3ten,
The FDR recording and the general trend seems to indicate that the crew went all the way down to that building without ever doing nothing, and that, to me, is also unlikely.
As a matter of fact, the FDR graph shows that they *tried* a lot ;
- Full reverse
- Re-cycle the ground spoilers (We know that it would fail)
- Brake to max pedal input
- Transfer of control (s...?)
- Veer of runway (this, associated with the *Vira* plea shows even some monitoring of the aircraft progress ).
I dare say that was a pretty busy cockpit.
I travelled in a TAM A320 cockpit a couple of weeks before the accident, a instructon flight with 2 captains, and I observed perfectly good standards. I have to admit that I left that cockpit with a much better impression about aviation in Brasil. Of course, this is worth what it's worth.
That's interesting because we now have a first-hand testimony. But the cockpit procedures on a 320 are a lot stricter than on all my previous types (including some on different fleets of the same airlines...Nowadays, these SOPs have descended into the new FBW types, so I'd like to ask a few questions, if you could remember them, apart from the general impression of good standards :
- Were all the FMA changes, and generally all the messages (be they caution or change of configuration...) announced by the crew, and by whom ?
- Did they seem to have *triggers* for check-lists (like QNH = xxxx triggers the call for *Approach check*...) ?
- Did the handling pilot call for specific speed values or just *Speed S...Speed F+20...etc... or did he make his own speed setting ?
- Was the A/THR used during the approach or was it manual thrust ?
- Was the autobrake used ?
- If yes, was *Decel* called out, along with *Spoilers deployed*,* Reverse green*...?
These are the questions we could ask, on the accidented aircraft where while the general adherence to procedure is apparent, there are some calls that are missing (This crew, too was made of two instructors, one of them in training, so we must assume that adherence to SOPs were/should be the strictest ).
in my MEL, the asterisk means that the failure must be plackarded in the cockpit.
Yes, that's another presentation.
Thanks for your answer.
RWA,
The essential question is how vastly-experienced, over-10,000 hour pilots could have got themselves involved in such a horrible accident. And I for one still can't for the life of me work out how that could possibly have happened. For pilots like that, forgetting to retard the throttles in the flare would, on the face of it, be about as likely as them forgetting to put their trousers on before they left the hotel........
The two previous incidents are proof that it happened to their crews, and they were not less trained or experienced, so please leave that angle. You will never know.These crews cannot explain that mistake.