KAL lost the B747-200F at EGSS on 22 Dec 1999 by memory. It had a Capt's ADI failure in roll axis only. The only person who knew what was happening was the Flt Eng, and he resigned to his fate on the way down. The CVR is sobering, as was how close it got to the village. The other ADI and standby were fine until they got mussed up by England's green and pleasant land.
The mega death 2.0 was not caused by any attitude indication failure. The accident report by the state of incident is nonsense, and did not make any sense to the CVR or the radar data which is all that survived. The DFDR was taken out by the APU... The FO was aware of the event as it developed. The underlying causal factor is common on many other aircraft, however, the 2.0 at modest weights can have a wild ride in certain circumstances. Paradoxically, having good performance can result in not having any performance... on 15 Apr 99, the crew got caught out by the interplay of the AP and ATS in high rate events. The logic of the system has been changed since then, but the same sort of interplay still occurs on Boeings to this day. Airbus, this is one event that would not occur in your airplanes, you have other matters to deal with, like full thrust TOGA which adds so much fun to the event. HL7373 was more or less wings level from the event to impact. It did stall twice in the event, once at TOC, and once in the recovery. The last high speed stall probably would have made no difference, the attitude required to meet the available data made a prompt recovery necessary before the pitch attitude had decreased to that in the mid stages of the descent. From approximately 4500' AGL, the aircraft hit the ground in just a little over 16 seconds, from a low speed as recorded by both the radar plot and by the spectral analysis of cockpit wind noise. The behaviour of the autothrottle was identifiable by spectral analysis of the CVR, which showed that where the engine signal was lost due to ambient noise, the 400Hz lines and their harmonics showed the response of the CSD which has a slight delay to the changes in engine RPM; increasing N2 gives an initial overspeed of the CSD which shows as a shift of the 400Hz line, and vice versa for the thrust reduction case. The cockpit broadband noise also provided an SPL solution for speed, which made the modelling of a reasonable flightpath possible in conjunction with the calls of speeds, and the radar data which was pretty sketchy itself. When you are flying your non Bus aircraft, pay some attention to high rate altitude captures with AP and ATR engaged, as during the altitude capture the aircraft is pitching to a rate to achieve the level, which may or may not be within the energy capability of the aircraft. Opposite occurs in a high rate descent capture of an altitude, if you have the boards out, then retracting them once the altitude has been captured will result in a speed excursion dependent on the sink rate and speed at the time of alt cap.
Capturing an altitude from a zoom climb, where you happen to have traded speed for increased vertical rate needs to be carefully monitored, as you may not have enough thrust left to fly the path that is now commanded by the APFD, and you could end up with a reducing airspeed if not intervened.
Filejw: I assure you from hundreds of hours of reviewing 16 seconds of audio, that the crew did not dive the aircraft into the ground, it stalled at TOC. The CAAC report was and is nonsense, and did not match the CVR or radar data. The FO was rather insistent in the last seconds of his life about raising the attitude that the aircraft had achieved in the post stall, and which had a hesitation mid way down from the secondary stall which was evident on the CVR. The hypothesis of a simple push forward from the speed of 240KIAS (by memory that was assumed) but did not match the radar data) was not borne out by kinematic reconstruction or by simulator trials; simply put, you cannot get the plane from Point A to the known Point B in the required attitude at impact, time or distance, which I was also involved in. FYI, the simulator was odd in its own right, we demonstrated 6000FPM + rate of climb in full stall conditions which didn't appear to match either the QTG or the plane itself. The MD11 was an acquired taste; it had more than it's share of issues on landing, from a high approach speed as a freighter, coupled with it's relaxed longitudinal stability which LSAS assisted to some extent. The 10 was a very nicely harmonised plane,
The EGSS aircraft was a -2B5F, (MSN448, HL7451 KAL8509) not a -400. Both of these were messes to clean up.
Last edited by fdr; 2nd Mar 2019 at 05:45.
Reason: corrected date 23>22