PIA A320 Crash Karachi

[FlightDetent]

Originally Posted by gums

Excuse me if I do not unnerstan the ROE here.

Fair call.

gums, any thoughts about the crashing technique?

Cactus 1549 was brought back down at full AoA limiter. PIA8303 seem to have stalled in. Approaching with a right circuit, topography suggests there were other choices available for a controlled crash-landing. The undershoot of 25R for instance.

Does your ilk receive any training in that apart from the ejector seat, which might be beneficial for the busdrivers among us?

[vilas]

The thinking process had stopped from the time they kept saying we are comfortable. There's a possibility that they never realized they landed on the Engines because why would they pull reverse? and they went around only because they had doubt about stopping. That's why they asked for another radar vector. Had they realized landing on Engines then they may not have gone around or if they did they would have asked for visual circuit and definitely made it to the runway.That's why perhaps they are involving the cabin crew about not informing them of landing without gear. Also their gear operations appear more like habit interference. First approach they raised it normally they would lower it. After GA they would raise it but lowered it and then realizing it put the lever up. More of mechanical actions that at this altitude gear status has to be changed. Lots of grey areas if they raised flaps it should go to 1+F. If Both engines failed then gear should have been lowered by gravity but there's no evidence of that.
And does ever a discussion take place after the full report is out because in the years that it takes the focus shifts to more recent ones. If report is going to take years it's useless because some more accidents could have taken place due to same causes.

[Goldenrivett]

I can usually come up with some bit of lateral thinking that would explain things, at least is someone's universe, but not for this.

Since the crew had selected the gear down early and declined ATC help suggests to me that they were indeed comfortable with their position. I wonder if they had done similar types of approach before? If the gear had remained down at the 5 mile point then perhaps we wouldn't be having this discussion and PIA's lack of data monitoring would have gone unnoticed for a lot longer. (see post 12 of "PIA banned from Europe" which shows EASA reason for the ban).

I suspect the gear was raised in error at 5 miles because PF normally called for gear at that point (learned reflex) and the PNF normally moved the gear lever. When the aircraft ceased to decelerate as expected, then confusion overloaded their last brain cell.

I'll wait for the CVR and accident report with interest.

[olster]

Gums you of all people surely understand a robust debrief. I believe that in the military a no holds barred approach is used where opinions are direct. Mistakes are admitted. Shortcomings acknowledged. How to make it better next time. Ok off to the bar.
This used to be how it worked in civil aviation until (picking my words) a more ‘sensitive’, no hurt feelings etc style , was introduced for a whole set of well documented reasons. So, let us say you were assessing this accident in the simulator without the inconvenience of all the lives lost. What would you say to every rule broken? Stabilised approach criteria busted by a mile. Going around after selection of reverse thrust? Those are definitely fail items! So the ROE are analysing all that without upsetting anyone.

By the way I really do enjoy your posts, amusing and to the point.

Cheers

[ATC Watcher]

There's a possibility that they never realized they landed on the Engines

I doubt anyone here has ever landed an A320 without gear , except perhaps in a sim , but having had this unfortunate experience on a GA aircraft , I can tell you you cannot miss it ,the lower than normal position on touch down , lack of suspension makes the actual landing quite harder , the faster deceleration with vibrations and the noise...
I realize the main gear on an A320 is not that much higher than the cowlings, but still with a few hundreds landing under the belt on the type you should notice the difference, OK, a hard landing can be the same as on wheels and not sure if the eventual pressurization remaining would suppress all that noise, but the vibrations caused by the scraping should be felt and the deceleration quite abnormal..So I doubt they did not notice..

[vilas]

I doubt anyone here has ever landed an A320 without gear , except perhaps in a sim , but having had this unfortunate experience on a GA aircraft , I can tell you you cannot miss it

The way this approach was flown so many warnings, visual staring in the face, audio warnings driving them deaf were ignored, there's absolutely nothing that one can say you cannot this or cannot that. Everything is in the realm of possibility. All posters by now know what happened but they are desperately trying to find some method in the madness. That's all.

[Clandestino]

Originally Posted by Airbubba

We must pretend that this could happen to any of us, low blood sugar, some warnings were inhibited, we must not judge from a Western cultural perspective etc.

Yeah! We need to throw away all the PCishness and ask ourselves the hard question: would the crew originally trained by the USAF ever be able to plonk their DC-9-32 N10556 onto the KIAH runway 27, gear up, at Vapp+61 kt and let it slide 6850 ft down the runway till it stops in the grass, 140 ft left of the runway centerline?

[vilas]

I'll wait for the CVR and accident report with interest

golden your patience will be tested for sure. Their last fatal was in 2016 report is not yet out. May be EASA ban will expedite matters in this case.

[farsouth]

Originally Posted by Clandestino

Yeah! We need to throw away all the PCishness and ask ourselves the hard question: would the crew originally trained by the USAF ever be able to plonk their DC-9-32 N10556 onto the KIAH runway 27, gear up, at Vapp+61 kt and let it slide 6850 ft down the runway till it stops in the grass, 140 ft left of the runway centerline?

Here’s a link to the report on the accident referred to above. A lot of similarities, and certainly shows that the PIA accident cannot only be blamed on a non-“Western cultural” mindset.

For those who don’t wish to read the whole Houston DC9 report, the Co-pilot (PF) realised the flaps had not deployed, and that they were way too fast, (but not that the gear was not down)

Five seconds after the captain rejected his go-around request by stating “no you’re alright,” the first officer said “I can’t slow it down here now.” The captain again stated “you’re alright,” and the first officer replied “we’re just smokin’ in here.”

The Co pilot three times suggested going around before the captain took control, and landed, gear-up, at 40kts above the flaps up vref, and >60kts above the vref for the selected flap setting.

Both ex-USAF pilots.


https://reports.aviation-safety.net/...C93_N10556.pdf

[Lonewolf_50]

Originally Posted by Clandestino

Yeah! We need to throw away all the PCishness and ask ourselves the hard question: would the crew originally trained by the USAF ever be able to plonk their DC-9-32 N10556 onto the KIAH runway 27, gear up, at Vapp+61 kt and let it slide 6850 ft down the runway till it stops in the grass, 140 ft left of the runway centerline?

Number of fatalities in that accident in 1996 was, let me check, oh, yes, here it is: 0
"Any landing that you can walk away from ..." (But I'll go with 'sometimes, better lucky than good' on that one)

The Co pilot three times suggested going around before the captain took control, and landed, gear-up,

One would hope that in the last quarter of a century, CRM has improved a bit at Continental.

Is learning from someone else's mistake acceptable, or must one make one's own mistake to learn the same lesson and then decide "Yeah, that could happen to me too"?
Answers on a post card, if you please.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Karachi, part 99

The strength of the international civil aviation system including the parts of it within the area of 'public international air law' derives in major part from the sovereign capacity of each country to work through official processes as it best sees fit - in this instance the Annex 13 official AAIB report of course. But a weakness of that same international civil aviation system derives from that sovereign and independent capacity - it's not actually too realistic to expect someone in a position of authority to pick up a phone to call somebody in Pakistan and put a boot in a backside to get the report done in a lot less time (and still done properly). As I have said earlier there really isn't much imagination required for the system (as described above) to lose its virginity and have a subgroup of the AAIB under Annex 13 plus a select few professional people (like, huh, hey about EASA, they're sort of interested already, no?) join in, and hear the entire CVR output. Not public dissemination, but whose important stake in civil aviation safety globally could possibly suffer if the preliminary report is supplemented with some significant additional information from that evidently critically important CVR output??

With the speed with which places like forum threads dig into accident facts as they emerge and yield up a great many insights even as just based on partial information, one would think the investigation process cannot stay in slow motion. I'm an SLF certainly but I've traveled by air since I was less than 2 years of age (that's a fact) and something like this accident which sends pro pilots scratching their heads in bewildered or at least quite puzzled concern is not the norm, not even close. So the post by vilas about not waiting, I'm on that bandwidth.

And as for Goldenrivetts postulating a wrong-directional push of the gear lever, based on a routine call-out having been made despite that call-out having been obviated by previous action (if I read that post right), if that is what turns out to have occurred, well it'll be a case of aviator daydreaming or sleepwalking. This is not a matter of cultural factors but it is a matter of whether you're playing in a realm where rigor counts or it does not.

(And Toulouse says nothing about an aircraft issue, that speaks volumes, does it not?)
WillowRun 6-3

[gums]

Thank you, Olster. And good stuff from vilas ( 95% of the time, LOL). And point taken Detent.

My goal was to get over to the tech log and talk about the profile and the gear logic. Someplace it was mentioned that you couldn't lower the gear above "xxx" knots, and I unnerstan that. But then what happens when it's down and you exceed "xxx" knots? Does HAL raise the gear?

Simple question, but instead the thread was deleted and over here with armchair aviation afficianodos and a few real pilots/crew we still keep harping on ethnic and cultural crapola. I know that those elements of the bidness can play a role in accidents and just as well as super airmanship. I would prefer the cultural stuff to stay here and get the technical stuff over on the technical forum.

As far as the military debriefs go, the first 737 crash would not have happened in any unit I ever flew with if we flew that type. Good friggin' grief. To fly a leg with the shaker going and turning off stuff to fly completely manual ( glad those folks could do it for the sake of the SLF riding behind them), and then not putting that into the maintenance log? BEAM ME UP!!! Whenever we had a strange thing happen we talked about it. We also spared no feelings when debriefing the sorry performance of any of us. No room for a thin skin or PC stuff, none.

@detent We indeed have a few "light" types that have ditching or dead stick procedures - very few. I only flew three with the dead stick procedure and did it for real one day. We also had procedures for landing with partial gear down. I would have had no qualms about setting down the Viper in the weeds, but a water ditch would be very problematic due to the intake position. The A-37 could easily be set down on most corn fields/ rivers and you could walk away. In any case, I appreciate the "heavy" folks that don't have the nylon letdown that I had for so many years.

[Lonewolf_50]

Originally Posted by gums

My goal was to get over to the tech log and talk about the profile and the gear logic. Someplace it was mentioned that you couldn't lower the gear above "xxx" knots, and I unnerstan that. But then what happens when it's down and you exceed "xxx" knots? Does HAL raise the gear?

That was discussed in this thread a few dozen pages ago, and I think that the consensus was 'no' (and IIRC the rationale was 'it would damage the gear doors if the system did that at speeds in excess of the limits from the manual ...). Go back about a week or two in posts and I think you'll find the discussion on that. Starts at around page 28, something about a logic gate based on IAS of 260 knots.

Simple question, but instead the thread was deleted and over here with armchair aviation afficianodos and a few real pilots/crew we still keep harping on ethnic and cultural crapola. .

I think that part of Clandestino's point was that an unhealthy cockpit gradient can happen anywhere.

[Airbubba]

Originally Posted by farsouth

The Co pilot three times suggested going around before the captain took control, and landed, gear-up, at 40kts above the flaps up vref, and >60kts above the vref for the selected flap setting.

Both ex-USAF pilots.

And the captain was a former FAA Air Safety Inspector. 'Watch this...'

[FlightDetent]

L/G won't come down above certain speed, due to hydraulic being de-powered.

If the wheels are out, and you dive above V(lo), the hydraulics will at best cut off again. No autoretract fitted, let alone a gravity one. 😊

[vilas]

Auto retraction simply not possible and even the concept is illogical. VLE is 280kt. retraction speed is 220kts. If it doesn't allow you to lower beyond 260kt. why will it retract?

[gums]

Good point(s), Vilas.

My concern was that HAL may have retracted the gear on the initial approach attempt with no pilot action. e.g. they had gear down but then speeded up above "xxx" knots. I don't know of any plane that lets HAL retract the gear without a pilot command, but there some that do not send the gear handle signals to the hydraulics without a signal from the WoW switch, huh? Sorry I have not seen all the plots of data from the FDR, and lost the FCOM I had downloaded back in 447 days.

I still would still like to see this discussion on the Tech Log and let the management and other stuff stay here.

[FlightDetent]

Vilas, we're saying the same thing.

gums, the A320 is a very conventional design, no HAL. Although the FBW has hard limits at the envelope's edges.

The raising of the gear and retraction of speed-brakes at 5 NM on the first approach, is consistent with crew wanting to put the gear down but not realizing it already was. So the handle was just moved the other way.
The G/A gear flick DN and UP identically so.

It has happened before (*). If it was not for the overspeed clacker, they would hear and see the ECAM warning. If it was not for the high speed, the GPWS would have told them as well.

[ferry pilot]

This was an approach like no other, but it must have been carried out that way for some reason. No matter how pointless it appears to have been, it was not pointless to the pilot. Or the first officer so it seems.
There has been much discussion on this forum about the gear, and what would happen in the case of overspeed and gear selection.
If you were not sure what the gear would do, you could try cycling it at high speed. With a long enough runway and a compliant copilot, why not try it and see what happens? Why not indeed.
This accident makes no sense whatsoever except for this. If an attempt was being made to settle an argument regarding gear selection and overspeed limits, it is not so strange at all.

[gums]

Sorry, Detent, but that dog won't hunt.

the A320 is a very conventional design, no HAL. Although the FBW has hard limits at the envelope's edges.

I am more familiar with the 330 due to the 447 discussions some years back, but your FBW has a lot more modes and submodes and "shaping" algorithms of control surface movement and rates than so-called "protection" at the edges of the envelope. e.g. bank angle and other limits vary according to which "alternate:" law you are in until "direct".

The raising of the gear and retraction of speed-brakes at 5 NM on the first approach, is consistent with crew wanting to put the gear down but not realizing it already was. So the handle was just moved the other way.The G/A gear flick DN and UP identically so.

My diagrams of the instrument panel seem to show a handle and adjacent indicator just above the center pedestal. Clearly marked "up" and "down". So your last minute checks don't involve touching or visually verifying the position and the lights?

If it was not for the high speed, the GPWS would have told them as well.

I thot HAL knew if gear was down for a landing and the FBW was switching into the "flare" mode at "x" altitude above the ground/runway. So can I perform CFIT by just getting above "x" speed with gear up? Somehow, I thot GPWS/HAL would have said something. "Dave? Sure you wanna try this?" I gotta admit they "greased it on", but maybe that was because they were not in "flare" mode, which seems to be almost pure "direct" law with "heavier" pitch command deflection.

Oh well, back to the Tech Log.....