A number of people have shown they don’t know very much about ETOPS and/or the A330 in the comments they’ve made here. I’ve got no problem with that in most cases.
However, I understand that the person who started the thread purports to be an L1011 pilot. By his comments here, he’s proven himself to be a fraud – or the person who signed him off on his conversion course needs a serious talking-to re standards.
Guv, if you had any in the first place, you’ve blown your credibility BIG TIME in the patently silly remarks you’ve made here, proving to all and sundry that what knowledge you have of air transport ops has been learned, parrot fashion, from a textbook or from what you’ve overheard in a bar. If you ever have strapped an L1011 to your ass and lived to tell the tale, it’s mute testimony to the wonderful, forgiving, machine Kelly Johnson and the boys at Lockheed’s Skunk Works made for us ‘systems monitors’ to passively watch over.
This incident has brought home with one glaring, thankfully not fatal example what reams of written argument can never do over why pilots think they deserve more money – and recognition, even respect – than the bean counters are willing to give them in this age of almost total automation. It also shoots down in flames those who argue that automation should be used at all times.
I’ll be very interested to learn the background of the pilot – (perhaps that should read ‘pilotS’) – involved in this incident. London to a brick at least one of them had a good swag of bush flying up his sleeve before he found himself ‘monitoring’ the plastic jet where the automatics ‘always’ work.
My heartiest congratulations to all the crew. (And thank you, God, that it wasn’t me!) When the Monday morning quarterbacks, with three months at their disposal to carefully scrutinise every manual and regulation remotely pertinent to the situation you found yourselves in, decide that you didn’t get it 101% right in the few minutes you had to deal with it, remember that when push came to shove, you got your aircraft on the ground in one piece and all your passengers out of it alive. Where I come from, that means you all did an extraordinary job. Well done to you all.
And to any lawyer who takes on the case of the inevitable passenger who feels he/she was ‘traumatised’ by this incident to the point where he/she needs a couple of mill in recompense…
I think I’ll leave it at that.