Over 700 posts ago, this was written:
This video nails it pretty well.
3500’ at 5nm (over 2x the normal path), overspeed warning on recording, pod strike in the pictures and ATC mention “a belly up landing”.
Looks like high energy unstable approach, leading to a crash landing bounce, go-around into the circuit. Essentially crashed the jet then tried to fly it.
Since then the biases and prejudices have appeared:
1. Crew protection - no one could be dumb enough to do that so it didn’t happen. Followed by a plethora of systems posts blaming the jet.
2. Blame Ramadan - fair point on contributory factor. Not PC to discuss religion, gender identity etc.
3. Airbus vs. Boeing - it must have been those dodgy none moving throttles (conveniently forgetting Turkish at AMS, Korean at SFO and EK at DXB that all had moving thrust levers and managed to have the wrong power set. Why not blame the auto-trim system instead? Because it doesn’t matter.
4. Anti-military - ah, he flew military jets therefore had no CRM. If that was the case BA, UAL, DAL to name but a few would be spearing in left right and centre.
5. CRM protectors - if they had good CRM, they wouldn’t have crashed. No sh1t, if they had performed any other of about 100 competencies better they wouldn’t either.
6. Let’s blame a chain of events....everything that ever happens comes from a chain of events and if any were broken the day would have been saved. Sometimes though the links are as tenuous as a butterflies wing flap in the Amazon causing a Wall Street crash.
7. Bad Pilot/Good Pilot - we always like to judge as a defence mechanism blame the pilots solves the problem, particularly if they are conveniently dead.
8. ATC should have said something. Well they did but the crew ignored the advice.. but why?
Millions of approaches have been flown without incident and often the jet has saved the day by finally getting through to the pilots that they have screwed the pooch. The EGPWS works well, the Airbus FCS is well designed with world leading flight control protections. The jet was fine. All the rest above are at worse biases at best a small link in the chain.
So what was it? The crew performed inadequately on the day! It’s no different to the lorry driver that turns the wrong way up the freeway. All the signs are there but he didn’t notice. But he wasn’t trying to go the wrong way, why didn’t he notice. Was he worried about the length of the vehicle etc. etc. That must be it!
Capt Gul, didn’t plan to crash and we can’t comment on how good his human machine normally was but it failed. The FO clearly should have intervened but his machine failed as well. Why? Tunnel vision, task saturation, lack of capacity. By the way this is the main reason most military pilots get washed out in training. Their human machine is unable to cope as the workload increases on complex missions. Okay problem solved.
How to fix it.
1. New rules...uh no, that is managements way of trying to show they have done something.
2. Better selection, Traning and examining. of course it could help..
But then there is the elephant in the room.
On this occasion this crew were unable to cope with the demands of a badly flown approach and actually managed to over-ride all the protections in place. But why didn’t they spot the clues? Why didn’t they listen to the machine, ATC etc, etc, telling them they were wrong?
Simple, culture! As an illustration, not to denigrate but a statement of fact, on the same day as this crash a video appeared of 2 women being ‘honor killed’ in Pakistan, in Iran a 14 year old girl met the same fate. That is the society from whence the Captain came. Those norms are still considered acceptable by many and at the same time a Captain is considered a god. ATC know they can only hint to the infallible Captain he may have erred. The bottom line is telling a Captain he is a little high on the approach is quite a long way down his ‘give a sh1t list’!
This will be little different to the Air Blue crash in Islamabad. That was put down to poor CRM whilst ignoring the elephant in the room.
The reality is the only way to try and reduce these types of events is to change the culture that is getting in the way. I know the middle eastern airlines and Korean have worked hard in divorcing airline culture from national culture.
Yep culture needs to change, but they won’t internally and anyone that suggests they need to externally gets run over by the PC / ‘ism’ / ‘phobic’ bus. Until that day you will have to accept a small but measurable additional risk attached to flying on an aircraft who’s crew’s basic cultural norms may be incompatible with safety.