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Close call at Paris airport

I miss Atrib, too.
That flight situation sounds scary!
 
Increasing populations wnat to travel more. India just placed large orders with Boeing and Airbus. Airlines and airports are under pressure to get as many flights a day as possible.

Here in Washunf Sea-Rc is maxed out and the search is on for a site for a new airport. Which nobody wants near them.

As I remember it private pilots objected when the FAA required private planes even small Cessnas to have an altitude reorting transponder when entering a control zone near airports.

There have been several catastrophic collisionsand near mises between small private planes and commercial jets.

Private pilots are no saints. In the 80s I was taking flying lessons at a small uncontrolled airport in Keene NH.

I watched a guy in a twin engine prop planen takeoff pull a steep climbing tun at about 100 feet off the runway.Craxy NF. Somebody on a cross country flight ran out of gas on the apoach and dead sticked a landing.

I was doing a night flight. Near the airpoort is Mt Manadanock. I was headed in when I heard somebody on CTAF calling ' Keene tower' in a a panic, a towr which did not exist. It was a rural area with lttle lights from the ground.

I advised him there was no tower and to watch out for the mountain and head for the airport beacon. I turned on the landing lights. He followed me in and pulled off the runway onto grass instead of taxiing to the ramp. Apparently shaken.

There was a local VOR station which is what I was using. He was flying by dead reckoning at night over unfamiliar ground with few ground references without radio navigation. He ended up lost.

The major causes of private aviation in the day was euphemistically 'fuel starvation' and 'controlled flight into the ground',and flying into weather you know you should not.

The Kennedy kid crashed in the ocean and was not qualified for instrument flying as the sun went down and visbilty went down. He probaly lost a horizon reference.
 
Here's another of many MANY fascinating Mentour videos:



In all of these I've watched, I don't recall any (excepting Boeing 737 MAX MCAS) where autopilot, or other computer aids, failed. (There are often problems where the human pilots overlook what autopilot is doing.) There are problems with mechanical controls: on one flight the rear stabilizer control was jammed, and the stabilizer could no longer be trimmed. This made the airplane very difficult to handle.

On the flight linked above, the autothrust on one particular plane had been flakey for years. When switching from take-off thrust to climb-thrust, the system automatically reduces thrust but instead of pulling both thrust levers back a little, one jams so the other is reduced to idle to "compensate"! The thrust levers can still be set by human . . . if the human notices the problem. Every several months the system was inspected, rebuilt and/or lubricated ... but it would fail again after some months. In fact there was a failure the day before the accident flight but, with the on-going problem well documented, the pilots didn't bother to note the failure in the log.

Shortly after take-off from Bucharest airport, the tower calls the plane and advises to start the left turn earlier than planned. Captain (pilot monitoring) has to reprogram navigational computer. Distracted by this, he doesn't notice the autothrust problem: #2 engine remains at maximum thrust while #1 engine slowly moves to minimum thrust. With pilot flying banking sharply left per tower instruction, this asymmetric thrust increases the bank (and/or yaw) and becomes a big (and fatal) problem.

Shortly after setting "flaps up" the Captain makes a painful sound and does nothing else for the rest of the flight. This (heart attack?) might be considered the major cause of the crash, but in principle the remaining pilot should have been able to stabilize the aircraft. Instead he apparently never notices the asymmetric thrust. The workload during critical flight phases is huge even with TWO pilots but should it not have been almost instinctive for the pilot to reduce the bank angle and glance at the thrust levers?

As a layman, my opinion has no value but I'm happy to offer it anyway! There have been several Mentour videos in which wrong thrust lever settings caused a problem -- wrong settings that would be immediately and clearly seen if pilot glanced at the levers. Improper thrust is a major cause of flight instability.

There have also been previous videos in which programming the navigational computer distracted the pilot monitoring and led to problems (e.g. neglecting to glance at thrust levers). With so much navigational redundancy anyway, can't such reprogramming be deferred during critical (high-workload) flight phases?
 
Fly-by-wire airplanes rely on computer algorithms that may seem ridiculously complicated. Being an airline pilot with the need to react quickly in a wide variety of situations is definitely NOT a job for which I would be emotionally suited.

In that regard, the latest episode of Mentour Pilot is amazing ... and amazingly complicated. A wide variety of issues contributed to the incident, including the fact that the airline wouldn't want to reschedule an expensive training exercise.


I won't spoil the whole episode, but the airplane controls can operate in (1) Normal Law, (2) Alternate Law, or (3) Direct Law. Or -- though little-known -- (4) Mechanical Backup. In Mechanical Backup mode, the control stick inputs are ignored: Only the trim wheel can be used to control pitch. When the "Law" changes, pilots should be informed but are ONLY informed when the altitude is above 1500 feet. Waiting until airborne to indicate the fault adds to confusion if the fault occurred on the ground during touch-and-go.

The initial problem in the episode was caused when a wrong (too viscous) lubricant was used for a seldom-used piston. Because of redundancy this shouldn't have been a problem, BUT ... (I will stop here rather than "spoiling" or trying to summarize this weird incident.)
 
AP is one of those things that I think the regulatory agencies should do a better job of standardizing. I'm not going to say what they should do exactly, I think that is less important than having all aircraft behave in a more consistent way regardless of which model one is flying.

The FAA (which was the standard for aviation rules for a very long time, other countries basically copied our regulations) has long realized that standardizing flight controls, air traffic situations, etc., was worth doing because the job of a commercial pilot is already prone to information overload.

Flight control levers and knobs shape are all standardized, for instance. Modern fly by wire aircraft have so many things that can go wrong, and it is very difficult to troubleshoot software. I think this is one of the few areas that modern regulatory agencies are relying too much on the manufacturers to do their own testing and approval.
 
Wow. In any industry it is so true that a genuine critical debrief is important to save lives. Would that we could afford a debrief forum for new pilots to review their own perfomance as they start flying without an instructor.
 
Rhea said:
Wow. In any industry it is so true that a genuine critical debrief is important to save lives. Would that we could afford a debrief forum for new pilots to review their own perfomance as they start flying without an instructor.
Click to expand...
There are many such fora, both official and unofficial.

I am a frequent lurker at the Professional Pilots Rumour Network, which is perhaps one of the most informal of these; They have a ton of useful commentary for new pilots, private, commercial, and military, and are generally gentle with newbies asking "silly" questions (though they are very wary of reporters posing as newbies to try to get the inside story on headline news events).
 
Investigation by FAA for recent near miss at Reagan. Both planes were given instruction to be where they were and were heading. Jetblue was taking off and Southwest was taxiing to the terminal. Once the terminal saw what was about to happen, they ordered both planes to stop. Both planes did so very quickly, making me think they were aware of each other's presence, though probably more so with Jet Blue who was looking straight forward.
 
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