PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Cathay pilot 'sacked for Top Gun stunt'
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Old 27th Feb 2008, 19:39
  #190 (permalink)  
richatom
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
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completely agree with you. If you sack a skilled pilot for this then all pilots who do a go around during a CAT III approach at 20 ft should also be diciplined because it is done with Passengers on board! The size of "management brains" are inversely proportional to the price of Aircraft today.
You can't compare the low pass to a CatIII go around.

Going around on CatIII both pilots have rehearsed it over and over again in the sim, configuration changes and protection on the climb out are all exactly known, both pilots know exaclty what the other is about to do at all stages of the process. If you do have misfortune to have a critical equipment failure on the go around and you do have the misfortune to crash, you are not in any way criminially negligent because you have followed the procedures which have been carefully considered and designed.

Not sure this was the case for the low pass here. Did they practise the low pass in the sim first? Did the FO even know the captain was about to do it? How did they work out their N-1 protection on climb out? If they did have the misfortune to have critical equipment failure, or they had engine failure on applying TOGA at the end of the low pass and were outside of protection envelope on climbout, then they would be criminially negligent because they hadn't followed the procedures. No different from the Indonesian pilot (justifiably much maligned on this forum) who made his approach too fast, crashed off the end of the runway and killed half his passengers.
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