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Preliminary report into Air India crash released

bbc.co.uk

431–440 of 924 posts

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#431
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. His older videos are indeed phenomenal, but newer ones are "you won't believe what happened, right after this sponsor break"

FUD. His videos are just as consistently good as they always have been. The sponsor sections can be easily skipped (hint: SponsorBlock).

still, its annoying and he does not need it either with the number of views he gets on Youtube.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The switches on the lower panel that are switched, are the fuel cutoffs

But they don't look protected or hard to switch?

No they don't, do they. That also corroborates the fact that they could be both switched to CUTOFF within a second, like the report states. That impossibility was raised by parallel threads here. In the video they are both switched on even faster than 1 sec apart, or, at least it feels like it.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The switches on the lower panel that are switched, are the fuel cutoffs

But they don't look protected or hard to switch?

The pilot is toggling the switch on.

Toggling it off presumably requires more power and is multiple actions.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#434
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suicide is quite a stretch without any supporting evidence from the pilots' backgrounds. I would take mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memory, even a defective fuel cutoff system over suicide.

>mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memor Agreed. The sequence of events also supports this. I believe one of the pilots made a terrible muscle memory mistake and cutoff the fuel instead of raising the landing gear. This would explain why the landing gear was never raised, why the pilot who was accused of cutting off the fuel denied it (in his mind he had only retracted the landing gear) and why the engines…

This also makes sense with why nobody on the recording mentions re engaging the fuel switches

The pilot denies shutting off the fuel, then realises he'd done it accidentally and quietly reenables them hoping there's enough time to save them

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#435
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/live/SE0BetkXsLg?si=LPss_su3PVTAqGCO Both of these extremely-experienced pilots say that there was near zero chance that the fuel switches were unintentionally moved. They were switched off within one second of each other, which rules out most failure scenarios. If it was an issue with the switches, we also would have seen an air worthiness directive being issued. But they didn’t, because this…

Only the captain was extremely experienced, the FO was a rookie. He wouldn't have had enough hours for an European airline

This is not true at all.

Perhaps there are more qualifying statements that you meant to include? The certification and type rating requirements certainly differ between agencies, but in terms of raw number of flight hours it’s easy to find that this statement is false.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#436
post #387

What makes me more inclined to suicide is that this might have been the perfect time to do this so that even a small interruption in fuel would be catastrophic.

If this is the case, you have to then think about why this pilot would want suicide but also murder all aboard the plane. It's a bit irrational if they wanted to just suicide - you can easily just cut your own throat, hang yourself, or jump off a tall building.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no possible way to confuse these two actions. This is obviously an overstatement. Any two regularly performed actions can be confused. Sometimes (when tired or distracted) I've walked into my bathroom intending to shave, but mistakenly brushed my teeth and left. My toothbrush and razor are not similar in function or placement.

If someone confused their steering wheel for the brake you'd probably be surprised - there are indeed errors that are essentially impossible for a competent person to make by mistake. No idea about the plane controls, though.

Even in modern "fly by wire" cars the steering wheel and brake pedal have an immediate effect. They are essentially directly connect to their respective control mechanisms. As far as I understand both of the plane controls on question just trigger sequences that are carried out automatically. So it's more like firing off the wrong backup script than scratching the wrong armpit.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#438
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're telling me that those switches don't have a voice that says "fuel cutoff switches transitioned" like in the movies? That's bad design

I know this thread runs the gamut of armchair experts, pretend experts, and actual experts and there's no telling who is which but I really want to know why the downvotes and why this is not a good idea. The idea is to notify for crucial settings, replace vocal confirmation (probably) already in the SOP anyway, reducing mistakes in bad faith or otherwise. Don't some planes already have an automated announcement for s…

My first instinct is that the suggestion is overfitted due to hinsight bias. This particular accident happened to involve these particular switches so let's add a warning to these switches. Duh!

Some problems that immediately come to mind:

- For which settings is there going to be a voice confirmation? Is their confirmation more important than all the other audio warnings?

- During emergency situations, when pilot workload is high, will these only add to that workload, making the emergency even worse?

- Will the pilots get so used to hearing these every day that their brains will simply tune them out as background noise?

Really though, if a pilot wishes to doom an aircraft, there's 1000 different ways they could do so. The solution to this problem likely lies in the pilot mental health management department, rather than the fuel cut off switch audio warning one.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentour Pilot is a fantastic channel.

Anyone who does on-call should look into aviation disasters. Crew resource management, the aviate-navigate-communicate loop, it's all very applicable. ('WalterBright is an excellent source of commentary on applying lessons from the airline industry to software.) But I did burn out on Mentour Pilot after a while, I just had my fill of tragedy.

[flagged]

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#440
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/live/SE0BetkXsLg?si=LPss_su3PVTAqGCO Both of these extremely-experienced pilots say that there was near zero chance that the fuel switches were unintentionally moved. They were switched off within one second of each other, which rules out most failure scenarios. If it was an issue with the switches, we also would have seen an air worthiness directive being issued. But they didn’t, because this…

Only the captain was extremely experienced, the FO was a rookie. He wouldn't have had enough hours for an European airline

He had 1100 hours on the 787 alone. 3200 hours altogether. Most media sources just went with the former figure as his overall experience.
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