Would the pro's mind taking a question from an SLF to aid his understanding?

Is the following a reasonable summary of what happened:-

To bring the FACs back online after having had their CBs pulled, it was necessary as well as re-setting the CBs to cycle their on-off switches. As the latter wasn't done, they didn't come back online and, absent both FACs, the a/c dropped from Normal to Alternate Law (i.e. fewer protections) and the A/P and A/T dropped out. This [what exactly and why?] caused a 2 degree deflection of the rudder which provoked a roll to the left which the FO (PF) didn't notice until it had got to 54 degrees. He responded with right and back stick, the latter to retrieve the altitude lost during the unprotected roll. Except he never seemed to release the backward pressure on the stick which caused the a/c to stall. It's possible the Capt realised the FO's error but, if he did, for some reason never affirmatively siezed control of the a/c from the FO who continued to apply back stick during the following 5 minutes until the a/c hit the water.

If that's roughly correct, then it looks to my untutored eye horrifyingly like AF447 repeating itself.

Also, is there an irony that the absence of an RTLU caused the loss of AA587 whereas the presence of one caused the loss of QZ8501?

There are times when we need to react in a very small number of seconds - e.g. big-time windshear on late finals. Then, if the PF doesn't react correctly, it may be a case of 'IHaveControl INPUT' as fast as you can say it.

This was not such a case.

After Kegworth, our response was training and procedural; identify and cross-check the failing engine and ensure the correct actions are taken.

After this, and AF447, maybe we need a more rigidly disciplined procedural approach to upset situations, stalls in particular. CRM! Cross-check and verify, verbally and clearly: what is our attitude? What is our airspeed? Have any systems failed? What are the correct inputs, make them, and confirm they have been made?

Such an approach may have avoided AF, and this accident; it would surely be better than the chaos and evident lack of comprehension or situational awareness evident from the CVRs of both incidents.

I believe Swiss and 100% are correct. Our modern world which includes cheap flights for all comes at a price - we will kill a few hundred every now and again. No part of the "system" we fly under can be absolved - including ATC with their pathetic noise maximisation procedures and prohibition of visual approaches. Everything we do is driven by cost - cheaper is perceived as being better. Our training is cut to the minimum prescribed, clowns in flight ops. departments prohibit things like manual flight and manual thrust and we spend our entire lives saving pennies. The same rot has moved into our technical departments. The clever little MBA whizz-kids have worked out how few spares we needs to carry and how little time we need to fix things so that engineers are nown under pressure to release aircraft they would prefer not to. And all of this is overseen by imbeciles like EASA (stress on the middle syllable).

We will have a kill a few more thousand and get the public really scared of flying cheaply before things will change.

PM

Playing devils advocate here, from a Indonesian DGAC/ transport ministry point of view. LCC in Indonesia have killed I think 169 people since starting up 15 years ago. In the mean time they have flown 100m+ trips that would otherwise been on ferries or long distance coaches.

32,000 Indonesians die on the roads every year, can't find ferry deaths, but a quick google search shows ferry accidents in recent years with death tolls of 250+. Continuing to encourage LCC growth is absolutely the right thing for DGAC to do, and has almost certainly saved a large number of lives.

The calculus will be different in the West, and I can understand why EU would ban many Indonesian carriers. But in Indonesia, they have been a huge overall win

Desesperating aviation !!! Desesperating systems' management !!!
 

I comply with jcjeant : How many deaths are needed ?
A shame for all our managers and regulators.
Rh

Pilots are the final safety net
 

What were the captains thinking for at least the previous year about repetitive faults? In Indonesia (and possibly elsewhere) do captains think it is OK to continue flying an aircraft that has ongoing flight control problems?

Let me provide possible answers to my questions, but I would also welcome other input.

• engineers will finally discover the malfunction with a permanent rectification
• there must be a repetitive faults register with a red flag showing
• it is not really a pilot matter
• I won't make waves or I might lose my job
• the company knows what it is doing
• they must surely be talking to Airbus about this problem by now
• this couldn't possibly contribute to an accident
• there have been many tech log entries. I don't need to add to the list of what is already well known to the company
• I couldn't possibly refuse to fly this aircraft. Executive and check pilots are continuing to fly it so it must be OK. How would it look if I refused?
• I am only a co-pilot. Would it be illegal for me to refuse to fly this aircraft?

The accident report didn't seem to address the above very important issues. How come the accident report fails to consider the individual actions that aircrew can take to save their own lives before the event?

Readers who don't currently have the fortitude to save their own lives, take note.

The AoA sensors worked correctly on AF447, the issue was with airspeed. The aircraft was so deeply stalled that the static port was angled in such a way that it was giving similar pressure readings as the pitot tube, not the static pressure. Because of this, airspeed was calculated at an incorrect and much lower value. The computers had a built in suppression of the stall warning at low airspeeds, so even though the AoA was extremely high, the stall warning did not chime.

Keep in mind the stall warning chimed for a minute or two until the aircraft was severely stalled. Had their been an AoA indicator in the cockpit, would they have paid anymore attention to it than the audible stall warning?

Ranger One:

Would either of these accidents happened in an equivalent Boeing? (Control columns vs. side sticks.)

Yes, and they have. NWA 6231 and Birgenair 301 are two examples.

Stop being an apologist for a system that is fatally flawed, again, Dozy. The NW prang was 40 years ago (when jets were pretty new), and the Birgenair was almost 20 years ago. To use them in this day and age to justify independent invisible side-sticks is ridiculous.

The fact of the matter is, if you can see the control column in your guts and the stall warning is hooting, you'll stand a far better chance of working out what's going on and takeover, or force the controls to the recovery position, if they are interconnected and plainly visible. End of story.

Geez, the captain doesn't even need to say "My Controls", he just does it and the FO would let go pronto.

As roulishollandais intimated, that's two. How many more will it take?

Capn Bloggs you have a blinkered view of independent invisible side-sticks. The Birgen Air had it did not allow them to In aviation it does not matter if it happened 20 years ago.

In AF447 and this Air Asia crash both crews caused the upset into the STALL the aircraft didn't. Training in a simulator will not improve it, the regulators need to ensure that all basic training includes stall and unusual attitude training where your little "pink b*m" is at threat if you do not get it right.

Actually No!
Boeings do not have alternate law with all of the ramifications of a poorly announced change of flight law that adds to the surprise factor.

Maybe Alternate law needs some rethinking of its implementation.:suspect:

STKPF/STKPC
 

I'm looking at blue graph STKPF (Sidestick Pitch First Officer) at page 51 and I wonder again... How is it possible for a fully qualified FO to pull-up like that, for long 3 minutes?
Also, it's interesting to notice, the correlation of these two graphs, red/blue. The blue one becomes constant (a line) about the same time as the sidestick of captain becomes active (red graph), as FO handed over the control, then he used his stick as a nice handle. Captain, consciously handled the stick, then there is no logic to order endlessly "Pull down". However, on page 60, 23:19:08 at last, he said "Pull Up".
Rather, the captain would order to FO to help him with trim wheel: "Roll down", but is difficult to imagine the THS position, as this graph has been omitted.

Groooan- here we go again
 

AirAsia Flight 8501’s pilots effectively wrestled each other at the A320 jet’s controls as they sought to fight off an electronics-system failure, said a report that recommended Airbus change its control sticks to resemble Boeing’s.

Report on AirAsia crash urges change to Airbus cockpit controls | The Seattle Times

AirAsia Flight 8501’s pilots effectively wrestled each other at the A320 jet’s controls as they sought to fight off an electronics-system failure, said a report that recommended Airbus change its control sticks to resemble Boeing’s.

By Herdaru Purnomo, Fathiya Dahrul
Yudith Ho

Goes on ....

Bloomberg News

So in a but shell a plane crashed because a pair of incompetant pilots couldn't fly straight and level for a few minutes without the auto pilot.

And the Indonesians claim instead that its a design flaw that causes the crash.

Amazing

Capn Bloggs; your contributions over time are well worth reading, but if I may, have you flown the A320 or A330 series aircraft? I do understand the strong disagreements regarding the Airbus design and the preference of many for traditional Boeing solutions, but having flown types from all four major manufacturers over a period of 35 years, I think only that when/if one knows one's airplane and adheres to the book, neither presents higher risk than the other. I welcome your thoughts on a thread we must keep reasonable and calm to proceed.

Unlike AF 447, the airspeed/ Mach indicators were fully functional. Having never flown an Airbus, but having thousands of hours in various aircraft, if I saw a nose pitch up attitude, decreasing airspeed and Mach number, and the aircraft was screaming stall, I would shove the nose down and increase thrust.

It boggles my mind that any pilot with the most rudimentary training would do anything else.

What am I missing here?

Having read the report, sadly I can see exactly how this whole event unrabbled a long time before the day of the accident.

Pilots seeking information from engineers about maintenance fault finding/re-setting things contry to the QRH? I have witnessed that before more than once.

Lots of lessons that can be learn from this accident.

I asked myself the question after reading the report, could this have happened to me? And the answer was yes......... If that's my honest opinion, I'm sure a lot of others would be of the same opinion.

Well actually Boeings are effectively in alternate law all the time! Of course it could happen on a Boeing see Turkish stalling the jet going into AMS. Another jet with nothing significantly wrong that pinged in. Then let's get to Colgan, not a Boeing but.... Oh and Asiana missing the runway in VFR.....

Airbus could fix this issue but someone will still find a way to crash them. My view is that the industry is poorly regulated and the minimum requirements set by ICAO are woeful but even worse than that not applied effectively by many of the CAAs out there.

This will sound like I am slamming the crew but actually it is just evidence of where we are at and the systematic failings that allow pilots to pass all the required checks but still not be able to fly. From what I have seen the same thing happens in other industries...medicine��. I am sure the Crew had Level 4+ English which was good enough to lead to "Pull down" rather than "I have control, let go of the fing stick." Sorry, stress or not communication was not up to scratch. I have seen many People with level 6 certificates that couldn't ask where the dunny is.

As to flying skill, good grief! 56 deg bank? an interesting instrument scan taking place I am sure, but certainly didn't involve the PFD. How a rudder travel limit fault, manual flying and a small altitude change leads to 11,000 ft/min is beyond me. Actually it isn't, it is symptomatic of the level of quality not just of the crew but the airline, regulator and training standards. This is not Swiss cheese it is a thin slice of heated Brie melting to oblivion when the AP fails.

Sorry if I offended but it really pisses me off that our industry is killing people in this way. What next a barrel roll due to hot coffee spilt on a knee.

Part of the problem is that technology is advancing faster than humans can advance. Hours in the logbook means nothing these days when operating these flying computers housed around an airframe.

Every time Apple do a software update is a massive challenge for me.

Says it all, really, FDMII, doesn't it. No, I've never flown an Airbus. If I do, not knowing what inputs the other seater is putting in would concern me. I have to work that out from what the aeroplane is doing; reactive management.

It concerned me enough to not bid the A330 even though I could have flown a better roster on that equipment.

Is this something new
 

Alternate law and the side stick as well as the Airbus controls have been around for at least 30 years! In the past 5 it seems there have been 2 fatal and several other similar instances. Has something changed in the technology or is it an endemic sign of improper training or less experience in the cockpit for similar mistakes to be made repeatedly?

That indeed is the question to ask. The fact that this time the pilots were quite experienced rules out that todays initial training of pilots is the major issue. The fact that they flew quite basic transport aircraft (e.g. the Fokker 27) for years shows that they should have known and did know all the basics. So what exactly has changed/erroded over the last 30 years that now screws up what worked before?

Given the CVR transcript has been so heavily censored, can an Airbus pilot clarify if the second CB required one of the pilots to leave his seat please ?

Even if so, he must have been able to resume it given the bilateral sidestick inputs.

I am just really blown away, after Air France, that pilots could not get out of a stall, and that the pilot in command did not take authority mentally and physically. This seems so basic.

How would he have been aware of the full nose up input of the right hand seat chap ? A small icon ?

Versus : a yoke hitting his balls !

To give a medical analogy, it is like a surgeon seeing a gushing major artery, and just putting a sucker on it for 5 minutes, allowing a patient to bleed out, rather than applying pressure or a clamp to arrest the problem ! Am I wrong to expect more of basic piloting skills ?

I enjoy the threads very much; thanks to all of you for your commentary.

having read the report i will be looking forward to the reply from airbus, i cannot believe the Indonesian DGCA are blaming the RUD TRV LIM as the main issue for the crash !
this crash was caused by a crew following non authorised reset procedures and then being incompetent to deal with the aircraft when it ended up in alternate law.
what was the point of all the training introduced after AF447--all they had to do was fly basic pitch /power whilst they worked out what was happening ----they should have been familiar with the QRH procedures for stall recovery.
why did the capt never push the RED take over PB !!

This was a minor technical issue which resulted in a total hull loss , the DGCA appears to have its own agenda.

No surprises there. Blaming the Captain, ex-airforce pilot would be humiliating one of their own. If you ever wanted to see a movie called 'How NOT to be a Pilot/ATC/Doctor/Insert whatever...' Indonesia is the place to go. Very entertaining to say the least.

It's a country in which 'Crashes get caused because it was will of the Almighty' is a perfectly legitimate excuse. No one is ever willing to be accountable for their own actions. You will find that aviation accident reports in Indonesia never put the blame onto a pilot especially if he/she is a local.

I have seen and heard two 737s joking on the radio how they landed after the cloud was below minimums but they just dropped an extra 100 or so feet and 'scud ran' the last 4 miles to the runway and this is considered normal ops in Indonesia.

Using a half cut and eaten watermelon on top of your head as a helmet while you ride your scooter is considered being safe in this place. Now tell me, how do you improve safety in a place like this.

Aussipax yes you can not reach FAC 2 CB whilst in a pilots seat.
(In fact I was once told that AB put all those cB's on the rear panel out of reach intensionaly so you could not reset them in flight)

And yet they didn't blame the French PF, which would have been quite a reasonable conclusion, I think.

Ice Pack
 

Exactly.

If it's a situation where someone is saying, "I once saw this done, let's give it a go", that's risky enough on the ground in an empty aircraft. Wicked to try that stunt for a non-lethal error warning in the air.

TriStar
Really?

Cpt Blogs just because an incident happened more than 20 years ago does not make it irrelevant.

Rather than could this happen on B rather than A, the question should be could thhis happen with yoke rather than side stick?
The answer is an emphatic yes.
Look at Colgan. Another case of the non lethal leading to lethal.

No one intentionally takes a civil aircraft on a normal flight close to the envelope. Therefore when their actions or the situation result in being close to a stall or actually stalled it takes them completely and utterly by surprise.
Whether the other pilot recognises the inappropriate response is a side issue. The real problem is that so many pilots react inappropriately in the first place and do not carry out the correct stall recovery procedure.
Training!

The CVR and FDR times on page 55 do not match up with those on page 57. Some of the facts that led up to this are missing and a more comprehensive CVR transcript might have been omitted because doing so wasn't "convenient."

If the PIC has left his seat to re-set the CB's surely this would have been picked up by the CAM mike, and probably also it would have been discussed.

What happened next, and why, is an entirely different matter, and one that training will have to address.

"If the PIC has left his seat to re-set the CB's surely this would have been picked up by the CAM mike, and probably also it would have been discussed."

It surprises me that someone has not commented on this before, I've seen comments that the PF was slow to react to the 56 degree left bank, but if the captain was busy sliding/falling around due to the increasing bank while out of his seat then maybe that explains why the FO didn't react, he may well have been looking back over his shoulder and thinking "Oh crap!"

Quote:
if I saw a nose pitch up attitude, decreasing airspeed and Mach number, and the aircraft was screaming stall, I would shove the nose down and increase thrust.*

Really? Increasing thrust in a nose high stall with underslung engines is only going to make things worse.

Detailed hypothesis.
P2 (handling pilot) is a Frenchie with 2,000 hrs. Check the AF447 accident report (http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090 ... 601.en.pdf), which has a similar P2.
These junior guys do not know how to fly. There is nowhere near enough real handling on their training courses.

Clearly neither of them expected the autopilot to trip out on pulling the second CB. It was nine seconds before they noticed the aircraft at 54 degrees left bank. Poor systems knowledge.
Wouldn't be surprised if one of them was completely out of seat operating the CB (panel is behind the crew),and the other was watching him or concentrating on the checklist
Handling pilot panicked, huge pitch input and bank all over the place.
Captain can't speak English - instructed P2 to "Pull Down". P2 responds to first word.
Later on, we get "Pull", "Pull down" and "Pull Up". At no point is there a "Push down"
The two pilots are opposing each other on the sticks, and the airbus takes the average (how stupid is that?!).
There is, of course, no cross-feedback like mechanical sticks - I bet the P2 was unaware the Captain was inputting.
At no point does the Captain state he is taking control verbally. He's reverted to type and, with a combination of single seat time and the Asian authority gradient, isn't communicating effectively to the P2.

Like AF447, this goes on for 3 and a half minutes plus.

Absolutely no one in the aviation system is going to admit the entire training process is abysmal, because they like the profits and this kind of thing happens rarely enough that the punters don't care, but that's the reality.

The aural stall warning is evidently ineffective. Would it be difficult to attach a shaker to the sidestick?

the first thing to go when overloaded, is hearing. An aural stall warning is ineffective and couples with the complex airbus computer FBW system is a recipe for disaster IMO.

No, the was no indication in the Colgan prang that the pilots were fighting each other with the controls (nor the 767 prangs). The FO sat there watching. Here, the FO was doing one thing and the captain was doing another. That would have been impossible with control columns. As for pressing the red button, in the heat of the moment, you fight the way you train. Perhaps the captain had never used it, so it was not an automatic response in a "startle" situation.

I don't agree. The FO had a career change at middle age and had only 2000-odd hours. If the majority of those were in an A320 "in the new world", he'd have probably 10 hours actual stick time, if that; liftoff to 500ft and 500ft to touchdown on the sectors he was pilot-"flying".

I disagree that there is anything wrong with the Stall warning. The P2 is doing what he has been (wrongly) told, and the Captain recognised the stall (from his stick movements) but never told the P2 to let go.

"Pull down"
The Captain probably thought the P2 was pushing down, because that's what he thought he'd told him to do. The P2, however, was pulling because that's what he thought he'd been told to do, and he probably thought the Captain was also pulling.

The initial stall is a pilot handling problem.
The continued stall is a language problem.

As many have concluded, this is a scary similar to the AF447 horror story.

Disclaimer: I am a concerned SLF with a huge interest in aviation.

What I do not see much is references to the weather. The report clearly states that the weather was not a contributing factor, but if you weigh in the weather conditions the similarities becomes even more awful.

1) Somewhat adverse weather in both cases.

2) A technical fault (in AF447 the probes -> unreliable airspeed, QZ had a rudder glitch)

3) which is not responded to according to SOP (seriously, resetting CBs inflight, that was a bad bad idea even before that Northwest plane without flaps some years ago)

4) Neither technical fault should have had any adverse consequences had the crew followed SOPs.

5) Pilot Flying is the FO.

6) Capt is not situationally aware.

7) Noone has formal control of the airplane.

which tragically ends with...

8) So FO puts all his efforts into stalling the **** out of the plane as hard as you possibly can.

Now, how comes that two FOs can do such extreme harm to people and matter? Many are calling for extended training, and now I wonder: How much more training can you get? How many hours of "nose down, gain speed" do one person need to avoid or recover from a stall?

Here you have a FO with 2000+ hours. He should know how NOT to stall something, right? Yet he didn't. In AF447 the FO was a glider pilot during free time. He would have known tons about how NOT to stall the bird. Yet, when manure reached the air condition he goddarn sat on that side stick all the way into the drink.

So I would guess that there is more to it than just increased training. There is something going on that we might not yet see. It might have something to do with the side stick/yoke thing. I do not think we should dismiss that possibility. While there have been lots of stalling accidents with yoked airplanes, they have all included some kind of mechanical failure or, as in the Colgan case, extreme fatigue and/or flying in the circadian low. (Not counting Asiana here, that was very low altitude.)

As an SLF I find it troubling that people who, by all reasonable assumptions (flying hours, flying experience), should have the skills to... well, fly... they still don't. I don't believe that any of these FOs believed they weren't up to the task. I believe they did everything necessary to succeed and yet they failed so miserably.

So, can this happen to you who write here? Can you too one day end up in the big blue with the whole world condemning you for being a product of "p2f"? I think you could. So please, if you believe "more training" is what is needed, press your concerns with your airline. Be vigil, fly more in your free time. Challenge yourself with some home sim software. And be aware that maybe there is something we not yet know from these accident reports. The circumstances are soo soo similar, there must be something more than just "more pilot training" as a response.

-----------

What also concerns me is that two very similar accidents can happen. This tells me that the number of near misses must be reasonably large. Which is very unsettling.

On the airbus, stall warning is only encountered in alternate law, i.e. when the systems are already degraded by multiple failures. So stall warning is always preceded by other, unrelated, warnings calling for ECAM actions, and causing an unusual and stressful environment in which aural warnings tend to be ignored.