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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

#181

Post by WalterBright »

omegant wrote: post #82
onphonenow wrote: post #16

The memo from Emirates about not setting altitude in system to airport altitude is so weird. I really hope that's not the actual message Emirates is putting out there. It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. Memo should be to training / recruitment - where did you find these pilots to fly a 777? So they obviously didn't pre-flight the flight…

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…

Interesting comparing this with the 737MAX crashes. There, I regularly get excoriated on HN for suggesting that the pilots not knowing to turn off the stab trim system when it goes haywire is unreasonable, despite it being a "memory item" and despite Emergency Airworthiness Directives reiterating this.

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

#182

Post by rpeden »

zeristor wrote: post #123

So does someone monitor each and every flight for anomalies like this? Or is there some software that takes in the data from each flight and spots differences like this, there could be several more instances in the global data if this is a manual process. Could be an interesting little project, although I guess the data isn't publicly available.

That's what FOQA tries to do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu... https://www.alpa.org/-/media/ALPA/Files/pdfs/news-events/tra...

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

#183

Post by throwaway984393 »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #98
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.

I'm surprised they don't do a full reset then set every checklist variable to an invalid state, in which the aircraft will not permit starting until all have been set by the flight crew.

This is the way. Like a computer-enforced Pointing and Calling.

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

#184

Post by WalterBright »

kchoudhu wrote: post #127
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…

This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training program. He was recently bemoaning the following situation: 1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!) 2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time. 3. Pilots now thi…

My dad flew for 20 years in the Air Force. He more than once defied procedure that would have put him in jeopardy on a flight. He told me he was not going to die because of a bureaucratic rule written by someone whose ass was safely behind a desk.

One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew into the ground. He said he'd be damned if he was going to do that, and kept one eye on the lead and the other eye on the ground.

He spent some years as a flight instructor, who sits in the back seat. There were incidents where the student would panic and crash the airplane. That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.

(That Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic a few years ago was an example of the junior pilot panicking and holding the stick back till it crashed.)

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

#185

Post by mulmen »

usrusr wrote: post #126
jcrawfordor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was only ever approximately accurate anyway, a NM is no longer an arc minute because that is inconsistent even along lines of latitude, so it had to be pinned to 1.852km. Aviation, broadly speaking, inherited all of its navigation techniques from the maritime world. In particular, prior to radio methods and to some extent today aviation navigation is based primarily on dead reckoning periodically corrected by obse…

Ironically the metric system suffers the same theoretical "error" as the not-an-arc-minute-anymore NM because the meter was originally defined by taking the distance from pole to equator (to the best of their knowledge at the time) and then shifting the decimal point to get something human scale.

> to the best of their knowledge at the time

I think it was actually extrapolated from a survey of the length of France. No idea how they did that extrapolation.

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

#186

Post by errcorrectcode »

You put your life in many other people's hands every time you step into an airport. If you use Chickens, Goats, and Passengers Airlines, expect not to make it to your destination in one piece.

737 NG (-6xx (736), -7xx, -8xx (738), -9xx (739)), MAX, and 787 are reasons not to fly on Boeing equipment. They have both obscure (Ducommun) and well-known history of cutting corners in design, testing, manufacturing, and who knows where else. Furthermore, Boeing pilots have huge cognitive dissonance issues around these matters because their salaries depend on it (remember Upton Sinclair's quote). They will overconfidently swear on their mother's graves that their equipment is "safe" on blind faith while unable to face the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Boeing isn't as bad as kit planes made in someone's backyard or Tupolev's, but the cutthroat profit-obsession culture is different than at Airbus in terms of priorities.

Human-piloted aircraft for routine transportation makes no sense. In terms of safety and ecology for long-distance travel, trains will dominate in the end because flying adds inherent risks and consumes much more energy.

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

#187

Post by bumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #181
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…

Interesting comparing this with the 737MAX crashes. There, I regularly get excoriated on HN for suggesting that the pilots not knowing to turn off the stab trim system when it goes haywire is unreasonable, despite it being a "memory item" and despite Emergency Airworthiness Directives reiterating this.

It’s because from a safety standpoint, procedural controls are not preferable to engineered controls. PPE controls are lower still.

It would be like alleviating a motorcycle manufacturer from responsibility of a bad design by claiming riders wouldn’t be hurt if they were wearing all their protective gear. It may be true while also being sub-standard design practice for a safety-critical system.

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

#188

Post by atonse »

op00to wrote: post #170
tshaddox wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a pilot either but I am shocked that there’s not some standard “reset” procedure so that each flight starts with the plane in a consistent clean slate. It seems bizarre for any process to rely on the previous flight coincidentally leaving the plane in a certain state.

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

Then I do fully support firing them. (If they didn’t follow the checklist)

At first I saw they might have been fired and thought damn that is strict.

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

#189

Post by jcrawfordor »

yesenadam wrote: post #142
leetcrew wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems slightly odd to use an angular unit for airspeed; the linear equivalent would technically depend on altitude. I guess airplanes don't actually fly high enough for that to matter.

What seemed odder to me is GP's talking about speed as if it's the same as distance: > a knot is "exactly equal to 1/60th of a degree of latitude. ...Therefore, a knot is equal to one minute of distance." I'm not sure what that quote is from, but it's is akin to saying "A metre per second is equal to one metre." Um, no. The units don't match.

Oh, I think I didn't even read that correctly since it seems like it's just a mistake. A knot is, for historic reasons, a term for NM per hour. An NM is defined by latitude.

I believe that the term knots originates from a method of measuring speed at sea by use of a twisted rope and a sea anchor, but perhaps that's apocryphal. Presumably though the definition in terms of NM was a later improvement.

While I don't have any real evidence for this, I would speculate that part of the reason for the enduring use of knots in aviation is that, much like the old twisted rope, it links the unit to the instrument. The speeds usually quoted for aircraft are in KIAS, Knots Indicated Airspeed, a measurement which is basically defined by what the instrument shows. It is intentionally uncorrected for various errors in the instrument design. This happens to be convenient because many of the same factors that affect the instrument calibration also affect the aircraft handling, so handling at 100 KIAS tends to feel similar even though the actual speed varies by altitude etc. KCAS and KTAS, Calibrated and True Airspeed, are both KIAs after correction for various errors and are useful for certain calculations but not nearly as often as KIAS. My point is that it might be helpful to use Kts rather than MPH or KPH because it helps keep these factors in mind and helps to reduce ambiguity about whether a number is indicated or true, although people very frequently just write knots when meaning KIAS.

Of course for ground speed none of this matters but ground speed isn't really a "flight" concern per se, more just used for navigation calculations.

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

#190

Post by jrs235 »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #114
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…

I would like to know what the Ryanair pilots are ordered to do by their higher ups. Been on a few of them in Europe and they all hit the runway pretty hard coming back down.

Maybe they prefer Navy pilots? /s

An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway and you have to get the hook down.

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