Originally Posted by
JustAnothrWindScreen
I guess we will have to agree to disagree. "In my opinion" anyone that has flown high performance aircraft or have also flown captain on any of numerous commercial airliners do find that 9 seconds is a huge amount of time. Supermen, laser-like mind, whipping our a weird, but effective, solution, James Bond.... no not really, just a professional doing what they were trained and paid to do.
Well, yes and no; and I certainly don’t mean to “step” on your opinion – you certainly have a right to disagree with mine.
Nine seconds certainly
can be a huge amount of time – but, I believe it all depends on what happens during that time period. I would submit that when a 9-second window is divided into segments, where the first third of it is used to adequately address the issue at hand or, more properly,
believe that the issue had been adequately addressed; taking another third of that window to verify that belief – that being the Captain’s query, “You alright?” and the confirmation from the F/O, “Yeah. I’m fine”; the balance of that window, at most a third, or 3 seconds, comes down to processing the “I’m fine” response while having the airplane’s tail ripped off. Again, I don’t think either of these two pilots were watching a series of controlled events unfolding very slowly and deliberately before their eyes.
Yesterday, I posted a quote from an accident report only to show that there ARE times when what would seem to be “adequate time,” for some reason, is not. In that accident, a Check Airman, serving as PIC, was assigned to a line flight to specifically observe a F/O for proficiency, and during a crosswind approach to landing where the F/O apparently showed signs of not coping well with the progress of the approach, allowed the F/O to establish a high rate of descent while still crabbed on the approach, failed to notice that the F/O did not maintain adequate control inputs for the situation, failed to take control of the aircraft when the F/O did not flare the airplane at the appropriate point, and allowed the airplane to land so hard that it collapsed the right MLG, dropping the wing to the ground, dragging the airplane off the runway. The report cited the improper crosswind and flare techniques by the F/O and the Captain’s failure to take corrective actions.
Where a case could easily be made on this landing accident that the Captain had every reason to believe the proficiency of the F/O may have been in doubt and, somehow, got caught either over thinking the problem or was over confident in his recovery abilities, I think exactly the opposite case can be made for the Captain of AA587. The AA587 Captain had no reason to be suspicious of his F/O’s proficiency. He observed the F/O successfully transition a wake turbulence encounter mere seconds beforehand. Whether or not the Captain had any idea of the magnitude of the cockpit control deflections the F/O used, we’ll probably never know, but as the situation didn’t resolve itself as quickly as the first wake turbulence encounter, he queried the F/O about how he was doing and was told “Yeah, I’m fine.” It was THEN that the fit-hit-the-shan!