Wouldn’t a THIRD IRU have aided these mishap pilots?
Sure, but I doubt it would on an Adam Air jet. You can have 20 on board IRUs if U can, and still wouldn't help. The main point arising from this accident is that the IRU/S are crucial to your aircraft and needs to be maintained properly. Again it goes back to management commitment to safety. Instead of maintaining the IRUs properly, management decides that it's cheaper to perform "clean contacts and reinstall" as their IRU maintenance, repetitively. It basically got to a stage where if you have 20 IRUs on board, none would have helped. If you go to the management and say you need 2 working ones, they'd say, "look, U got two, one's to back up the other", it's best to just leave the company. Why would 3,10,20 make a difference? They'd just say "look, you got 20 IRUs, only one needs to work. Now stop messing around or I'll make your life difficult."
Irrespective of IRS failure, autopilot disconnect, FMC position anomaly. . . the crew members lacked elementary survival instinct by not immediately hand flying the airplane,
Bingo...
Now the question is, why the lack of the elementary survival instinct?
Pilots in Adam Air have refused to fly unsafe aircraft in the past and management instead of doing something positive about it, decided to give hell to those who refuse. Brown envelopes were sent and those pilots faced legal proceedings for breach of contract and arranged the situation such that those pilots had to settle out of court rather than face bankruptcy. Now, U expect those deciding to stay care about staying alive to the same level as "just a pilot at just another airline" ?
And if they do have that elementary survival instinct, they lacked the proper training.
Recurring simulator training with impromptu loss of A/P and instrument displays will re enforce the urgency of manual control before the airplane enters an unrecoverable upset.
Well, that's pretty obvious. But then, simulator sessions were just "a formality" for Adam Air. One member of the "National Evaluation of Transportation Safety Team" (NETST) appointed by the President last week went on TV that it had previously reported its finding where, a simulator was "available" for 2 hours, and they put 5 pilots into it, of which one was the instructor. The simulator had limited function as it was in a 2 hour break inbetween maintenance, and at the end of it, all 5 was then reported as "completed simulator checks".
Sad isn't it.
Next time you have lunch with an investigator, could you ask him if the NTSC could publish some of the reports for the several accidents that have been in Indonesia over the last several years. Tell him that they are much appreciated by those who are reading them.
Had discussed this in the past, and yes, the first thing I did when I spoke to him was to thank him for the report being published and that all who are interested in safety thanks the NTSC for finally making a lot of these allegations on Adam Air, official, through the report.
It appears from the discussions that those reports are "political hotcakes". The GA200 and KI574 reports being published saw huge opposition from the old guard at the DATC. Only since the head of the DGAC and DATC has been changed can the NTSC release reports by ignoring what the old guard is ranting about. The old "we shouldn't release reports because we do not want to blame anyone or have the report used as an instrument of blame" is no longer valid, those guys are on the loosing side in the NTSC, as the current head belongs to the same group as the heads of DGAC and SATC... reformers.
But, they wouldn't want to rock the boat too much. Relations between members of NTSC and old guard members of DATC has been sour since the GA200 report and now with the KI574 report. Now, the recommendations would, again, show DATC deficiencies, crew training deficiencies and also the airport operators, etc... Plus, of the past accidents, we got Lion Air who's now the political darlings of the aviation industry, and to release reports on Lion Air accidents would be a huge political row within the DGAC, and could result in the reformers being replaced by the old guard. If that happens, we're back to square one again, and none of us want that!
The reports of past accidents will be published when the time is right. They must also be careful on the reaction of the public. The GA200 report was just an eye opener, and now KI574, people want heads to roll. The sad side of it, the media isn't helping, and have spun the reports around to paint airlines (regardless of which accident was mentioned) as evil blood suckers. The reports, and new DGAC policies must be in sync. Just last week, the DGAC revealed that it would punish airlines with "repetitive technical delays", and the passengers must be compensated for such. Within days, we got passengers demanding outrageous compensations for delays at airports, and other silly things, culminating in one occurence where the passengers overcame security and invaded an aircraft demanding that it be flown to their destination because they've faced enough of a delay.
The reform, we'd like it to be quick, but then, if we do it that quickly, we'd have a bigger mess on our hands! We don't want planes crashing, but we don't want pax turning into angry mobs either... one new thing we found this week is that, if we move too slowly, planes will crash, and if too fast, we'd have a riot on our hands. Sad reality.
PK-KAR