PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - LOT 737 incident, June 2007: crew's poor English blamed
Old 12th Jun 2008, 08:54
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lederhosen
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Whilst there is no allocation of blame, the facts do not appear to reflect positively on the crew. As a 737 captain I am always particularly interested in incidents I can learn from. Hopefully I can subsequantly avoid doing something similar. The Adam Air 737 crew messing with the IRS and crashing, the TNT 737 crew trying to continue an autoland after deselecting the autopilot below 800 feet are good recent examples.

In this case a highly experienced crew (captain 15 years on type, co-pilot 6) managed to get into pretty serious difficulty doing something I can barely imagine. Taking off with the IRS not aligned and therefore no primary attitude or navigation displays is pretty amazing. That you can appear to have aligned the IRS, with most of the displays then disappearing on takeoff (if that is really what happened) is a sobering thought. In any case it underlines the rule about not moving the aircraft before the IRS are aligned, if it needed underlining.

The report is pretty fair in pointing out that the crew were under a fair amount of stress which may have exacerbated their limited English. But their level of English was a secondary problem. What is clear is that they were completely unable to navigate the aircraft on their own for various reasons. Without help from ATC it is unlikely they would have found the runway.
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