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Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

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Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#541

Post by PicassoCTs »

toss1 wrote: post #492
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very nea…

>>Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. This is the exact wrong way to think about it. With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it. With risk management by knowledge, technology, planni…

Crew Resource Management should have kicked in and the Pilot Monitoring should have taken over on rotating the moment the Pilot flying did not steer after V1.

That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#542

Post by op00to »

tshaddox wrote: post #234
op00to wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t. The pilots didn’t do their preflight checklist which would have caught a poorly set up flight computer.

Right, but what I mean is that it shouldn’t be possible to skip those steps and have things coincidentally work because of the state the plane was left in. I’m not a pilot or even much of an aviation geek, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the description of this incident, but it sounds to me like this crew did what they always do, and that normally works fine, but this time it didn’t.

There’s a lot that goes into deciding how and what tasks to do, how quickly, at what points in flight, and those numbers change as winds, weather, traffic, and fuel burn changes. Each flight, the pilots need to basically take all the factors going into the flight (# passengers, bags, cargo weight, routing, taxi time, and so on) to figure out how much fuel to use, what particular climb profile they’ll use, and a bunch more.

It makes sense that there’d be a “clean cockpit” magic button to push, but not only would the magic button need to be tested in every aspect of flight, in every configuration, in every combination of working and broken sensors… but airplanes are flippin’ complex, and flying modern airliners as part of an airline is even more complex.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#543

Post by hunter321 »

jacquesm wrote: post #437
azalemeth wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings very true. My dad is a retired commercial pilot and has a whole evening's worth of rant about this, albeit mostly in the 1970s-80s, before pilot hours were regulated to quite the same extent they are now (and with less automation). He said that his absolute worst was a "double washington" (i.e. London to Washington twice in "a day"), and that on the return leg either him or a co-pilot would really be opera…

The interesting thing about that flight is that I don't think the pilot knew how close to crashing we came whereas I had a 'front row seat' to what would have been a wingtip ground strike if we had been just a tiny little bit lower. I've flown 100's of times per year for a decade and I've never had a landing that bad. This was a short hop from Berlin to Amsterdam on Lufthansa. I'd love to hear your dad's stories, the…

Out of curiosity what job did you have that required you to fly 100s of times a year for a decade (assuming you're not in the aviation industry).

Edit; never mind, I looked at your profile.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#544

Post by jhugo »

avh02 wrote: post #536
jhugo wrote: post #351

I'm surprised fatigue is not mentioned more in the discussion of this incident. The takeoff was at around 3AM local time, and Emirates is well known for pushing their pilots hard (many pilots take a job there specifically to build hours quickly, despite the unpleasant working conditions, with the intention of moving to greener pastures once they've done that).

While I agree with you, I remember that 3 a.m. was also quite busy in Dubai, it's not an usual or quiet time there.

True, I was more referring to the time relative to the pilots' sleep cycles. They likely spend their days off in UAE, and probably sleep at night on those days off, so 3AM would be a difficult time to be alert and performing at your best.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#546

Post by brigandish »

bencollier49 wrote: post #391
omegant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes way beyond checklist stuff. Imagine having an intermediate system in your Tesla, one between fully manual and the autopilot. This system uses the navigation capabilities of the autopilot to draw in the big screen some squares that guide you to your destination without the need to look outside. Something you may find in a videogame. This system is helpfull and easy to use, and allows you to pay attention to mo…

Out of interest, which British carriers? Am British so would like to know so I can avoid. I thought Ryanair were Irish? Also, why are Ryanair et al doing this? I mean, obviously Ryanair have a bit of a reputation.

Ryanair is an Irish company but Stansted is its largest operating base.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#547

Post by garaetjjte »

twistedpair wrote: post #474
dehrmann wrote: post #66

I'm surprised commercial planes don't do full software reset before each flight, and especially before a new crew takes over. Checklists only get you so much.

It takes a while (think like 10min+) to reboot these planes. Checkout "cold start 777" on YouTube [1]. There are a ton of computers (FADECs for engines, fuel management computers, FMS (flight management), PFC (flight computers), weight and balance computers... and much more). All of these have state. Which way is up for the gyros. Proper direction for the compasses. Proper location on Earth for the navigation system.…

...unless you need to reboot to prevent the system from crashing inflight because of timer overflow https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/boein...

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#548

Post by grog454 »

PKop wrote: post #539
grog454 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work…

>is the ability to do something more productive with my time Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly. Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely offloading the responsibility to the car and doing whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if it was public transit. But my point wa…

> But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.

Agreed. If I got a Telsa tomorrow I wouldn't do so with "FSD".

> Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.

I'm not sure what effectiveness you're measuring. There will always be fatal accidents with heavy vehicles moving at high speeds. It's more of a regulatory issue where the accident rate of auto-pilot systems is sufficiently lower than human drivers (because I believe it is already lower in many situations, just not sufficiently lower or ubiquitously lower) and we decide its good enough to no longer require monitoring by the driver.

Edit: I guess its even more complicated than that. Using hypothetical numbers, if the accident-free rate of a human is 99%, and auto pilot is better at 99.9%, but combined (auto-pilot with human monitoring and rare intervention) is 99.999%, can we justify allowing no monitoring in that situation? Can we expect people to follow the law or will it turn in to more of a speed-limit type grey area.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#549

Post by toss1 »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #541
toss1 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. This is the exact wrong way to think about it. With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it. With risk management by knowledge, technology, planni…

Crew Resource Management should have kicked in and the Pilot Monitoring should have taken over on rotating the moment the Pilot flying did not steer after V1. That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.

Yup, and that cultural rot is also a key failure to manage risk.

Just because you are [using knowledge, technology, skill, & planning] to manage risk once does NOT mean that the job is done. It needs to be constantly maintained.

If it is not constantly maintained, you are slipping back into the zone of [rolling the dice and getting away with it]. It will bite you.

What comes to mind is the last video from the very experienced skydiver which was normal until chute-opening-time, then got very chaotic and ended - he'd become so comfortable/complacent that he didn't do his checklist, jumped with only a knapsack instead of his chute. I'm sure he started out checking everything well. But getting casual and complacent killed him.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#550

Post by zarzavat »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #442
zarzavat wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no functionality to reset the computer between flights? It seems insane that the first item in the checklist isn't "press the reset button". And the computer shouldn't let the aircraft take off if some required setting hasn't been set. Imagine if you were on an e-commerce website and you had to delete the previous customer's billing details before checking out!

This would take substantial time. Would you manually reinstall and reconfigure your workstation every morning?

Manually reconfiguring is what happens today. What I'm suggesting is to reset to a known good state.

Some settings should clearly start as blank and be required. Other settings could start as as a default value (defined by the airline) and the pilots would merely have to confirm that it is correct, or deviate from it.

The point is, we can do a lot better UI-wise than just reusing the settings from the previous flight, and with a little thought put into it the configuration process could be both safer and faster.

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