That was also the case in the 1990 crash of Indian Airlines 605, a dual-bogie A320 doing route training. Knobology issues led to an unstable approach without a timely go around.

so were are the tires marks?

I disagree. You say ‘pushing on’ but there may be a million reasons why this error wasn’t noticed; and consequently trapped at the appropriate gate. Swiss cheese and all.

I’m sure the PIC didn’t set off to work that morning with a explicit plan to disregard SOPs. It is incumbent on an airline to investigate why this gate might not have enabled the trapping of an error, rather than just fire the PIC involved. I’m not saying that in this case it’s excusable, but that it should be investigated fairly and a just culture applied rather than an immediate escalation to disciplinary proceedings and the assumed cover-up applied for the sake of the share price.

If you fire people based solely on the FDM, your crew will get very good at flying the FDM rather than the aircraft.

All we can say for certain at this stage is:

1. They were high and fast.
2. The approach was unstable.
3. The engines scraped the runway.
4. They became airborne again and tried for another approach.
5. They aircraft crashed.

Once the FDR is read we will know what the position of the landing gear was:

1. Selected up the whole time.
2. Selected down but did not extend.
3. Selected down but retracted too early before the aircraft was positively climbing away resulting in ground contact.
4. Which systems were lost and what was the aircraft state afterwards.

Crew actions seem to be the major factor here, and the CVR should prove vital in determining:

1. Were they aware of the height/distance situation in the first place ?
2. Was there a CRM breakdown ?
3. Were they aware that they had a damaged aircraft or if they had contacted the runway at all ?

I was questioning the location of critical components underneath the engine with the Sioux City DC10 in mind, a turbine failure managed to sever all the hydraulic lines due to them being concentrated in a small area. Standard military doctrine is to spread things out, be it soldiers not bunching up whilst on patrol or aircraft parked close together. Unfortunately it appears that aircraft engines don't offer too much freedom in this area.

Absolutely! They were tragically 1400 ft above the path therefore trying the “capture Above” the sound reported (din din din ) was not associated in my opinion to unsafe gear but to overspeed. Flaps auto retracted for load relief. Tunnel vision aural alarm at that point “too low gear” was another sound over the mess in which pilots behind the plane forget also they’re own name. The go around was the tragic mistake.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....8516bba4d.jpeg

But after a month or two of non-flying (if that was indeed the case yet to be determined), memory fades quickly. Not all SOPs or memory items remain in short term memory.

The only auto retract on the A320 is from CONFIG 1+F (slats + 1st stage) into CONFIG 1 (slats only) and generally occurs in turbulence after a max weight take off. Once you go beyond that stage you will be explaining the exceedance, and possibly damage as there is no further protection.

At 5nm from the threshold, any sane A320 crew would want to would want to be in at least flaps 2 with the gear down and a sensible speed, most would be more comfortable with flaps 3. Doing 250 kts the aircraft should be clean and even with speed brakes and configuring as soon as the speed fell below each limit there is no way you could be stable at 1000' even if you went for a flaps 3 landing. You might get it onto the runway and stopped if it was long enough but you could kiss goodbye to your job and probably your licence as well.

Those referring to a ”Just Culture” here, bear in mind it is not practised in some areas of the world. Pakistan being one!

Worth reviewing the 1996 gear up landing of Continental 1943. Gear horn blaring up until touchdown at 193 kts, no 3 green, GPWS chirping away, yada, yada, yada…

Never underestimate the capacity of the human being to ignore/block prominent visual and aural alerts when under stress.

If it was a factor, it would be considered contributory not causal, Mr investigator. His point is relevant. You might refer to the previous Air blue accident in 2013 where the report referred to same..( occurred during Ramadan)

IF you would be able to recognize and distinguish ’fresh’ tire marks,

they should have been way back, behind the position

from where the video of the engine scratch marks started.

learner . . . ;)

Interesting taught process and I am glad you brought it up. Highly relevant

The focus on engine component separation is 'engine to engine' isolation - i.e. any single mechanical failure will only affect one engine. Separation wise, this is mainly applied to cross engine debris - it's not possible to completely eliminate the risk (if that theoretical infinite energy 1/3 fan disc impacts the other engine, there isn't much you can do about it) - the emphasis is to minimize the risk.
I suppose one might argue that a wheels up landing is a 'single failure' - it would take multiple failures or mistakes to get there, with the further mistake of attempting a go-around after impacting the runway with the engines.
There is only so much the designers can do to protect against bad or suicidal piloting.

I appreciate/realise that. But I assume that FlightDetent wasn’t working in Pakistan.

Still, we must hold each operator up to/towards our own national standards. Just saying a lesser standard is acceptable because of local religious/political/cultural/(whatever loaded idealism you can think of) is not enough. We should all be aspiring to 100% safety. I realise the reality is different, but if FlightDetent is based in the west (which I assume he is), the the lack of a just culture at his airline is shameful.

If it's true that RW 07 was set up in there FMGS, therefore this would explain why they were above profile continually from the TOD after having being offered a straight in approach for 25

Re 'single failure'. Something to be said for the tri-jet engine configuration. Or small outer-rim permanently exposed load-bearing high-tolerance metal wheels (think Thrust/Bloodhound SSC) to obviate/ameliorate both engine strike in case of gear failure. For future consideration.

Both captains ? , where they both military and how many hours on the bus ? I read somewhere Airbus only new to airline . Taking a straight in when setup for overfly can take a few seconds to process before committing to it . Having to do a quick orbit on final when it did not quite work is sometimes required . ( I know as I’ve had to it and only good thing is it’s usually done in silence )

As there are no facts to work with aligning those two accidents - as yet - why are you leaping to this conclusion?
You don't start assigning causal or contributory factors unless you have evidence to support them.
Follow the evidence as you uncover it.
If - yes let's do this IF thing, shall we? - there had been a thunderstorm, there may have been other potential contributory causes.
If, if, if ... in a few days there may be more to work with.

Anything "exposed" that is capable of absorbing a wheels up landing while protecting the engines is going to have a huge weight and drag impact - which of course turns into a large fuel burn impact.
There are a lot of things that become doable when costs and fuel burn are not a consideration... Heck, we could go back to fixed gear - that would solve the problem...

Your post about culture got me thinking a bit here. One of the things about FOQUA and Metrics is what those tools incentivize. For example:
If your reward/punishment scale is "who uses the least fuel per mile" you will incentivize creative ways to either save fuel or appear to be saving fuel.
If your reward punishment scale is "who gets off on time and lands on time" you will incentivize creative ways to get to the gate on time.
If your reward punishment scale is "fewest complaints about firm landings" you will incentivize (perhaps) an extraordinary effort towards greasing one on ...

And so on. Which makes me wonder: what do this company's SOPs and rules and metrics incentivize? Did those incentives play into whatever it was that this crew did during this (apparently) routine flight from Point A to Point B?

Sometimes you can write a policy and discover, months later, maybe years later, that what people are doing to appear to be adhering to that policy isn't quite what you wanted them to do.
(I have a vague memory of a story about 727 pilots being clever with the flaps in flight from years ago that would illustrate that point, but can't find a reference at the moment).

The trouble is, those little wheels have got to support a huge potential weight and have to be fastened to something.

Built into the fuselage somehow?

I assumed you meant load bearing wheels under the pods. I'd given thought to such a thing, or skids, under the MAX 8 pods, but there's really nothing there to take the impact of a heavy landing, let alone a wheels up landing, however momentary. It's very exposed vulnerability, like heart and lungs under a wisp of a ribcage.

It will be interesting to know exactly what stopped the engines. Perhaps nothing more than bent pipes.

The whole gearbox is right near there, with a very high rpm drive shaft turning it. It may have disintegrated with the impacts.

That's precisely my point and one incident that I was referring to. Cultural issues are always raised in a negative context when a non-western incident occurs but rarely if ever when a western incident occurs.

Thanks tubby, editing on my phone so missed it ;)

I'm sure Peter Burkill would agree with you.

I don't see anyone saying a lesser standard is acceptable due to cultural differences, the problem is thinking that cultural differences by default result in lower safety standards. It's a simplistic way of looking at things.

You don't have the Sioux city lessons learned correct.

The hyd lines were separated apart but so were the high energy bits of the fan. It wasn't so much that the lines were completely severed but more to them bleeding out due to no check valves This stuff is now addressed in the cert rule advisory which also allows design leeway for the stuff Tdracer mentioned above

OK, we may learn something new in this accident, but I prefer to wait for the on-site reports

Inexperienced?
 

“With a 24-year experience in the airline industry, Gul had flown over 17,000 hours, including 4,700 hours of Airbus A320. He is survived by his wife and four children.” Extract from Khaleej Times. He seemed to be in his early 50’s

[QUOTE][Heck, we could go back to fixed gear - that would solve the problem.../QUOTE] Instead of piecemeal solutions the technology is moving towards removal of the elements itself that have too many limitations. They already have technology for one pilot aircraft. Not far from none pilot aircaft.

You are right, ATC does say turn left to 180, that's a wrong transcription on the video. That makes much more sense rather than a confusing attempt to request a left orbit.

In fact, that was a moment at which they could have halted the entire spiral into disaster. Had they simply complied with ATC's request, almost certainly they would have got back on top of the situation and it would have been a non event.

Yes, that's a correct reading of the schematic.

[QUOTE=vilas;10792530]The technology is there now, for no pilots. However it doesn't have much passenger appeal at present. After this, pilotless aircraft may have more appeal.

A pilotless a/c was flown direct, from the USA to Australia. Landed, refuelled and flew back home. No crew rest or preceived cultural imfluence either.

Reports are there is a preliminary report. Can anyone find a link to it?

How is that going to help, when on nearly all 'low wing' installations the engines extend well below the bottom of the fuselage? What you're proposing is not meaningfully different than the fixed landing gear arrangement that was abandoned for commercial transports ~80 years ago.
Better to figure out a way to keep the pilots from attempting wheels up landings. Since aural alerts can (and have been) be ignored, I keep thinking about an old James Bond movie: There was some 'game' that shocked the player when they were losing. Maybe we need a system like that - if the pilot is doing something really stupid such as landing wheels up or CFIT - it's starts shocking the PF to get their attention.

There is considerable controversy about this incident: It happened in 1979, TWA Flight 841, Hoot Gibson was the PF (I remember this because I met a different Hoot Gibson - Space Shuttle Astronaut - with the associated name confusion). Anyway, the story was you could get lower cruise drag/better fuel burn on a 727 by extending the trailing edge flaps - except to make it work you needed to disable the leading edge devices first. Allegedly, Hoot and company did this while the flight engineer was in the toilet - when he returned to the flight deck he noticed that the leading edge device CB's were out so he restored them. One side extended, the other side jammed due to the aero loads and the asymmetric lift rolled them into a dive. They were only able to recover when the extended leading edge ripped off. The controversy was (short story) that the flight crew claimed they were scapegoats - that the leading edge device extended uncommanded, while the official report basically says what I described.
It didn't help the flight crew's story when they erased the voice recorder after they landed :sad:

Are the engine cowlings on the A320 made of composite material? Is that why the scrape marks are black?

It's not a prelim, rather a 20 page PDF document put together by an insider of PIA stating a number of grievances and also pass accidents where management failed to respond to the lessons learned with the appropriate response.

You will find it shared on whatsapp

I have that one. As stated it has grievances but so did many Boeing employees so I wouldn’t discount it on those grounds! It’s very well put together as a timeline of the events unfolding. Looks like a perfectly serviceable plane until the runway contact.
Retired Guy