Can one or more of you tenured and experienced commercial pilots tell us how this can happen without some sort of BS going on in the cockpit?
And....wouldn't the cabin crew also have a role in this? Surely the cabin crew knows the ETA and should be feeling a little nervious when the expected communications and directions are not coming from the cockpit?

quote:

Originally posted by TWL:
Can one or more of you tenured and experienced commercial pilots tell us how this can happen without some sort of BS going on in the cockpit?
And....wouldn't the cabin crew also have a role in this? Surely the cabin crew knows the ETA and should be feeling a little nervious when the expected communications and directions are not coming from the cockpit?

Tom, Sounds like ems in the field.

Where is Vemo? He seems to be a 'pro-airline' employee who thinks they can do no wrong! Especially Crapinental!

Gremlins in an Electric Jet (Airbus A320)

I can understand one of them napping, but it would seem prudent for at least one pilot to be awake. If they really were fighting (and we'll know soon enough when the black box recordings come out) then they would have to be a couple to fight for over an hour, and miss their scheduled stop.

quote:

Originally posted by buckeyeshooter:
Where is Vemo? He seems to be a 'pro-airline' employee who thinks they can do no wrong! Especially Crapinental!

Hey buckeye,

You know there are so many appropriate replies to this but I think a simple FUCK YOU ASSHOLE works best here. I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard it either.

right back at ya Shurstrike!!

"Black box" registers flight control inputs.

Cockpit voice recorder is only good for the last 30 min.

Woa, guys. I'm just asking questions about a specific incident, not pilots in general. My guess is that America's airlines are staffed by the best trained professionals in the business. I have great respect for them.
I simply can't understand how something like this can happen.

Older CVR's had 30 minute tapes. Newer versions have 2 hours. NW188 had the older 30 min version so not likely to have much unless they were dumb enough to discuss details towards the end of the flight.

Don't let buckeye piss you off SS, he had a bad flying experience 10 years ago and thinks everybody should feel sorry for him. I called him out on it and he felt bitch slapped. Shit, everytime I go to the airport i get pissed off but I don't get on the world wide web and bitch and moan about it. Frickin jag off.

When an airliner is flying across the country pilots change radio frequency's every 10 minutes or so. The atc guy or gal will give you a new frequency for the next sector, you dial it in and give them a call. You will get frequency changes more often in congested airspace (eastern seaboard) than in not so busy sectors (mountain west) When it gets so flippin busy you can't even get a word in occasionally the controllers don't hand you off and you fly out of their sector and you are basically not talking to anybody.
When that happens its hard to catch, not unusual to fly a 100 miles before you realize you didn't get the hand off, then you pull out the maps you haven't looked at since your last sim period, figure out whose sector your in and give them a call. Or, they will come looking for you and ask another aircraft to contact you on 121.5 which we have active in a standby radio continuously. Or, they will call your company and tell them to get your attention via other methods.

As far as the flight attendants go, there's more pressing issues buzzing around that brain trust than if the guys in the front office are concious or not.

No idea what happened here. Could have been one or a combination of a dozen differint things. Won't speculate either but I will tell you there are more people than those two guys wondering if they are the ones who screwed the pooch.

What I would like to find out is how much fuel was on that aircraft when they got to the gate...
One news report stated they flew one hour past their destination and then stated it was 150 miles!

Here a question for the next journalism class.

460 nautical miles per hour X 1 hour is uhhh,
A. 460 nautical miles.
B. 150 nautical miles.


Not to defend the indefensible. But I tell you this situation would not have happened in Germany, Japan,India,Taiwann, Canada and a whole bunch of other countries. They have controller-pilot-data-link-communication. More commonly known by the acronym CPDLC. It is basically a comm program that works just like cell phone texting. No language barrier, readback error, frequency congestion, etc. Of course the good old reactive- manage from one air disaster to the next- Federal Aviation Accident Administration- can't find the funds or the talent to implement that program here in the good old USA even though 18.5% of your ticket is fees, special charges and taxes to support their freakin crack head bureaucracy.

quote:

Originally posted by Vemo:
Don't let buckeye piss you off SS, he had a bad flying experience 10 years ago and thinks everybody should feel sorry for him. I called him out on it and he felt bitch slapped. Shit, everytime I go to the airport i get pissed off but I don't get on the world wide web and bitch and moan about it. Frickin jag off.



Here a question for the next journalism class.

460 nautical miles per hour X 1 hour is uhhh,
A. 460 nautical miles.
B. 150 nautical miles.

Vemo,

Yeah you're right I shouldn't let it get to me, I am just so sick and tired of whiny little pussies like this guy.

I also can not comment as to what happened as I have no idea. But Vemo covered it pretty well. Another thing that the flying public doesn't get now days is just how bone crushingly and chronically fatiguing schedules are for flight crews in this brave new world. When I hear about crews falling asleep on the flight deck it doesn't surprise me at all. I'd like to see how alert anybody else is after a 16 leg five day trip with an all nighter in the middle followed by an east coast early AM departure to multi-leg trans con on day five. And that is the third one you've done in the last 20 days. I don't care who you are you're going to be smoked.

I am not saying that is what happened in this case but it wouldn't surprise me if fatigue was at a minimum a contributing factor.

The NW188 flight track is available on the website "Flight Aware". It looks like about 150 east of MSP where they turned around. they did wander around a bit rather than a direct return to MSP. I agree, it would be interesting to know the arrival fuel state.

Am not a pilot, but out of curiosity, we keep hearing about the 150 miles over shoot, but what kind of time are we talking about?? Don't know his air speed, but are we talking about say, 30-45 minutes delay in this particular incident?? I realize it was not a good thing to do what they did, but it seems the press will always select the fact, number, etc. to emphasize the worst possible picture to the public. Again, just curious.

martin

Well if he was at cruise speed we will just say a nominal 460 ground speed not taking winds into account it would have taken about 15 minutes plus the time to turn around to get 150 miles out is about 18 minutes or so. Then you would have the slow down and decent and vectors for traffic on the return which could easily add up to an hour.

But they did not overfly MSP by an hour.

OK, makes sense. I had estimated speed at approx. 200+ and not considered speed of something twice that rate of speed.
Years ago waited most of the day in Columbus,Ohio for flight to Mexico City, Mexico via 747 and when he finally did show up in Columbus,OH., and finally got airborne to Mexico, pilot informed us that he had gone to Columbus,Georgia!! Wrong Columbus and I could only assume that he could navigate to Mexico City and not New Mexico. We made it ok.

quote:

Originally posted by stubbleduck47:
The NW188 flight track is available on the website "Flight Aware". It looks like about 150 east of MSP where they turned around. they did wander around a bit rather than a direct return to MSP. I agree, it would be interesting to know the arrival fuel state.

Much of the "Wandering" was ATC making them turn and follow commands , attempting to be sure the pilot was in control of the AC and not Hijackers in control.

Let's clear up some of this matter now. ALL A/C & helicopters carrying more than 10 PNR's have to have the 2 hour cockpit voice recorder. The NTSB requested the change a decade ago but the FAA issued the order just last year. Now, let's add all the caveats to the ruling: ALL A/C mfr'd post March 2010 must come equipped with the 2 hr recorders and all existing A/C must be modified BUT the window extends to March 2012 to comply with the mods required for the update. A lot of A/C will never see the mods complied with as anything coming out of service PRIOR to the 'drop dead' date [poor choice of words?] will not have the $$$ expended to comply.
Hope this helps.

Radio news says the pilots were on their laptops and lost track of time, quit listening to radios, et cetera. Report says the will most likely lose their licenses tomorrow. Them boys is fucked...

quote:

I am not saying that is what happened in this case but it wouldn't surprise me if fatigue was at a minimum a contributing factor.

Yeah, me, too.

Glass cockpits, nothing for pilots to do anymore during the flight. Take off, flip the switch, wake up and land the plane. Not that simple of course, but boredom surely must be contributing to inattentiveness. So the pilots broke out the laptops and started surfing while the computer flew the airplane. Perfectly believable to me. Maybe we've gone too far with the computers in the cockpit? Talking to a friend of mine last night who just retired from flying 777's said they didn't even flight plan the route anymore, it was all downloaded from the tower into their computer before they left the gate.

quote:

Originally posted by clowdis:
Glass cockpits, nothing for pilots to do anymore during the flight. Take off, flip the switch, wake up and land the plane. Not that simple of course, but boredom surely must be contributing to inattentiveness. So the pilots broke out the laptops and started surfing while the computer flew the airplane. Perfectly believable to me. Maybe we've gone too far with the computers in the cockpit? Talking to a friend of mine last night who just retired from flying 777's said they didn't even flight plan the route anymore, it was all downloaded from the tower into their computer before they left the gate.

Well sort of.

You receive your flight plan for review in operations. When you get to the airplane on some routes you have a sat link down load from dispatch which will load the flt plan data into the flight management computer. After it is downloaded it must be checked by at least two independent sources usually the captain and one of the first officers. After it has been checked you can execute the download and it will store into the FMC.

Auto download is actually a very good thing especially on a long international flight where you might have 60 or 70 way points to load and many of them are lat long only so the potential for human error is very high.

There really isn't all that much difference in cruise from a glass airplane to a hard ball airplane. Both are autopilot equipped and both have the lowest workload in cruise. In fact the pilot flying on three man aircraft with an engineer has practically nothing to do in cruise.

These guys screwed the pooch big time and it has really nothing to do with the type of airplane they were flying. By the way this isn't the first time an aircraft has overflown it's destination or missed a check point or missed a frequency change. It happens for various reasons and it has happened throughout the history of aviation. It just is much more visible and dramatic when it happens to passenger aircraft and with the speed of media now days it makes for very sensational story, embellishments and all.

Pilots lose licenses...

http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dp...00910271256682657027

quote:

Auto download is actually a very good thing especially on a long international flight where you might have 60 or 70 way points to load and many of them are lat long only so the potential for human error is very high.

True. When I was in the cockpit flying the 747-200, we had to manually enter the coordinates of all waypoints into the INS's manually, (GPS was not yet installed), and both flying pilots would crosscheck. When I was FO, I caught two mistakes by Capt's. and when I was a Capt., I had an FO catch me on one. But you have to check the auto download very carefully, because somewhere, that stuff is generated by a human being. Humans make errors.

quote:

Originally posted by jetdrvr:
[QUOTE]we had to manually enter the coordinates of all waypoints into the INS's manually, .

When I was a green engineer on the 727 I brought the APU generator on line, tripping the jet way power. The INS dumped 3 pages of waypoints the crusty old captain and the first had just loaded. Never said a word about it but I will never forget that hairy eyeball staring down at me! Stellar performance, not...

quote:

Originally posted by Vemo:

quote:

Originally posted by jetdrvr:
[QUOTE]we had to manually enter the coordinates of all waypoints into the INS's manually, .

When I was a green engineer on the 727 I brought the APU generator on line, tripping the jet way power. The INS dumped 3 pages of waypoints the crusty old captain and the first had just loaded. Never said a word about it but I will never forget that hairy eyeball staring down at me! Stellar performance, not...

Oh, the pain...

quote:

Originally posted by jetdrvr:

quote:

Originally posted by Vemo:

quote:

Originally posted by jetdrvr:
[QUOTE]we had to manually enter the coordinates of all waypoints into the INS's manually, .

When I was a green engineer on the 727 I brought the APU generator on line, tripping the jet way power. The INS dumped 3 pages of waypoints the crusty old captain and the first had just loaded. Never said a word about it but I will never forget that hairy eyeball staring down at me! Stellar performance, not...

Oh, the pain...

And I damn well bet you never did it the 2nd time, eh?

And then you have the lovely little Airbus and it's "funny" quirks. I was going down to San Jose CR a while back and the route has just a short Class II segment with two or three compulsory reporting points. Just as I am calling in my first position report my FMGC locks up and my ND displays in red MAP NOT AVAILABLE. So what's a poor boy to do. Yep, heading select declare no NAV fortunately there were no other aircraft in the vicinity so we didn't have to do a track exit or anything drastic. Just about the time we renter Class I airspace bingo like magic we get everything back minus, of course the loaded route. Now here is the weird part about reloading a route on the bus if your original dumps. To reload the box you have to change your original destination to anything but the original then reload the route then do a lateral modification off a way point that isn't the new destination and then enter your original destination as an alternate to make it your new/original destination.

Can anybody here now tell me that the guys who designed the "logic" into this system weren't smoking meth?

To me this whole thing is a non story. Gee's they had there licenses suspended? I guess the DMV took them. I don't have a problem with guys making a mistake, we all do from time to time, in this case all that happened was being maybe 20 min late and burned a few extra gallons of Jet A. Not going to bankrupt the airline. The only Glass I ever flown was a G-1000 in a brand new Cessna 182. I got 20 min check out and told go to europe. I will admit that for the most part it was information over load, and I started tuning out things. If I was the Chief at Delta North West, I would have a 10 min chat with each and go fly a trip with each and that would be that. But we are all perfect right.