Air France at it again
I would be hesitant at throwing stones at other people’s glass houses. I know the UK airlines have no shortage of incidents and close calls……let’s try and learn from everyone’s mistakes.
There is a lot of learning in this incident, and the recent events that are noted by flight international's article. The crew procedures help remove one of the crew from the flight path management in these visual approaches, it would appear making sure that all unnecessary actions are complete before manoeuvring near finals or ground. If that is incompatible, then the risk mitigation would be, don't do the procedure. These types of events happen on all continents, and by almost all operators, and they all make sober reading after the event.
The majority of accidents and serious incidents on approach/landing remain “crew-caused” and the root problem is the fundamental flaw in most airlines' SOP duty allocations. Pilots have a natural human tendency to optimism (hoping for the best), plan confirmation bias, and looking for ways to minimise effort by taking short-cuts etc. These show up in a huge percentage of events where perfectly valid instrument information was prematurely abandoned in favour of inadequate and unreliable exterior ones. The SOPs should provide active obstructions to these tendencies, but don’t. This was a typical event which would almost certainly NOT have happened in "bad" weather. Old hands will probably see where I’m going with this……!
I am surprised there is no requirement in Air France to tune approach aids available for the planned landing runway.
My mob require the highest precision instrument aid for the runway to be tuned and displayed when conducting a visual. Had they simply backed up with the ILS it would have been rapidly evident something was wrong.
My mob require the highest precision instrument aid for the runway to be tuned and displayed when conducting a visual. Had they simply backed up with the ILS it would have been rapidly evident something was wrong.
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But the presence of a few areas of cloud meant the captain briefly lost sight of the runway.
(There are some airlines that I will not fly with. This one has far too many more incidents than others.)
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There is a time and place to practice visual approaches and IMHO at night at an island with terrain and showers is not the place. They ended up doing the ILS in the end anyway so why not save everyone the grief and report writing by getting vectored to the ILS to start with? Why the PIC decided that this would also be a good opportunity to practice manual thrust skills is also perplexing. If he/she had kept the A/T in then the speed would not have fallen below the Vref of 138kts. Airbus spell it out quite clearly: Appropriate level of automation.
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Possibly a case of not using an appropriate level of automation for the situation. In a day visual approach you an see the clouds and make an assessment of whether you can remain visual the whole way, it's a different matter at night, where whilst you might have the runway in sight at one point, you can't be sure of remaining visual for the remainder of the approach especially with rain and associated cloud in the area.
I also wonder if the Captain had a simulator check coming up and was doing a bit of practice.
I also wonder if the Captain had a simulator check coming up and was doing a bit of practice.
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