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Silk Air MI 185

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Old 28th Jun 2003, 13:09
  #101 (permalink)  
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56P, not all investigators were unwilling to admit it.
At least one investigator refused to submit to the interference in the investigation.

He now works somewhere else
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Old 28th Jun 2003, 16:41
  #102 (permalink)  
 
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I am a bit late onto this post but have been away at the Paris Air Show.
As the person who first broke the story that the accident was caused by intentional pilot action I would like to add some comments.

1. I too was badgered by lawyers who tried to insist that it was rudder hard over and told me I had no idea what I was talking about. This was just after I broke the story in Aviation Week a month or so after the accident.
2. I am one of the very few who has seen the radar plot of the 737 and it is a tight almost vertical descent totally inconsistent with two pilots fighting to regain control. Remember Tsu was the leader of the Singapore Aerobatics team and if anyone could regain control of a rouge aircraft he could. And the high speed of the descent is also totally inconsistent with an aircraft that is tumbling from a rudder hard over.
3. While no investigative body is perfect the NTSB's report on Diran's final report is compelling reading. If you subscribe to mathamatic probability THERE IS JUST NO WAY it can not be anything else but a pilot/human induced accident.
4. David's actions in joining the suit against Boeing I know are motivated at finding the truth becuase it certainly didn't come from Indonesia in the final report.
Best GT
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Old 28th Jun 2003, 18:40
  #103 (permalink)  
 
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GT,

some of the ramblings by people who still think it was ANYTHING other than Pilot suicide, makes us wonder if they are real.

they sound like the so called "French" expert who testified in the Singapore court. Didn't he say that " he and his co-pilot got the fright of their life when they were given pressurisation failure in the SIMULATOR"!!!! Whoever has heard of a pressurised simulator
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Old 28th Jun 2003, 21:04
  #104 (permalink)  
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Wasn't there some reputed correlation between the date that MI85 crashed and that of the aerobatic team to which Tsu belonged, Tsu allegedly being the sole survivor of the team's crash?

I feel very much for you, Crockett, as the apparent cause of this crash should have been recognised and removed.
As a pilot who was not in any way connected with the passengers, crew, or company involved, I have had the scenario of this "accident" play through my mind on many occasions, and hold nothing but total contempt for the selfish actions of something less than a human being.

"Closure" would seem to be what you are searching for, Crockett, and from your posts it would appear that you are searching for ANYTHING other than that which has been so poignantly presented as the probable real cause, by those who were closest and privvy to information not available/disclosed for "public consumption", in spite of 1 or 2 individuals' attempts to introduce red herrings.
Unfortunately, I believe that if the closure you seek is dependant upon finding an aircraft malfunction over which the crew had no control, then you will never find it.
But by the same token, I - and I believe that that goes for most all who have posted on this thread - can also understand why you WILL keep searching.
"That which the HEART has held can never be lost."
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Old 28th Jun 2003, 23:29
  #105 (permalink)  
 
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Silk Air MI 185

Obviously the majority are convinced this accident was a pilot suicide, along with Egypt Air 990. Don't forget the Royal Maroc ATR 42 in the Morroco area.

It does seem that we have an epidemic of suicidal pilots.

NW 705 was also a pilot induced pitch over into a vertical dive, (The aircraft came apart in the air), The aircraft encountered a pitchup into a nose high attitude, in severe thunderstorm activity and the piot trimmed the stabilizer to a full nose down position. Both vertical gyro's nose down stops indicated severe impact damage from a rapid rotation of the aircraft about its center of gravity.

Read NW Capt. Paul Soderlind's Flight Standard Bulletin FSB 3-65. entitled "Operation in Turbulence" and FSB 8-63 "Jet Turbulence Penetration", to discover how your flight instruments lie to you in turbulence. Paul received 8 awards for his contributations to flight safety. ( He developed the airspeed bug system and the turbulence plot.) Paul died in December 2000.

Until pilots are trained to ignore these erroneous flight instrument indications and rely exclusively on the artificial horizon, in turbulence, we will continue to experience these types of accidents.

In the COPA accident over Tucuti, Panama, when they put the FDR readings thru the computer, the Boeing engineers stated that the aircraft could not have possibly performed these manoevers.!
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Old 29th Jun 2003, 10:12
  #106 (permalink)  
 
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wsherif1 In Silkair 185's case we are talking about tropical latitudes, Dude. Around the equator we don't have jetstreams and most of the time winds are light easterlies (around 20to 30 knots at FL 350), so SEVERE CAT which could lead to loss of control would be a bit hard to find.

Sorry, Dude, and it wasn't a standing mountain wave, either... It was murder, if you ask me.
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Old 29th Jun 2003, 11:10
  #107 (permalink)  
 
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Kaptin M.
Without searching through my files for exact date...yes you are right it was an anniversary.
The interesting part was that some parties to the investigating team denied it until we, (the media), were able to turn up the Straits Times articles that referred to it. Dianne Brady from the Asian Wall Street Journal broke that element of the story.
Re Clear Air/Thunderstorm: We looked at that for a month or so and were even able to get a satellite image of the weather almost to the hour of the accident but this appeared to show nothing. We understood that weather was not a factor. Besides a rudder upset or a turbulence upset are simply not consistent with the radar descent profile which Diran showed my by accident.
I think in all this debate what struck me were the Indonesian's absolutely pathetic explanations for the CVR and DFDR disconnects, which the NTSB ridiculed .
Remember the Indonesian interim report said human factors were to blame.
Best GT
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Old 29th Jun 2003, 11:37
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GT

you are being polite when you say " human factors"

Diran announced in a press conference in July or August 1999 that it was " Unlawful Human Intervention" that caused the crash. Of course, he changed his story a few years later ( and a few m.. dollars perhaps)

Tsu way Ming was leading a formation flight out of Subic Bay on 19/12/1979. His aircraft developed engine trouble at take off point, and he returned to the bay. The other three flew into a mountain and were killed.
19th December 1997 was an anniversary day!!
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Old 29th Jun 2003, 12:59
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Burger Thing.

Your quote:

"In Silkair 185's case we are talking about tropical latitudes, Dude. Around the equator we don't have jetstreams and most of the time winds are light easterlies (around 20to 30 knots at FL 350), so SEVERE CAT which could lead to loss of control would be a bit hard to find.

Sorry, Dude, and it wasn't a standing mountain wave, either... It was murder, if you ask me."

In smooth air conditions wake turbulence persists for extended periods of time. (Dr. AA Wray of NASA affirms.) It doesn't take much wind shear across the openings of the pitot-static ports to affect the altimeter. rate of climb and the airspeed indicator.

A smooth air mass, while enjoyable to fly in is, at times, more of a threat than rough air conditions. e.g. TWA 800
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Old 29th Jun 2003, 22:17
  #110 (permalink)  
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Welcome to the conversation GT..

I hope you will cover the story if and when it goes to court in the USA... You know where I am coming from....

Kaptim M....Your last quote is very nice..Thank you...I will keep searching because I have to... I just do not want it to be forgotten until the truth is truly public...Whatever the cause of the crash and there are obviously a few different opinions....???

Trusting that all who read this understand...It is not about the money... because I can assure you...there ain't gonna be very much anyway...In any event..how caN YOU PUT A $$$$$ value on life anyway.

For those who know me...you know I speak the truth..

Last edited by Crockett; 30th Jun 2003 at 07:17.
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Old 30th Jun 2003, 07:32
  #111 (permalink)  
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wsherif1 and others

GT is correct. The flight path as per the radar plots can only be followed by consistent and controlled pilot input. I've done it in the simulator and I found it to be not an easy manoeuvre, despite my 10+ years T & C experience on the type. It's certainly NOT a trajectory caused by structural failure or incorrect pilot reaction to any type of upset. The constraints of height lost Vs time elapsed Vs horizontal distance travelled are plainly and obviously too great. Unless you have seen the plots and tried to fly it, you simply have no idea.

Add to that the manual tripping of the relevant DFDR and CVR CBs and lack of distress call with no 7700 on the Tx as well as the other latent factors in this case and the real situation emerges.

Perhaps, you might obtain a clearer picture of this whole tragic scenario by viewing (if you haven't already done so) a copy of the "Assignment" documentary on the subject. The info presented on that program by GT and others was as accurate as you can get - you'll have to take my word for that!
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 08:47
  #112 (permalink)  
 
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Tripper & others,

In a previous post I said,

Until pilots are trained to ignore these erroneous flight instrument indications and rely exclusively on the artificial horizon, in turbulence, we will continue to experience these same types of PIO acciidents!

Now it is CHINA AIRLINES FLIGHT 611.!!! And so it continues.

Last edited by wsherif1; 1st Jul 2003 at 14:21.
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 10:30
  #113 (permalink)  
 
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wsherif1

read the COMPLETE NTSB report

THERE WAS NO TURBULENCE OR WX. IN THAT REGION

THE CVR STOPPED RECORDING WELL BEFORE THE POINT 185 LEFT FL 350

THE DFDR STOPPED A GOOD MINUTE AND A HALF BEFORE 185 LEFT FL 350

THERE WAS NO PITCH UP

read the other postings by 56P and Casper. This aircraft was deliberately flown into the ground ( or should I say bottom of the river)
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 14:29
  #114 (permalink)  
 
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wsherif1, with the greatest respect, in illustrating your undoubted theoretical knowledge of what you write, you are merely showing your total practical ignorance of the same subject. You come across as a lawyer – and there is no implied insult in that; in fact, quite the opposite.

Like any good lawyer, you seem to have studied your brief exhaustively, searching though textbooks, (or more likely, the Internet), for (selective) evidence to support your client’s case. Your findings would quite likely ‘blow a jury out of the water’, impressing them no end and quite possibly swaying them to find in your client’s favour. However, those same tactics simply don’t cut any ice with this audience, who know the subject in which you profess to be an expert intimately.

Here’s something you don’t appear to know – (and one which I assume you’d be able to confirm through Google in about five minutes) – pilots are trained to follow the attitude indicator, (or ‘artificial horizon’, as you quaintly call it), and not the performance instruments, from their very first lesson in instrument flight. As an ex IF instructor, I can assure you that the importance of not following performance instruments, particularly in turbulence, is stressed from Day One.

If you’ve been employed by Singapore Airlines or one of their subsidiaries to swing the spotlight of blame away from the captain in this terrible business, I can only suggest that you’ll earn your money to far greater effect if you concentrate in making your highly selective expert opinions to people who can’t see through them in an instant, as any professional pilot can.

If I’m totally incorrect in my suspicions of your professional background, could I suggest that you try what quite a few of the people who’ve written in on this subject have done? Get yourself in a simulator, (it doesn’t have to be a B737 – virtually any commercial passenger jet sim would suffice). Leave the motion off, (or you’ll probably damage the hydraulic stops) – and try to put the sim into the situation you so expertly describe by mishandling it due to faulty performance instrument readings. (Performance instruments, just in case you’re not aware of the fact, are the airspeed, altitude and vertical speed indicator whose erroneous readouts you blame for the pilot’s/pilots’ mishandling of MI185.)

Hit your stop watch as you start the exercise. You might be surprised how long it takes an ‘out of control’ jet to ‘plummet’ 35,000 feet – or seven miles vertically down – even a ‘totally out of control’ jet, even if it is 50 or 100 knots about its ‘red line’ speed.

Also ask the sim tech to give you a printout of the path your cyber jet traces over the cyber sky as you attempt to follow the erroneous instruments. It will quite likely be pretty erratic – but I can guarantee it won’t be vertically down unless you push the two funny little rocker switches on the yoke fully forward and hold them fully forward for something like ten or twelve seconds and then push the yoke forward as hard as you can all the way down until you hit the cyber earth.

And believe me, thanks to some physical laws called aerodynamics, it won’t be easy holding the cyber aircraft in that very unusual attitude, particularly if you leave the thrust levers fully forward as you attempt to carry out this extraordinary manoeuvre.

After you’ve completed this exercise, you might then give some thought to the mathematical probabilities of the CVR and the DFR circuit breakers both tripping of their own accord a minute or two before the aircraft entered the turbulence that caused the performance instruments’ erroneous readouts. Also the fact that, if you are correct in your surmise about this turbulence, why commercial aircraft aren’t falling out of the sky daily due to it.
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 15:46
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Wiley,

Your comment.

"Also the fact that, if you are correct in your surmise about this turbulence, why commercial aircraft aren’t falling out of the sky daily due to it."

Not daily, but more often then we should accept.

TWA 800, (breakup from wake turbulence, prior to explosion), EgyptAir 990, (not a suicide), United 585, (Not a rudder problem), USAir 427, (Not a rudder problem), NW 705, (PIO out of weather turbulence) COPA 185, (PIO), China Fight 611, PIO out of wake turbulence, Royal Air Maroc ATR 42 PIO (Erroneous flight instrument Indications.) Eastern DC8 (PIO false instrument readings Captain reversed engines to recover from dive), Eastern DC8 (PIO, same F/O year later!), United 826, PIO Clear air turbulence, (5 broken necks, 6 broken backs, 1 fatality) etc., etc.

No books, just personal experience.
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 16:22
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wsherif1,

though your postings say that you are from San Diego,CA but your responses seem to come when it is past midnight in that part of the world. I wonder if there is a San Diego near Malacca straits!!?
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Old 1st Jul 2003, 21:33
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No books, just personal experience.
From that comment, can I assume that you are telling us that I was wrong in thinking that you are not a professional aviator, wsherif1? If that’s the case, I’m surprised you didn’t pick the rest of my post to pieces with the same diligence as you took in dissecting my last paragraph, for I make some assertions that are completely at odds with instrument flying training as you appear to think it is conducted.
Until pilots are trained to ignore these erroneous flight instrument indications and rely exclusively on the artificial horizon…
I’d also like some evidence re your novel (and rather startling) conclusions on EgyptAir 990 and the Royal Air Maroc ATR42 ‘accidents’. The rest of the world seems to think that both of those crashes were also pilot suicides.

Geoffrey Thomas, here’s something you might like to pursue. On the subject of EgyptAir 990, it has always surprised me that no journalist looked again at that tragedy with the 20/20 hindsight that Sept 11th 2001 has given us all.

The Egyptians piously assured the world that the FO could not possibly have committed suicide as suicide went against Islamic teachings. September the 11th 2001 and countless Palestinian suicide bombers before and since the EgyptAir tragedy would seem to put paid to that theory pretty convincingly, but few seem to question the Egyptian claim.

Outside Egypt, most analysts, (but not wsherif1, it would seem), seem pretty convinced by the overwhelming evidence that the FO did indeed purposely destroy the aircraft and kill all on board. Is it possible that the First Officer was made ‘an offer he couldn’t refuse’ by Al Qaeda or some similar shadowy organisation, threatening his family with death if that aircraft arrived at its destination? The IRA used very similar tactics on occasion to some effect in N.I., forcing unwilling drivers to ram police and army checkpoints with bomb-laden cars while they held the drivers’ families hostage.

Anyone coming up with this theory prior to Sept 11th 2001 would have been branded a crazy conspiracy theorist. I don’t think too many would find it so hard to believe now.

And sorry, mate, but in listing all the accidents you did in your last post, you still seem to me to be someone who’s learnt all you know about this very involved subject from books rather than from hands-on experience. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be making the assertions you did about the need for re-training in instrument flight techniques. “Power + Attitude = Performance” is a sign that was displayed prominently on my instructor’s cubicle wall and later on my cubicle wall when I was instructing – and I think you’ll find the same would apply for about 90% of instrument flying instructors over the last sixty years.

What the books and websites you’re reading may really be saying is that perhaps some pilots today - particularly those who go into large airliners with around 200 hours total time after graduating from airline cadet schemes – may be relying far to much on automatics in their day to day operations, to the extent that some may be losing the skills and instrument flying techniques they may be called upon to use at a moment’s notice in a situation like those you are quoting with gay abandon.

But the fact remains that this is totally off the subject of this thread – MI 185 could not have manoeuvered anywhere near the profile it did after leaving its cruising altitude had a pilot, be he inexperienced or not, been attempting to regain control after somehow losing said control for whatever reason.

It may come as a surprise to some that probably one of the most effective ways to recover from an unusual attitude, if you are high enough to suffer a substantial height loss without hitting a cumulo granitis cloud, is to do absolutely nothing. The aircraft is trimmed for the speed you were at when encountering the upset and it will seek to recover to that same speed, flying more or less straight and level – and not almost 90 degrees straight down and supersonic as MI 185 did.
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Old 2nd Jul 2003, 01:32
  #118 (permalink)  
 
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Wiley,

Your comment,

"Outside Egypt, most analysts, (but not wsherif1, it would seem), seem pretty convinced by the overwhelming evidence that the FO did indeed purposely destroy the aircraft and kill all on board."

Your overwhelming evidence, once again, is an illustration of the NTSB's incompetence, or deliberate coverup of the true facts. The NTSB's statement that the pilots were fighting for control of the aircraft evidenced by the elevators being split, with the co-pilot
holding down pressure on the right elevator and the captain holding up pressure on the left control, is not true!

The FDR readout clearly shows that the elevators were perfectly matched until the aircraft reaches 0.99 Mach! The controls are now subject to buffeting and the aircraft is byond recovery.

The thumps and the clicks of the stabilizer trim system, reacting to the wake turbulence of the many aircraft in the area, as depicted on the track plots, is practically ignored.

There is an uncommanded roll and the co-pilot exclaims, "Control It." prior to his first prayer.

There are many sounds recorded on the CVR indicating the amount of wake turbulence i n the area.

Again we have a pilot instinctively reacting to erroneous flight instrument indications, due to wind shear in wake turbulence!
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Old 2nd Jul 2003, 02:21
  #119 (permalink)  
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Great debating technique, wsherif1 (or should that be “wsherif1-la”?), but I notice you’re carefully avoiding Wiley’s question about MI185’s near vertical descent.

Please explain how the 35,000’ tropical ‘wind shear’ did that.
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Old 2nd Jul 2003, 03:20
  #120 (permalink)  
 
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Any ideas as to when Digital Cameras will finally make it onto Commercial Aircraft.

I know the majority of pilots are against, just as when CVR's were first introduced. But really, the time and technology has come to make flying safer, at very little cost.

It will also stop the conspiracy thoerists, or stop the people who cause the things that the conspiracy theorists believe.

If we had a tail mounted camera and a cockpit camera, all would have been revealed. Even if they were turned off, we could at least have seen the pilots turning them off.
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