First, may I salute the fine airmanship of the BA 74 crew in SA. Firewall power (thrust lever position) was the right choice in response to stick shaker. Perhaps there was no steady amber LED indication because in-transit amber is really a "
disagreement" "light", right?, (with the commanded position)? The LED's were doing what they were commanded/programed to do: on ground, see reverse and retract? Thus, no LED amber airborne until the reversers shook out their unlocked indications?
Next, the attempt by airrabbit to defend the Air Florida Crew who did not "firewall" is passionate for some reason but not correct imho. I disagree with most of his points entirely. Also, I have a direct unknown connection with that accident. Let me elaborate.
First the background. Air Florida was primarily a prop operation with little airplanes that was allowed to blossom rapidly under deregulation into jet operations that it had no experience with. Thusly, they hired Western Airlines to do their FAA manuals and training in LAX in the B-737 simulators IIRC. (I don't think they were in-house at that point). I had been through that program a year before, and was back getting a 727 rating (sorry, was nearly 30 years ago, remembered it wrong yesterday.) The instructors in the program were shell-shocked, knowing that fingers might point back to them in their extremely crowded out-sourced training offerings. Many times the older sim would break disrupting airlines sim schedules, throwing every airline into chaos, requiring them to break the training up into chunks separated by weeks of idle time waiting for a cancelation or adequate period to come up.
So, there was, in my mind, a training question. Western's training was first rate, and most of their instructors were excellent. But many times, an airline could get a box period, but no instructor, so they would put in their own guys to run a mysterious box. Was it quality training? I dunno....
But let's examine rabbit's argument from authority: i.e; the F/O was a former F-15 pilot with the Air Farce bla bla bla. Who cares? Are we flying F-15's here? No. Many fighters didn't even have anti-ice I was told by my co-pilots who flew em. But it's possible, that the first officer was the only one with any appreciable jet time at all in that cockpit.
Noise doesn't equal power (ref: the CAM analysis). If you forget to turn on the engine heat, as Air Florida did, and you've been taxiing along in clutter, getting blasted by the aircraft ahead of you for take off, not only is your PT2 sensor going to ice up, but also fan blades will turn into baseball bats. They certainly weren't clean fans and rotors anymore. Saying they had 75 percent power based on noise is highly speculative. I becha they didn't even have 50 percent. How do I know this?
Because it happened to me one night in a bizjet. I had a knot-head for a captain on a dereg operation, who refused to turn on the engine heat in moderate snowfall situation with a long taxi to t/o. He told me: "Don't turn them on till we hit the clouds." I protested: "That's not right" pointing at the engine instruments. Both EPRs started bouncing all over the place from the snow being blasted up by the taxiing aircraft we were following. But his Airworthiness wouldn't budge, having only a prop background previously, so he didn't know the significance of it, and since CRM hadn't been invented yet, the trip was "Bossman/Boy" the whole month.
So, trying to keep my crappy job, I obeyed, and told him, "O.K, I'll just set them to N1, since the EPRs are frozen." (Flight 90 was firmly in my mind.) But in hindsight, I should have mutinied and walked off and quit, because we lost an engine due to broken N1 blades and 275,000 dollars later, he got fired, and I got a checkride from hell. But we could've been killed.
Rabbit makes a conclusion that the Air Florida F/O was looking at the wing talking about 1/4 inch of ice, etc. Anyone who's flown -200 Boeings knows he's probably talking about the windshield wiper and it's visible bolt on his side of the aircraft. You can't determine ice thickness on the wingtips from that distance.
And most people in the industry fully agree with the NTSB accident board findings. Especially the part where the F/O doesn't see nine o'clock on the N1's and repeatedly questions the Captain on the power he's applied for takeoff. The Captain, having no real jet experience, and no CRM training to draw on, creates the Captain Blye Cardinal Sin: "
"My I.Q. goes right up with my seniority number!"
Conclusion: There is just no excuse for making a FUBAR this big. If your F/O is unhappy, you should defer to his paranoia if you don't have experience in the particular operation. Go ahead and push them up guys! You can't damage the JT8D-9 Pratt unless you exceed RPM or EGT!
Note: They did push them up shortly before impact; too little too late. But on the runway, after the PNF (Pilot Not Flying) "80 kt" call, at WAL the training was to say: "Check", then "power's good" by the non-flying pilot, IIRC. This was what the F/O was looking at and pointing at, not flight controls that he was handling! If there was a flight control problem they would have aborted. But if there was a disagreement on where the power was set it could have been rectified if the Captain knew to look at N1. He didn't, despite the F/O pointing, saying, "look at that thing".
I am repeating the off-the-record assessment of the men who trained these guys to the best of my memory. They marched upstairs while I was there, in a briefing room and checked their version of the Air Florida AFM Vol 1, cold weather ops and confirmed that Flight 90 was directed to have engine heat on takeoff with visible moisture and temp under 10 degrees TAT on the Rosemont Probe. But even the crew failing to do this right, the instructors were incredulous that the F/O said: "We're going down, Larry", and the Capt said: "I know".
"Push the power up dummies!" was the critique of their sim instructors at LAX.
And if you accidentally overboost, who cares? Those old buckets will warp before the rotables fly apart (engine casings will warp slowly before failure). Never sit there with a negative rate of climb.
Do something!
Crunch
Air Florida Flight 90 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia