Originally Posted by Centaurus
But apart from that, instructors occasionally see some alarming events that leaves you knowing how some of these strange accidents start in the first place. For example: Crew were intercepting the localiser (in the sim) but one autothrottle developed a fault. As the thrust increased to hold the glide slope only one thrust lever moved up from idle. The other crept up steadily to 80 percent N1.
The crew simply were so engrossed with reading the landing checklist and monitoring the MCP that neither pilot saw the split throttles or the ever increasing wheel angle as the autopilot tried to hold the localiser. After 45 seconds or more, the first officer spotted the split levers motioned with one hand towards the offending thrust lever and you could almost hear the bemused captain muttering "Cor" WTF is going on 'ere"
The long suffering autopilot said stuff this for a joke and disconnected with loud wailing. Captain sees the closed throttle and calls for engine failure checklist. F/O is obedient to the bitter end and scrabbles on the floor for the QRH as the sim rolls into ever increasing bank angle beyond 55 degrees. We hit the ground just as the F/O (unaware of the flight path ) got to the page starting with Engine Failure and Shut Down checklist. And this from pilots with lots of time on the type. Certainly head banging stuff in more ways than one..
Very interesting story. I have once experienced a similar failure in an MD-11 after takeoff: when the autothrottle switched from takeoff thrust to climb thrust, the number 1 thrustlever didn't move, due to some misalignment in the thrustlever mechanism. In response, the number 2 and 3 thrustlevers retarded all the way to idle, the FMS popped up the ENGINE OUT climb performance page, and the EICAS issued an ENG FAIL warning. This all happened just as we were starting a turn to the right.
We were lucky enough to recognise the problem instantly, and the thrustlever could still be moved manually. But I always wondered what would have happened if one or both of us would have been preoccupied with other tasks, such as reading an After Takeoff checklist,
at that precise moment. Perhaps we might have overlooked the asymmetric thrust altogether, given that we just entered a right turn, and we might have ended up in a sudden steep bank angle. Add some heads-down tasks into that equation, and there'd be a nice opportunity for spatial disorientation - and an exercise in unusual attitude recovery.
Reading your story, I now believe it is in fact possible to misdiagnose a stuck thrustlever for an engine failure (or even a dual engine failure in our scenario)...