edlb ..in a life as a pilot all odds may be against you . you want to fulfill the mission and you did the trip many times before . that day a glowing heat covers the alps and just that day the plane is fully booked , the passengers have much baggage , you are very heavy. you depart with a bad feeling but you want to fullfill the mission , the heat also does not improve your brain and common sense. over the alps you realize you are at the edge of performance but you want to continue - more and more trading speed for climb . in the last minute you see that this time you will really not make the mountains and in panic - being already critically low on speed - you make a sharp 180 deg turn to avoid crashing into the mountains . during the turn a wing stalls snd seconds later you hit the elevated bottom .

thats what happened i guess , they simply asked their ju52 for something she was not able to deliver at that day with that heat and that load .just few passengers less or a little colder athmosphere and that would end without an issue or media coverage .

Some of the worst captains in all cultures are over 60 years old.. And put 2 old captains flying together, well that is often not good. Ask any commercial pilot.

Furthermore operating an old Junkers at high altitudes in the high mountains, fully loaded, is not intelligent. It is risky. Given that one must assume a failure at critical circumstances, be it power plant or even flying controls.

The CH folk do not have the best safety record either, be they pilots or ATC. There appears to be some complacency here, sadly unfounded.

I think the eldest son in a Swiss family isn't allowed to fly in their Air Force, for a very good reason.

That's tosh. Sounds like RoyHudd is a bitter younger FO to me.

I think the key phrase is "some of the...". Both major airline operators that I flew for rarely flew two captains together on a line flight (for obvious cost reasons) although I've never seen or heard of a two captains restriction. There could be lots of reasons that your operator, atakacks, actively avoided this, not necessarily because they're all megalomaniacs - as I think that you and RoyHudd are implying. Let's just wait for the report?

At the outfit I used to be with, while there was no formal policy, it was accepted practice to avoid pairing senior captains because of the increased risk of complacency. This comes straight from the mouth of the horse, the Flight Ops Director was one of them, and he had FOQA data to back this up. (BTW the Pretoria CV-340 also had two senior captains up front).

Some very simply-conducted research of RoyHudd's previous posts and threads started would have quickly eliminated that theory.

Crusty industry veteran who doesn't suffer fools gladly, more like.

Can you please elaborate on what you base your statement on ? Sounds a bit harsh I would say.
On the 2 Capt theory , yes unfortunately there, the data support this . One (of many) that comes to my mind is the one and only TAP accident (in Funchal 1977) had 2 capt on board and decisions were impaired . that accident led to lots of changes in Funchal ops and in crew pairing .

It never ceases to amaze me that even after 30+ years of human factors training in which human fallibility is so closely examined, additional to decades of global accident statistics that show conclusively that by far the biggest single cause of accidents is broadly dscribed as "pilot error" that so many pople are so reluctant to accept the likelyhood that this accident was simply what it appears to be. Mishandling.
There have been dozens of accidents reported in this forum over the years that have attracted the same old automatic responses, "A 60 year old commerecial pilot would never do that!", "He was an ex military pilot, he'd never make such a basic error", "I knew him and I know he'd never make such a mistake" "he was a brilliant pilot and he'd never -"etc.etc.etc. But every time he did, time and again it turns out that's exactly what they did. I realise it's difficult to accept that even such experienced pilots as this can make such a basic error but experience, history and statistics prove that they do, and regularly. Sure, HF applies here too, acceptance of the ability of experienced pilots to make very basic errors relies on our acceptance of our own fallibility, something none of us like to admit to. Thrashing around trying to invent ever more ulikely scenarios (elevator trim failure was one) when a heavily loaded, underpowered vintage aircraft tries to make a downwind turn in a mountain valley just below a ridge at high density altitude and falls inverted from the sky suggests to me that the lessons of HF are still not as ingrained as they might be, though I recognise that there are a lot of expert spotters/spectators etc here vs. pilots who have actually studied that subject. Sad as it seems it appears that these guys got themselves too far into a narrowing hole and tried just a bit too hard to turn out of it, and got bitten by 1930's stall habits. What seems more important here is not so much the what as the why?

There has been considerable discussion about the stall characteristics (esp. power on) of the DC3/C47 following the CAF's recent accident in which many have attested to that type's viscious stall habits. Tante Ju was from a design era pre C47 and would very likely behave in much the same abrupt manner in an aggravated power-on stall. We saw the Australian Mallard make a simiar manoeuvre with similar results. Yes, of course there's a tiny possibility that the inside knurled flange-bracket went "ping" but all the evidence points elsewhere, and whatsmore to the same place. But that's playing double jeopardy, isn't it? At the very point in a flight where every aviator says "Bloody hell, they're really asking for trouble doing that" something completely unexpected and invisible yet critical chooses that very instant to break. It isn't really a credible scenario. (viz the Shoreham accident. Page after page of fanciful speculative failures when all the time the duck was sitting there patiently quacking away)

Guys, though it isn't yet proven (and never will be as they 99.9% for certain won't find anything significant in the mechanical investigation) this case has all the attributes of the duck analogy. Looks like, sounds like, swims like. Is.

I think we'd sometimes do better to recognise and accept the weight of the obvious in reaching our local (as opposed to the investigators') conclusion rather than trying to invent fanciful "balancing" arguments where no shred of evidence nor requirement for them for them exists.

We have had a report (my previous post somewhere above) that on a previous flight the aircraft was apparently flown in a more "sporting" manner than the pax liked such that the pilots had to be asked to tone it down and though that report is anecdotal and a one-off (so far) it may well indicate an operational style that had developed. I too find it hard to believe that professional pilots would throw pax around so much they got sick and had tp be told to knock it off but apparently they did. If that does prove to be the case one can only wonder whether it was a one-off or not, or had other less than prudent habits attended the operation not just in flying but in the field of performance and loading perhaps? If so it wouldn't be the first time professional pilots, removed from the straitjacket of airline ops found themselves in a relaxed little fun operation where they could cut loose a bit. And came to grief because of it. After all, that's just human nature (factors).

That is where the bulk of the investigation will centre I suspect.

Great post, mealeagertoo!

Mountain-slopes all over the world are littered with mangled wreckages that have been put there by captains that should have ben too experienced to let this happen.
In fact, it's exactly this attitude that is the first hole in the cheese...

It's against our environmental protection laws to litter our mountains with guys and their aircraft who believe they may pass any obstacle once they have made the fence. .

Great post, sadly totally made irrelevant by the words " downwind turn". There are downdrafts downwind of mountain ridges, but there is no such thing as a downwind turn.

WOW, very impressive to learn some know already what actually happened.

Eh???
Not many people know that, my friend, and even if you take issue with the terminology (but why? It is a common enough expresson) everyone knows what is meant by it and the significance of it in this case. Quite how that one petty cavil renders an entire post "totally made irrelevant" (ugh!) is known only to you pal - but it doesn't say much for your CRM, tolerance or powers of logic and judgement does it?

Nul points for a pointless, irrelevant snipe.

gearlever - do spill the beans - who "knows exactly what actually happened"? and what was it? I'm impressed you "know" too. Hadn't realised the case was closed and hadn't read any post so far revealing it.
Or could it be you read my post so so carelessley that you took it to be a statement of facts rather than the clearly stated hypothesis based on probability and likleyhood that was repeated so many times specifically so lazy people who don't bother to read posts properly might not jump to conclusions and mistake it for something else.
Human factors again?

Very much appreciated your post too meleagertoo (and I didn't think any of it "irrelevant" by the mention of a downwind turn). I think this person is just exercising the usual knee-jerk black & white judgement reaction to the possibility that in using the term you're indicating you're from that die-hard aviation fraternity that swears by the belief an aircraft behaves differently (and has differing stall speeds) depending on whether you're turning into the wind or away from it. There is of course an ongoing debate with members of this fraternity where some will absolutely hang-on to this notion that an upwind turn "can save you" in circumstances where you're close to stalling whereas an equivalent downwind turn can be your undoing. What's missed in these discussions again and again is that these turns can only be termed "upwind" and "downwind" when considered in regards to reference against the terrain the aircraft is flying over and it is when a pilot falls for the trap of attempting to tighten a turn because of the perceived overshoot with reference to the ground or terrain that a "downwind turn" can be so fraught with danger.

And (from what I can assess with the obvious experience and knowledge you've presented in your post) it's this phenomena you're talking about; an aircraft close to the edge of its performance envelop in high density altitude conditions boxed in by rising terrain where a downwind turn will have the pilots likely overshooting with the radius of the turn bigger than expected resulting in them (potentially and unwittingly) pulling it tighter and into a stall. This is an accident scenario all too common, with one of the more obvious ones being where pilots stall during the turn from base onto final when dealing with a strong crosswind. They start overshooting during the turn because they didn't allow for the wind behind them and in the ensuing over-banking stall and spiral in.

The human factors you've written about and the complacency that can set in with very experienced high-hours flight crew is all too likely to have been the major contributing factor in this accident. I appreciate how you've articulated this.