It seems that there was a bit of verbal biffo in the cockpit of a Jetstar A320 approaching Sydney Airport more than two years ago between a ‘tough’ training captain and a rookie first officer.
In June 2013 the training captain conducted a partly unapproved exercise in instrument land system approaches with an inexperienced first officer during the final stages of a scheduled flight into Sydney in an A320 and things went unacceptably wrong.
The approach speed of the 177 or 180 seat jet fell to unsafe levels while the captain and the newbie first officer “discussed the requirements of the [Jetstar] handbook” until despite the captain’s last minute intervention an audible low speed, low energy warning SPEED, SPEED, SPEED sounded in the cockpit.
Outside it was apparent that the approach following the path that goes directly across the domestic terminals had become ‘unstable’. The captain performed a last minute high energy go-around, and the flight from Ballina was then landed safely after being put in a position no airliner should find itself in while dropping toward a runway at Australia’s busiest airport.
A referee pilot suggests that ‘discussion’ in the ATSB report was a euphemism for what was really going on in the cockpit between the tough school training captain who disagreed with the Jetstar company rules for this sort of exercise, and a first officer with only 125 hours experience in the single aisle Airbus.
But we’ll never know. The ATSB is good at code words, and quite rightly, in that the jet wasn’t actually destroyed, not likely to entertain us with excerpts from the cockpit voice recorder. There are some very guarded references to attitude of the training captain to Jetstar’s rules in the longer version on the report linked to on the ATSB web site.
Now that 27 months have passed since the incident the safety lapdog has published a final report that is nevertheless well worth careful if caffeinated study.
There are so many things the report steers us away from even in the full version, including (on advice) some important safety matters involving experienced captains and inexperienced first officers.
Such as, the safety implications of training captains that not only don’t follow company rules, but insisted on inputting false altitude values for the Sydney approach exercise that so exercised the first officer that they engaged in such an intense discussion that they lost track of where the ground was, and how dangerously slowly they were moving toward it.
Guys, if you are going to have an argument discussion in the cockpit, don’t do it while on final approach to Sydney!
Keep in mind, airlines must conduct some real life hands on flying training with their pilots. But the rules that a company sets for such training with real live passengers onboard must also be respected.
As the often and much criticized ATSB says on this occasion:
This occurrence demonstrates the risks associated with conducting training exercises during periods of high workload. Training pilots need to be cognisant of trainee experience and capability and ensure that the training exercise never compromises the primary task of monitoring/flying the aircraft.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalk...aching-sydney/