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Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

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Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#51

Post by noduerme »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #43
noduerme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the coolest emergency airfields I can think of is, literally, Uruguay Route 9, along the coast of the country, where a 2-lane highway becomes an enormous runway that you continue driving along. I don't know if there were any famous landings there; I heard it's only used rarely by the Presidential jet. Here's where it is: https://goo.gl/maps/fpwxuPzGVDtDEKmB8 and what it looks like when you drive on it: https:/…

Not that uncommon. The Czech motorway D1 can be converted to a military airstrip here: https://www.google.com/maps/@49.3870307,15.9211894,289m/data... See where the grass divider ends, and gets replaced by a jersey barrier for 2 km? That part is the runway - it would require some hours of preparation before it would be usable, it's not quite "declare mayday and dump the plane there."

ah, that's very cool. Makes me think of all kinds of NATO-level shit that's strewn around the world waiting to be uncovered ;)

The thing with the road in Uruguay is that as you're driving, there's basically a yellow sign with a picture of an airplane and an arrow pointing up, and you're like "what the fuck did that mean?" And then suddenly you understand exactly what it meant because you're driving on a fucking runway...

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#52

Post by madaxe_again »

noduerme wrote: post #34
robga wrote: post #9

Interesting that they call Lajes a “military airfield”. On the Azorean island of Terceira, Lajes (TER) is a mixed use airfield that is the commercial landing strip of the island since the 1930s, as well as having a multi-national military base on the other side since the 1940s. There is a picture in the story. The NTSB report called it a military airbase, and other reports say “Military air traffic controllers guided…

One of the coolest emergency airfields I can think of is, literally, Uruguay Route 9, along the coast of the country, where a 2-lane highway becomes an enormous runway that you continue driving along. I don't know if there were any famous landings there; I heard it's only used rarely by the Presidential jet. Here's where it is: https://goo.gl/maps/fpwxuPzGVDtDEKmB8 and what it looks like when you drive on it: https:/…

Hah! I was driving down this route a few years back when I suddenly found myself on an airstrip along with all the other traffic. It was particularly bizarre given that I’d just driven down from tacuarembo to punta del Diablo on largely unpaved roads.

That said, it’s not the first road doubling up as a landing strip I’ve found myself on - there’s a stretch of the main road between Donetsk and Mariupol that was, in soviet times, used as an emergency field for strategic bombers. It’s this relatively quiet provincial highway that suddenly turns ridiculously wide, and goes dead straight and level for what feels like an eternity - 11km looking at google.

Oh, and RAF manston used to have a level crossing across a taxiway.

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#53

Post by scheme271 »

robga wrote: post #9

Interesting that they call Lajes a “military airfield”. On the Azorean island of Terceira, Lajes (TER) is a mixed use airfield that is the commercial landing strip of the island since the 1930s, as well as having a multi-national military base on the other side since the 1940s. There is a picture in the story. The NTSB report called it a military airbase, and other reports say “Military air traffic controllers guided…

Lake Shore Drive in Chicago has also been used as an emergency landing runway but smaller general aviation aircraft complete. At least one of the planes ended up flying under a pedestrian bridge over lake shore drive during the landing.

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#54

Post by eCa »

chx wrote: post #50
bambax wrote: post #40

For some reason I'm a little obsessed with airline incidents and crashes. Admiral Cloudberg produces outstanding write-ups, and of course the videos of Mentour Pilot on YT are also excellent. While this is in no way scientific, it seems that what most catastrophes have in common are bad CRM (crew intra-communication) and lower-than-average airmanship. In most cases, for a catastrophe to occur there must be an initial…

Another very famous incident is the Gimli Glider which was also a result -- as almost all of these are -- of quite a string of issues, including, astonishingly, the mixup of imperial and metric units. The report on the accident found fault with Air Canada procedures, training, and manuals. Everything else was, I guess, peachy :P

> quite a string of issues

Also known as the Swiss cheese model[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#55

Post by bambax »

chx wrote: post #50
bambax wrote: post #40

For some reason I'm a little obsessed with airline incidents and crashes. Admiral Cloudberg produces outstanding write-ups, and of course the videos of Mentour Pilot on YT are also excellent. While this is in no way scientific, it seems that what most catastrophes have in common are bad CRM (crew intra-communication) and lower-than-average airmanship. In most cases, for a catastrophe to occur there must be an initial…

Another very famous incident is the Gimli Glider which was also a result -- as almost all of these are -- of quite a string of issues, including, astonishingly, the mixup of imperial and metric units. The report on the accident found fault with Air Canada procedures, training, and manuals. Everything else was, I guess, peachy :P

The Gimli Glider is covered by Admiral Cloudberg here:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-mathematical-miracle-t...

This story is more ambiguous. The plane should never have left the ground and the captain committed a serious error when he decided to depart with no fuel gauge working. According to airline procedures at the time, no plane could be dispatched without working fuel gauges. That wasn't up for debate, it was a hard rule and it was disregarded.

Then, contrary to legend, nobody really mixed up imperial and metric units, but they did the math wrong (twice!) when converting from one to the other. They weren't surprised when they found that 8,000 liters of fuel would weight 14,000 kg. One liter of water weights 1 kg; fuel is less dense than water; without knowing anything else, one should question a calculation that results in the weight of 8,000 liters of fuel being more than 8 metric tons.

So yes, ultimately, the plane landed safely thanks to outstanding airmanship; but it was improper following of guidelines, and math incompetence, that caused the problem in the first place.

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#58

Post by philjohn »

robga wrote: post #9

Interesting that they call Lajes a “military airfield”. On the Azorean island of Terceira, Lajes (TER) is a mixed use airfield that is the commercial landing strip of the island since the 1930s, as well as having a multi-national military base on the other side since the 1940s. There is a picture in the story. The NTSB report called it a military airbase, and other reports say “Military air traffic controllers guided…

Sounds similar to Gibraltar airport, which is both a civilian airstrip, as well as a military one (the military base is opposite the passenger terminal).

If you haven't looked into Gibraltar airport before, it's a fascinating thing - the land it's on is reclaimed using rock dug out from the siege tunnels, there's a level crossing on it as the only route into the town crosses the runway; if a plane is coming into land, or taking off, you have to wait at the barriers. It's also the city airport closest to the city centre it serves at 500m.

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#59

Post by Shank »

kqr wrote: post #47

The actual report: http://www.fss.aero/accident-reports/dvdfiles/PT/2001-08-24-... One of my pet peeves: the first 7 "causes and contributing factors" effectively blames the engine technicians for taking shortcuts. Nowhere does it say anything about the scheduling pressure from management that made the technicians consider shortcuts in the first place. If you have hiring and firing power and you tell someone they nee…

It really underscores the importance of using a framework like HFACS [0] in a situation like this, because you end up exhausting all possible sources of problems and ensuring that you reach the correct root cause. It seems abundantly clear that the forcing-function was getting the aircraft back into service as fast as possible, not as safely as possible or as carefully as possible. A well-designed organization would have said that any unexpected contingencies during the maintenance process would have led to a full re-evaluation of the situation to understand it. The moment the engine didn't match their understanding, they should have scheduled a replacement plane or cancelled the upcoming flight, and reset expectations about how fast the plane could be back in-service.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Factors_Analysis_and_Cla...

Re: Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236

#60

Post by irthomasthomas »

noduerme wrote: post #34
robga wrote: post #9

Interesting that they call Lajes a “military airfield”. On the Azorean island of Terceira, Lajes (TER) is a mixed use airfield that is the commercial landing strip of the island since the 1930s, as well as having a multi-national military base on the other side since the 1940s. There is a picture in the story. The NTSB report called it a military airbase, and other reports say “Military air traffic controllers guided…

One of the coolest emergency airfields I can think of is, literally, Uruguay Route 9, along the coast of the country, where a 2-lane highway becomes an enormous runway that you continue driving along. I don't know if there were any famous landings there; I heard it's only used rarely by the Presidential jet. Here's where it is: https://goo.gl/maps/fpwxuPzGVDtDEKmB8 and what it looks like when you drive on it: https:/…

This it? Looks like traffic stopped for a presidential landing. https://youtube.com/shorts/GQWtCBUlXq0
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