41–50 of 154 posts
Thank you for your armchair analysis, but I will wait for the NTSB's report.
indeed, which will take ~2 years
Even though I'm a former pilot, I've not made any posts prior to this one, because I didn't want to speculate.
The accuracy of something like flighradar24 at low altitudes (where the difference between a landing and a crash is a matter of feet) is not high enough, and the data reporting interval is not small enough, to be used to do more than guess what happened. The article gives 3-4 data points per minute . You can't look at that data and draw any conclusions about the motion of an aircraft. It's fun speculating, but please…
I would hope the difference between a landing and a crash is a little more than 'feet' otherwise we'd have a lot more crashes. Maybe the difference between a BAD landing and a crash is only feet :)
This isn't normally a problem, because detecting and ensuring that 300ft difference is not really hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pilots will actually very rarely use the autoland functionality (apart from when weather, e.g. low visibility, requires it, and also to ensure that they're current with the procedure). They'll use the autopilot for the initial part of the approach, but then when visual with the runway will often disconnect it in order to fly the actual landing manually (still following the indications on the flight director, which ar…
Why is this? Can they do a better (in terms of passenger comfort) job landing manually?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pilots will actually very rarely use the autoland functionality (apart from when weather, e.g. low visibility, requires it, and also to ensure that they're current with the procedure). They'll use the autopilot for the initial part of the approach, but then when visual with the runway will often disconnect it in order to fly the actual landing manually (still following the indications on the flight director, which ar…
Why is this? Can they do a better (in terms of passenger comfort) job landing manually?
"The final bit of information is interesting. It shows a positive rate of climb – 120 feet per minute to be exact, which for a jet airliner, is very slow. For reference, at takeoff the vertical speed is most often +1500 feet per minute. Another interesting bit of information is the aircraft’s airspeed; 85 kts – for a Boeing 777 that is (and I’m guessing here) probably way below stall speed." That is actually expected…
I'd wager that 120fpm climb reading to be due to a measurement error of some kind, not actually something that really happened.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this? Can they do a better (in terms of passenger comfort) job landing manually?
No, autoland is pretty good. But there are two factors that cause pilots to land manually most of the time: 1) pilots think they are better at handling last-minute unexpected contingencies like wind sheer or bird strikes (and they may well be right about that) and 2) pilots don't want to give the Powers that Be any additional data to suggest that they aren't actually needed to fly a plane at all. The fact of the matt…
Curious as to why autopilot isn't being used to land planes yet. My understanding is that pilots can choose to use it to land, but only do so when visibility is very low. (ex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOFs-oa-bbc )
I heard a reporter on TV reporting that the airplane was doing cartwheels on the runway, and I pictured the semi-truck being flipped over in Batman. And then I thought what the hell could have done that? Fishtailed makes more sense, thanks for the clarification.
The plane (from what I see) after crashing does a near 360-degree turn with the right wing high up – in fact you can see that the plane is almost nose down-tail up which almost makes it look like it was cartwheeling.
Very surprising revelation, I really did not expect an airframe to remain as intact as it did after going through that.