Twilight Gap
Member
Hold on to something, pray, and think happy last thoughts. Not much else you can do if the plane is distressed.
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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean
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Hold on to something, pray, and think happy last thoughts. Not much else you can do if the plane is distressed.
Insane Metal
Member
Wow, that sucks (about the sleep).
And yeah, it was more because of miscommunication among them. And the fact he almost didn't sleep the night before.
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Wut? You really think pilots just "push buttons"?
I think people are losing faith in commercial pilots as a profession. Air Asiana SFO crash was a pretty damning indictment.
Chittagong
Gold Member
The real difference is that the AF plane sent home a series of automated messages indicating a chain of compounding technical problems and warnings:
Wikipedia said:
No such messages came to Malaysian. This would rule out a similar scenario entirely. Rather, it would indicate an immediate explosion at 33000ft (posing the question of 'where is the debris and why was no explosion detected') or a deliberate plunge (posing the question 'why doesn't flight tracker show any descent before flight is lost').
Really very bizarre.
Like they did for twa 800?
Lamel
Banned
Autopilot is helpful, but it can't do everything on its own, contrary to public opinion. You still need pilots to monitor and step in often.
There was a recent accident caused by a malfunctioning autoland operation with a Turkish airlines jet.
Ether_Snake
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edit: nm
If no foul play is involved, this must be one of the most important disasters in aviation history because if I understand it correctly then the characteristics are just remarkable:
- Modern aircraft with a reputation for safety.
- Flight disappeared fairly close to civilization and without any adverse weather
- No emergency signals
- No sign of uncontrolled descent
- No sighting of mid-air explosion
- Still no debris found
- Modern aircraft with a reputation for safety.
- Flight disappeared fairly close to civilization and without any adverse weather
- No emergency signals
- No sign of uncontrolled descent
- No sighting of mid-air explosion
- Still no debris found
Harry_Tequila
Member
Sounds almost exactly like the Air France crash from a few years ago by that criteria...
The Air France flight went right into a tropical storm though, didn't it?
It was also in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The AF flight sent back warning messages from ACARS. From these messages and other evidence at the time, the cause of the crash was theorized 100% correctly by investigators before any major wreckage was found.
aeroslash
Member
Yes and warning messages were sent to Airbus...
The only thing they have in common is huge aircrafts, over the sea, that were difficult to find.
Yeah. However, there is a discussion about how autopilot makes the abilities of today's pilots less reliable. And even though autopilot has made flying safer, it can malfunction , and then the pilots have to take over.
I read about this in a report published by the NTSB about a certain crash. I don't remember which crash was it though.
the US brought in a firm that used a kind of statistical process that helped narrow the search field. And the lucked out that it happened to be on a relatively flat area vs. Mountainous region they originally feared
I am using hyperbole, but there are plenty of concerns that over reliance on autopilot leads to lack of practice when it comes to manual flying skills.
http://www.dailytech.com/Study+Airl...Have+Trouble+Manually+Flying/article33779.htm
aeroslash
Member
What the people forget is that we have been trained without autopilot until we get to a commercial plane. And most airlines let their pilots fly in manual whenever they want to preserve their skills.
Autopilot is only a help to mantain the aircraft in a given parameters during long flights. That's it. We don't just push buttons...
Chittagong
Gold Member
Indeed. Really unprecedented that there is not a single hint of anything after two days of aerial and nautical searches, radar footage reviews, satellite surveillance, communications logs retrievals, time for witnesses to come forwards... This is much more complex than AF447.
Tell that to the FAA and their statistics. I understand you guys go through hell to become pilots, but numbers don't lie.
Stop, just stop.
Except that the storm had almost nothing to do with the accident, the main cause was human error based on miscommunication among the flying crew...
My brother is an airline pilot. He tells me pilots are pretty much there for landing and takeoff, that's where the vast majority of problems occur. Autopilot makes the middle part bearable on long flights and prevents pilot fatigue. The cruising part of a flight is just maintaining course and altitude. It's trivial and boring for a trained commercial pilot, being on-stick during that part of the flight wouldn't serve any purpose or make them better pilots.
Yeah but the storm froze up their instruments and made them nervous with all the lightning hitting their windshield and the smell of ozone in the cockpit (this is all according to the documentary, thanks to the person who posted that btw). It's safe to say that if they had avoided the storm the crash wouldn't have happened, although it was the failure to communicate and to understand what was going on that was the ultimate cause of the crash.
aeroslash
Member
In Europe it's mandatory to pass a simulator every six months which includes manual piloting skills. I'm sure in America is the same.
I won't say it's not true that automatisms tend to make our manual skills worse in some way because you don't practice, but between this and saying that pilots only push buttons..
Anyway, as i said before, many airlines let us practice as much as we want to fly in manual.
Chittagong
Gold Member
For reference, this is the Lockerbie Pan-Am debris field:
Which goes back to human error made by the Captain when he decides to go straight through the storm, which is usually avoided by pilots. Instead he went to rest due to lack of sleep.
aeroslash
Member
The storm had EVERYTHING to do with the accident! The pitot froze so they did not have a correct reading of the speed. If it had not happened, they wouldn't have stalled the aircraft. Not to say that is veeeery different to control a more or less "easy" situation (a stall) in still air than to control it with severe turbulence and lightning striking the aircraft.
In the end it was a human error? Yes, no doubt. But you can't separate the enviroment because that's a cause of what happened also.
(that person was me)
If If If, the storm frooze the instruments, but that is common occurrence which the two co-pilots could solve easily if they didn't get jumpy, but they get nervous commit error after error due to lack of communication. Storms happen all the time and we don't see planes crash all the time, in the end a Pilot has to keep the calm and follow his training, when they do usually the situations end well.
Unfortunately he has a point.
There are quite a few airlines where the SOPS almost bar hand flying totally. Do it by FD or don't do it.
Asiana214 is not a good advert for disproving what he contends. Totaling a perfectly serviceable triple in CAVOK because the ILS was out. Jesus.
Ether_Snake
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Well one pilot holding the stick back non-stop while the other didn't know is a pretty big mistake because it was the source of the stall and why anything the other was doing was not working. The pitot freezing was not uncommon and certainly the airplanes were not build to rely so much on the speed reading that it would cause them to crash.
You can see in the transcripts, as soon as the captain is back and trying to figure out what happened and the other pilot tells Bonin to go up, he yells that he has been pulling back the stick all along so of course they are already going up, the captain hears this so he is told immediately to NOT go up (they are stalling so obviously you need to go down). But by then it's too late. The captain being there is what allowed them to start to doing the right thing, it happened very fast, but it was too late. If they had done nothing all along they would have probably been fine, but one pilot trying to make the airplane go up while the other didn't know was the real error.
Obviously, the system should tell them clearly when they are inputting contradictory inputs, but pitot freezing was not a big deal.
aeroslash
Member
Well, as i said, there are also a lot of airlines that let pilots fly in manual to practice.
Not only that, the pilots should've known to go around the storm as every other plane did in the same situation. The pilot not in control told the pilot pulling up that they should go left a little.
Yup. If he had known what was going on and why the plane was stalling, more than likely he would have been able to recover but it was too late.
aeroslash
Member
I've read many many times everything about that accident, thx.
Airbus does exactly that. When the two sidesticks are moved at the same time, a voice comes out saying "dual output" and there's a button on the sidestick to take priority. You can even deactivate the other sidestick!
thehunter01
Banned
Couldn't it be possible that a pilot had some open standing bills to pay and decided to cut communication and dive the plane into the ocean for insurance money?
I saw something like that on tv once, but they failed to do so.
That episode kinda made me incredible scary to even flight with planes.
I saw something like that on tv once, but they failed to do so.
That episode kinda made me incredible scary to even flight with planes.
Possible, but when the black box is found it would be figured out and insurance wouldn't pay.
Chittagong
Gold Member
This is interesting.
The captain knew his plane inside out, according to his colleagues. So if there was a way to make the plane vanhish with minimal trace, he would have had the skills to know how.
The captain knew his plane inside out, according to his colleagues. So if there was a way to make the plane vanhish with minimal trace, he would have had the skills to know how.
ِAre you implying it is a pilot suicide?
Liferebooted
Banned
Ok, this is the dumbest shit I've read in this thread and sad.
soundahfekz
Member
Kinda eerie that this Amazing Race episode is them flying to and visiting malaysia.
Insane that it is even a possibility. Hope the families and friends will get some closure soon.
Darren870
Member
aeroslash, who do you work for and what type of planes do you fly? Commercial, Cargo? 777? Or something smaller? Understand if you can't or don't want to say.
Just curious. I'll take your side over any internet critics any day of the week.
As someone who flies multiple times a year I trust pilots more then myself behind the wheel of a car.
Just curious. I'll take your side over any internet critics any day of the week.
As someone who flies multiple times a year I trust pilots more then myself behind the wheel of a car.
It wouldn't be the first time, but there just isn't enough evidence to come to any conclusions at this point.
Chittagong
Gold Member
The way it looks to me is that it's either suicide or complete disintegration in a very different location than suspected. The lack of automated data, lack of record of flying sub 35000 ft, lack of mayday calls and lack of debris all tell a part of the story. It either vanished purposefully (which is why there are no leads) or disintegrated in a wrong place (which is why no debris has been found).
Occam's Razor would suggest disintegration as it requires less explanation than suicide (why? why wouldn't other pilots prevent it? etc.)
To make it look like an accident?
Just as a point AF do not have a good reputation. Lots of incidents over the past few years many of them down to the crew.
Yes lots do encourage hand flying. But there are many "children of the magenta line" who are encouraged not to.
I don't think in this case it's anything other than catastrophic failure of the aircraft.
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