Adam Air B737-400 fatal crash January 2007

[pacplyer]

A certain war story break

Nothing but a hypothetical story follows:

Talk about the twilight zone......

Maybe once in your whole career, you're going to have to take the airplane away from a Captain who can't direct task-management correctly, or has quit flying the airplane for some reason.

This is the oldest cockpit story in the world. One guy MUST fly while the other diagnoses a problem. You can't have both of them troubleshooting. And if that guy can't keep the wings level, you MUST grab the controls, get it out of the [over] bank it's in, and recover. "Captain Captain Captain" is not assertive enough. State: "Captain I have the Aircraft," and do what you gotta do. But you better be right. Yes, you are probably going to loose your job. But at least you will be alive.

I had to do it once as a Flight Engineer and I will never forget it. Both "front enders" were continuing a bad GCA approach where foreign commuications became very uncertain. A different voice broke in and asked if we were going around (atc supervisor?) The GPWS went off and both guys ignored it, Captain pushing the G/S O/R button. I couldn't believe that both pilots weren't getting a read that this new controller was telling us something was wrong. Then he said: "you are Way North of Centerline and Way below Glidepath, are you going around?). They kept the sink rate going to minimums (that was the reason proffered later for not going around: he wasn't at minimums yet.) I pushed the power up from the back all the way to the stops and said to the pilot flying "Go Around, it's no good, Go Around, I'm giving you max power." I was sure I was fired. The F/O was shocked exclaiming "you don't do that, you just don't do that!" But the G/A was commenced. Then we for a second, we thought we saw the rooftops going by the windshield way too close, so I was later congratulated in the bar. But if it had been night, I'd probably be homeless right now....

I once was heavily criticized by a monday morning check captain for returning to base since the co-pilot was neither capable that day of flying or of any systems knowledge whatsoever. There was no way I was going to fool around with this serious mechanical problem while nobody flew the machine.

Maintenance was very unhappy with me that day, but this problem had been going on for weeks on this airframe.

The bottom line is that the PIC must be able to reject a broken airplane if he's been riding around on autopilot all month and is not up to a partial panel flying emergency.

The above is all just my opinion only.