https://onemileatatime.com/new...7-flight-washington/

Mike

I would suppose that heads will, or did roll on this one!(No pun intended, I hope!)

quote:

Originally posted by Use Enough Gun:
I would suppose that heads will, or did roll on this one!(No pun intended, I hope!)

Absolutely!

First and foremost a pilot does is his check list.

I have actually sat with modern pilots and told them they are no longer pilots, but system managers.

Funny enough. most agree.

We had something similar happen here about 25
years ago.

My place is about 5 miles west and inline of the main runway at Pueblo's airport. The tower then didn't open until 6am.

A G5A Galaxie had spent the weekend out there. They took off at 5am headed west over the foothills 25 miles away. They barely had altitude to clear the hills.

This is a military aircraft.

I don't know how high they were when they went over this part of town but they were mighty damn low.

They were headed to CAL to an airbase. A few days after it happened an article in the paper told about the crew being demoted in rank an taken out of that plane.

Just because of that incident ALL flights must take off headed East then if destination is west or somewhere else they circle around as required.

I doubt they had any settings wrong, just didn't have room enough to gain altitude over town or the mountains for such a huge plane.

George

These push-button pilots do scare me, and should scare us all.

It's like relying on spell-check by Bill Gates.

Don't do it.

There is no substitute for thorough proof-reading.

Draft a checklist and by God use it, all the time and every time.

They couldn't bother looking out the window?

The first comment from another 777 pilot tells you everything.

Something this doesn’t mention is the that even if ground level was set into the mode control panel, the aircraft wouldn’t have descended if it was being hand flown. That means that the flying pilot here selected the autopilot on immediately after takeoff This is unusual at Western carriers as we like to hand fly. To me this indicates a lack of experience or confidence or both. Also, this is something that SHOULD have been caught by at least two separate checklists, which they obviously didn’t do. Lastly, if they didn’t have a higher altitude in the altitude window, VNAV (vertical navigation) couldn’t have been armed which is a standard SOP during cockpit setup. So, these pilots were ill trained and negligent.

In the USA, max speed below 10,000 ft is 200 kts. These guys exceeded it before rotation. Insanity.

Who doesn't notice something is wrong when the runway is ending, and you are still on the ground? Insanity.

You should have some feeling for what rotation speed feels like. Insanity.

Who can't think to override the auto pilot when you are barely missing houses and power lines? Insanity.

I was in Romania and met a kid, yep, a kid. Braces, acne, looked like a high school senior. He told me he was a pilot for a commercial airliner in the Middle East, because those are the easiest jobs to get.

He graduated high school and went to school to fly an Airbus for 16 months. Yes ... 16 months.

He said they flew a 152 to start with, then never flew an actual plane until they climbed into an Airbus.

All their flight time was in a simulator. The majority of their classroom time was spent on communication between crew. He said accident reports showed communication between different cultures was a major cause of flight mishaps.

We have the equivalent of College sophomores sitting in the right seat of our Airbus now.

Ironically, on the way home, I read an article in the inflight magazine that backed up this very story.

What the actual fuck ...

quote:

Originally posted by Wendell Reich:
In the USA, max speed below 10,000 ft is 200 kts. These guys exceeded it before rotation. Insanity.

Who doesn't notice something is wrong when the runway is ending, and you are still on the ground? Insanity.

You should have some feeling for what rotation speed feels like. Insanity.

Who can't think to override the auto pilot when you are barely missing houses and power lines? Insanity.

I was in Romania and met a kid, yep, a kid. Braces, acne, looked like a high school senior. He told me he was a pilot for a commercial airliner in the Middle East, because those are the easiest jobs to get.

He graduated high school and went to school to fly an Airbus for 16 months. Yes ... 16 months.

He said they flew a 152 to start with, then never flew an actual plane until they climbed into an Airbus.

All their flight time was in a simulator. The majority of their classroom time was spent on communication between crew. He said accident reports showed communication between different cultures was a major cause of flight mishaps.

We have the equivalent of College sophomores sitting in the right seat of our Airbus now.

Ironically, on the way home, I read an article in the inflight magazine that backed up this very story.

What the actual fuck ...

I think the kid is pulling a fast one on you.

I know for a fact that Etihad, Emirates and Qatar have very strict rules for a pilot in command.

No one can be in command of an airliner unless he has had at least several thousand hours of flight time as co-pilot.

I know, because I have several relatives flying.

Charter companies here will not touch anyone unless he has had several thousand hours.

quote:

Originally posted by Saeed:

quote:

Originally posted by Wendell Reich:
In the USA, max speed below 10,000 ft is 200 kts. These guys exceeded it before rotation. Insanity.

Who doesn't notice something is wrong when the runway is ending, and you are still on the ground? Insanity.

You should have some feeling for what rotation speed feels like. Insanity.

Who can't think to override the auto pilot when you are barely missing houses and power lines? Insanity.

I was in Romania and met a kid, yep, a kid. Braces, acne, looked like a high school senior. He told me he was a pilot for a commercial airliner in the Middle East, because those are the easiest jobs to get.

He graduated high school and went to school to fly an Airbus for 16 months. Yes ... 16 months.

He said they flew a 152 to start with, then never flew an actual plane until they climbed into an Airbus.

All their flight time was in a simulator. The majority of their classroom time was spent on communication between crew. He said accident reports showed communication between different cultures was a major cause of flight mishaps.

We have the equivalent of College sophomores sitting in the right seat of our Airbus now.

Ironically, on the way home, I read an article in the inflight magazine that backed up this very story.

What the actual fuck ...

Charter companies here will not touch anyone unless he has had several thousand hours.

Yes, true, nobody will let a kid captain anything, not even a Cessna Caravan, without 1000 hrs(ish) This kid was sitting in the "right seat", the co-pilots seat.

I used to fly a lot. Have an Instrument and commercial certificate. Be careful ... I know just enough about planes tractors and horses to make me dangerous!

Slight correction there Wendell. 250kts max below 10K unless in an airport traffic area (ATA) where it's 200max.

We've discussed this focus on systems management vs actual flying before on AR. It used to be the Airbus vs Boeing focus where with Airbus, you have engineers telling pilots how to manage the systems and Boing had pilots telling engineers how they want the systems to help them. Now days, even Boeing has moved significantly into the systems management focus. Unfortunate.

This is allowing low experience pilots to fly as co-pilot and gain hours but what happens is a systems focused co-pilot, used to utilizing the auto pilot all the time, focused on every decision being checklist driven, eventually ends up in the left seat without the experience of knowing what to do when an event happens that isn't addressed by checklists. That's when you really end up in trouble.

Guys like Peter here on AR will jump in and call this discussion "racist" when in fact, it's a real problem developing in the aviation industry where real pilots with real hand flown flight time are being pushed out in preference for systems managers that don't have the background to handle events not addressed by the manual. When I started at American Airlines, and every piece of equipment I moved to, the first thing we did was learn the systems to the point of being able to describe each and every function of the system and its back ups.

You can gain insight of why we had that focus from reading about some of the Apollo space missions where things went wrong in the the capsule. The guys knew enough about the systems of their craft that they could come up with work arounds to make things function enough to get back on the ground. Times have changed and they haven't made the flying public safer.