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Old 19th Jan 2023, 15:21
  #304 (permalink)  
lederhosen
 
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There have been some strange crashes recently, Bangla and the Pakistan Airbus spring to mind. No one could with any certainty have predicted what the accident investigators would uncover there. In this case whilst we don't yet know what directly caused the accident, quite a number of facts are emerging. This is reported to be a tricky airport, probably what we would refer to as a Category C field, requiring special qualification. Often this involves simulator training followed by one or more landings supervised by a trainer. However in this case the airport is only a few weeks old and there is a good chance it is not yet included in the latest simulator database, nor that the trainer had necessarily flown this particular approach before. This is all informed supposition rather than fact. But the potential for the holes in the Swiss cheese to line up is there. There is no word yet who was flying. Maybe the trainer was demonstrating how he thought it should be done. Maybe the new captain was flying. In any case it is fact that the speed was allowed to decay and the aircraft departed controlled flight too low to recover. Quite why that happened will almost certainly be revealed by the investigation. With the terrain, unusual track and speed there may well have been a number of warnings going off simultaneously. Too low terrain, pull up, woop! woop! speed, speed accompanied by the stick shaker are not an unlikely combination. Sensory overload does strange things and whilst it is hard to imagine an experienced crew crashing a serviceable aircraft it cannot be excluded at this stage.
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