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Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore

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Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore

Old 17th Feb 2015, 00:06
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I'm afraid it's happened to every industry. It's called maturing. The first few people are pioneers, who succeed on luck as much judgement. That doesn't last, and eventually professional standards take hold, and the old guard moan that it was more fun when the odd ****up (even if fatal) was a risk it was acceptable to take.
If modern professional standards equates to monitoring automatics until such a time when the automatics give up, leaving two out-of-the-loop beating hearts to question what is wrong and fix it before landfall ... I prefer the sky gods, thank you.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 06:09
  #3242 (permalink)  
 
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I was disappointed back in AF447 that an A330 was not flown through the initial zoom and stall profile, perhaps with spin chute.

The data could have been provided to the sim manufacturers so the crews would have an opportunity to explore high altitude stalls and recovery with valid data. This crew, their passengers and their families might have benefited.

There is talk that no crew should ever get near that edge of the envelope, but convective activity can put any crew in a place they never intended to be.

Until the data is available, the ITCZ crapshoot will continue.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 08:32
  #3243 (permalink)  
 
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SLFandProud. Your analogies are superb....But you shouldn't be sidetracked by the occasional retired 'Skygod' sitting at their computer, tapping away feverishly at their keyboards about how brilliant they were in the 80's!

The problem is that ordinary pilots believe that the direction cockpit design took as technology 'enabled' enhanced safety, was to an extent the wrong one.
To remove the human input from cockpit automation, to dismiss ergonomics and human-machine interface design so comprehensively.

Things will always go wrong environmentally. It's called bad weather. It will always outfox a drone pilot or the most sophisticated automation technology. But when an Airbus has the equivalent of a 'kernel exception error' because it's probes have frozen up or it's Angle of Attack probes are jammed, it takes a pilot to know beyond the rudimentary basics of flight using only rudimentary instruments that remain. That requires training and that costs money.

This is not about ego. We all want 100% safety. It just requires making pilots more skilful to achieve that aim. Don't confuse those who moan about that lack of training as Egotistical!
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 08:58
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@right engine

SLFandProud. Your analogies are superb....But you shouldn't be sidetracked by the occasional retired 'Skygod' sitting at their computer, tapping away feverishly at their keyboards about how brilliant they were in the 80's!
Oh absolutely, I quite agree; the point I was trying to make is that this is a completely normal and natural evolution, and as depressing as it may be if you were once a 'sky god' there's no point tilting at that particular windmill.

It happens in /every/ industry.

Hell, the software engineers of my generation will moan that the job was more skilled when we hand rolled assembly language using nothing but a HEX editor, and that all this modern nonsense like automatic garbage collection and strict type checking means that any old Tom, Dick or Harry could write code with all the skill taken out of it.

Would you rather the automatics on your plane were being programmed by the greybeards like me who insist on using stone and chisels or with the full aid of all the modern compiler and software correctness tools available?
The problem is that ordinary pilots believe that the direction cockpit design took as technology 'enabled' enhanced safety, was to an extent the wrong one.
To remove the human input from cockpit automation, to dismiss ergonomics and human-machine interface design so comprehensively.
And that is an entirely valid argument to have. But it's not the one that @rideforever was making.
This is not about ego. We all want 100% safety. It just requires making pilots more skilful to achieve that aim. Don't confuse those who moan about that lack of training as Egotistical!
I think it's fair to say when @rideforever starts bemoaning the fact that pilots aren't worshipped any more it's hard to see it as anything other than an appeal to ego.

Look, I totally agree with your point. I learned to fly gliders long ago, stall recovery was in literally the first couple of lessons and was drummed in hard, so I find it absolutely astonishing that the pilot of AF447 could pull back on the stick all the way into the sea. But the blathering about automatics and sky gods seems to me to be to deflect the subject from inadequate training, not to highlight that that really is the problem. It's not the automatics making pilots incompetent - it may be the automatics meaning that incompetent pilots get to fly for longer before they kill themselves or their passengers, though.

As a society, we make even decide that's an acceptable tradeoff, since the overall levels of safety have absolutely increased, and since it has also resulted in the poor folk that @rideforever so derides to have access to travel that they could only have dreamed of not so long ago.


(As an aside, I also love the fact that because there was an Airbus involved everyone has basically assumed the entire incident is identical to AF447 and all the same arguments can be rehearsed, despite there being absolutely no evidence I've seen to support the assertion whatsoever.)
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 09:18
  #3245 (permalink)  
 
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I am a simple old world kind of person who has managed to stay alive after 10 years in the military and 30 years in civil aviation. I have had to learn to adapt to the fact that the machine knows better than the man. But does that logic follow when parts of the machine are compromised and parts are not? Indeed when parts are compromised, it is possible that the remaining parts are working against you rather than for you, but you are in such a lather that you don't or can't read the message.

Having trawled the various airbus accidents, I am convinced that there is a very serious problem with the trim control in partial degradation of systems. The Perpignon A320 accident is a classic example.

Small print advice is not something one can understand in a major upset.

Please Mr Airbus...do something about a system that will allow trim to work against a pilot in the case of partial or substantial upset.

Last edited by VR-HFX; 18th Feb 2015 at 05:38.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 11:14
  #3246 (permalink)  
 
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A few years ago in the simulator I was required to upgrade an experienced B737 first officer from RH seat to LH seat. This was in the days when the Australian CAA licencing system has first class endorsements and second class endorsements. First class endorsements were for captains and first officers were given second class endorsements. As expected back then, the second class endorsement was not recognised outside of Australia and that meant some pilots could not get jobs overseas despite being highly experienced.

This particular pilot had no problem whatsoever operating from the LH seat. At the end of the endorsement training we had time to spare and I asked him if he would like to practice some unusual attitude recoveries in IMC. He thought about it for a moment before saying he thought UA's were a bit of a waste of time. Anyway, he reluctantly gave it a go. The simulator was set up for a un-commanded steep pitch up at 500 ft agl after take off. Airspeed loss is dramatic. This had really happened some years previously in USA and by superb handling the USA pilot had rolled sharply through 60 degrees to get the nose to drop and cleared a building by 100 feet in the recovery.

In the event, our pilot in the simulator was completely caught by surprise when it happened at 500 ft in the simulator as he expected the UA's to be done at 10,000ft. He tried forward elevator to stop the immediate speed loss but to no avail. With the nose going through 50 degrees nose up, he made no attempt to roll to the nearest horizon to get the nose to drop which would have saved the day. To my astonishment, he pulled both engines to idle and the simulator gave up the ghost and fell out of the sky.

In short and despite several thousands of copilot hours on automatic pilot on the 737, he simply didn't have a clue. Certainly he was unfamiliar with the pertinent chapter in the FCTM about UA recovery technique.

I suggested he have another attempt - this time rolling to the nearest horizon. I even offered to slip into his seat and demonstrate the recovery technique. He looked at his watch and reiterated he thought UA's were a waste of valuable simulator time and that in any case he had an appointment elsewhere. In other words he had stuffed up big time and refused to admit it.

This episode proved to me that automation dependency will continue to be the shadowy danger in the flying of jet transports. It beats me that time and again we see regulators and ops management paying lip service to manual handling skills but have yet to schedule comprehensive simulator training to mitigate autopilot dependency. One well known Middle East carrier boasted that they had added one extra hour per year of manual handling. What a laugh that was. In other words extra safety measures that involve simulator training are seen as a unnecessary cost impost.

The occasional raw data ILS to tick a regulatory box is virtually a waste of time as it does not scratch the surface in terms of manual handling. I believe we will see more future instances of loss of control in IMC as pilots are forced into more and more automation by their ops management.

So much valuable simulator time is wasted on button pushing and excessive check list reading exercises. In turn, this must only increase automation dependency. IMHO, to counteract ever-increasing automation dependency, 50 percent of all simulator training should be devoted to non-automatics handling in IMC - and that includes high altitude flying. High altitude stall recovery skills (37,000 ft) and landing configuration stall recovery skills (1000 feet AGL) are vital.

Last edited by Centaurus; 17th Feb 2015 at 11:30.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 11:45
  #3247 (permalink)  
 
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Centaurus,




I would like to say that what you wrote is one of the most important and well articulated pieces that I have seen on this site for a while. Thank you for illustrating and sharing your insight.


Largely due to financial pressures of the industry, finding the balance between training costs and associated risk of crew experience is important of course. In the case of these airlines that have lost aircraft, the cost and pain for all involved has not been measured well.


The over reliance on automation is fact and needs to be addressed in a cost effective approach.


I have done research on this area and at times I feel safer in raw data at the 'what the' moments.




The high stall recovery techniques at FL510 are interesting.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 11:58
  #3248 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by SLFandProud
Oh absolutely, I quite agree; the point I was trying to make is that this is a completely normal and natural evolution, and as depressing as it may be if you were once a 'sky god' there's no point tilting at that particular windmill.

It happens in /every/ industry.

Hell, the software engineers of my generation will moan that the job was more skilled when we hand rolled assembly language using nothing but a HEX editor, and that all this modern nonsense like automatic garbage collection and strict type checking means that any old Tom, Dick or Harry could write code with all the skill taken out of it.
Your analogy does not hold for aviation.

As a software engineer you will know that there are always going to be difficult areas - the 'otherwise cases' that drop through the IF-THEN-ELSE logic or the places where the analysts and designers cannot come up with a simple fix as the number of potential permutations in the real world make a simple solution difficult. In the FMC and Autopilot software the way out of those nP problem areas has been for those systems to failover to the human pilot handing them the bag-of-bolts and expecting them to recover the situation that the automation could not.What you are saying is true that many areas of work have had automation creep in and deskill the operator. But aviation is unlike those as people will die if the automation goes wrong and the software analysts, designers and implementers have ducked the final responsibility when it gets difficult and handed it to the pilots. You know the 'sky gods' you keep running down. Because management in their ignorance treats automation as fault free they are paying off the 'sky gods' and replacing them with systems managers. So they are in the process of removing the final safety stop that the software analysts, designers and implementers always assumed would be there to save the day. In other words management and the software analysts, designers and implementers have worked together to create a system that fails dangerous rather than fails safe. Indeed short sighted attempts at graceful degradation have actually made the failure cases far more difficult for the human to take over as the actual state of the automatics can be indeterminate - but they cannot be switched off.

So the systems builders expect a 'skilled sky god' to save the day when they find it too difficult to build automation to cope and their system fails. Their systems do not fail in a simple way but sometimes in unexpected and complex ways compounding the original problems and management, trusting the system providers who say how very safe their systems are start deskilling the pilots so there are no 'sky gods' available in the cockpit to pick up the bag of bolts.

This potential problem was foreseen long long ago. One of two things will have to happen, the systems builders clean up their act and build 100% fault tolerant systems that can cope with multiple sensor failures and never lose control and automate the pilot completely. This may happen sometime but on current showings the systems builders are not yet clever enough and couldn't afford the insurance. Or the industry starts ensuring the pilots can actually pick up the pieces WHEN the systems fail. This means very limited training in the routine and very intensive and extensive training in systems faults and LOC including live manual flying and LOC training.

I get the impression that at the moment heads are firmly in the sand they will need to be extracted.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 12:05
  #3249 (permalink)  
 
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Centaurus

I'd like to add that I'm in the sim next week - thanks for giving my sim bloke a brilliant new plan to mess my world up...
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 13:07
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Better at least to be messed up in the virtual world than the real . . . . . back in the day, there always seemed to be a bit of time left at the end to "try things". These days, unfortunately, the box- ticking seems to take up pretty much every session, shame, a bit of "out of the box" stuff was always valuable / eye-opening.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 15:54
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The analogy relating to business systems does hold - and in a surprising way.

Many companies have business continuity policies in place to be used in the event of a system failure while system repair/recovery takes place.

It is often a regulatory requirement in certain businesses and jurisdictions.

Plans are prepared and maintained and staff trained in what is needed in the event of a large failure. This takes up time and significant resources.

If other businesses can invest in their staff to enable them to manually keep things going in a system failure situation then surely it makes business sense as well as safety sense to do the same with pilots.

Medium to large businesses will also run full-scale disaster scenarios to ensure that as part of the recovery process, availability within a specified time can be assured.

Another significant investment of time and money in the business version of the Flight Sim.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 16:27
  #3252 (permalink)  
 
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Sorry the idea of continuity holds - but its not quite the same as banking cutover to a standby data center. A data center cutover is automated with redundant copies of the databases held at secondary sites. The system does a cut over then rollback out of the last few minutes then rollback forward and reapplies transactions and the users may get an initial issue at ATMs and online but normally only seconds. In a disaster recovery the system is far more extended and the business can afford an hour down while the recovery service comes in. Everyone is called out and everyone works to their script. The systems are designed to failover to the backups and indeed with all the fault tolerant machines I worked with the user doesn't notice any part of the system being crashed.

In the aircraft case the pilots have to pick up the aircraft in seconds and get it right first time without any external support. The system is actually designed to failover to the pilots. It is not a backup system or a remote FMS that picks up the pieces it is the flight crew. The crew are actually seen as the backup to the FMS and Autopilot. So to go back to your business analogy its as if the failover all works but nobody is bothering to keep the backup system updated or running and they've saved money by not paying a disaster recovery service.

This is not fair on the flight crews - they can be put into a position that they have sketchy knowledge of and zero practiced skill. As you roll fast inverted in the incipient spin with a dead engine on the inside is not the time to start learning how to do a spin recovery in that aircraft type IMC on limited standby panel.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 17:04
  #3253 (permalink)  
 
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In the FMC and Autopilot software the way out of those nP problem areas has been for those systems to failover to the human pilot handing them the bag-of-bolts and expecting them to recover the situation that the automation could not.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to think that way. You could also add: “While overloading the $%^@ out them with aural/visual/tactile warnings that may be in error or inappropriate.”

A few tens of billions of transistors ridden by a million lines of code have thrown in the towel in the hope that a suited monkey with 85 billion neurons and 15 trillion synapses can do better... Unfortunately, a lot of mine are being used to tell the difference between various sorts of libation and to track attractive females. Not to mention run away from scary animals with big teeth.

Moving on, what separates the “old school” pilot from the “new” one in terms of their ability to recover from (or not even approach) UA/upsets? Did the previous generation of airframes flip on their backs every-now-and then to keep you in practice? Did people hand-fly 10hr sectors? Was there more UA/upset training? Or do some of today’s aircraft have a level of complexity in non-normal situations that would give Chuck Yeager difficulties unless he’d spent a few weeks with the FCOM in the sim? I’m not sure, hence all the “?”

Having automation that is very “modal” is OK up to a point but having modes that are hardly ever seen in real life and rarely practiced with causes problems to neural networks (that’s us) that have optimised their topography to deal with the input they get 99.99% of the time. If you want to know what that feels like, just try driving a car with your left foot on the accelerator and your right foot on the brake: it works while you are consciously controlling your muscles but as soon as your focus of attention turns elsewhere, say an obstacle suddenly appearing in front of you, it all goes wrong. Same as on of those trick bikes where the handlebar steering is reversed. You can’t retrain to proficiency by swapping over “LEFT” and “RIGHT” and issuing a notice to bike riders that this is now the case. Aircraft manufacturers and operators seem to think you can do just that...
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 19:03
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One well known Middle East carrier boasted that they had added one extra hour per year of manual handling. What a laugh that was. In other words extra safety measures that involve simulator training are seen as a unnecessary cost impost.

There are well known EU airlines who have reduced the common 4 x 4hrs per annum = 16hrs to 3 days <16hrs per annum. Guess why? and it's not to improve capability. Strict SOP's adherence will negate the need for skilful handling; yet what we are often talking about is skilful management of the situation. This could involve skilful use of automatics, or god forbid, skilful dexterity. "The future's dark, the future's................??" anybody's guess.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 20:53
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Look on the bright side, RAT.
You can always count on gravity to pull an aircraft back towards earth.
(Mis)Management can't do anything about that.
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Old 17th Feb 2015, 21:14
  #3256 (permalink)  
 
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Please Mr Airbus...do something about a system that will trim against a pilot in the case of partial or substantial upset.
Airbus auto trims with pilots inputs not against. If the automatics degrade then it leaves the trim as is. As far as I have read FAC never trims against pilots inputs. If you try and confuse auto trim by "whisk the mayo" then it will average the inputs. The problem with recent event appears to be recognizing when auto trim is on/off and not following procedures. When pilot takes control he/she needs to check all flight controls - there aren't that many - should take but a couple of seconds!

Last edited by xcitation; 17th Feb 2015 at 22:02.
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Old 18th Feb 2015, 02:52
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I have a feeling that this accident will become more puzzling once FDR available.
The plane left the normal law, that's clear.
Aircraft entered the stall and then probably a spiral dive that PF or something managed to reduce it to a developed stall.
We know that FDR and CVR recordings stopped moments before belly splash. Perhaps, THS was separated along with APU and recorders. Considering the relatively low damage of the wreckage, it is possible that THS broke at low speed, ie below the speed of maneuvering. Is this a case of induced oscillations that lead to extremely high aerodynamic loads on THS? Was there a battle between FAC trimming NU for low g factor versus PF trimming manually for speed recovery. Is this a cocktail of crashes of the big brother, AA + AF?
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Old 18th Feb 2015, 03:06
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_Phoenix

I've kept up with all the posts on this thread and the info in the media about this crash.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THE FDR AND CVR stopped before the belly splash (as you put it)?

The CVR and FDR haven't been released and I have seen nothing to indicate when the CVR and FDR stopped.

IF I have missed something, please let me know.

And if anyone else has something to add ,please let me know.
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Old 18th Feb 2015, 03:31
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@skyhighfallguy

https://ekliptika.wordpress.com/tag/airasia/
automatic translation from Indonesian:
"124 minutes were recorded on the CVR until the final seconds before the disaster. Revealed that in the last minute AirAsia flights QZ8501 not sound like a loud explosion and the sound of another explosion. There was only the communication in the cockpit, where the pilot and co-pilot struggled to control the aircraft until the final seconds.Given the explosion associated with aircraft electrical system that also supplies electrical power to the CVR and FDR. So when a short circuit occurs, cut off the electric current makes the CVR and the FDR stopped recording so that the sound boom will not be recorded"

Last edited by _Phoenix; 18th Feb 2015 at 03:59.
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Old 18th Feb 2015, 03:43
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Phoenix

thanks, but it sure doesn't sound official and it doesn't make much sense, granted I am but a poor American who insists on trying to understand English.

so, let's wait for something a bit more official and understandable.
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