This is the same company that diverted from MAN to LHR because the clever box thought 23R was too short. Says a lot about the culture there.

It baffles me that we've gotten to a point where blindly following the FD's have overridden basic flying skills.

Maybe fatigue played a role in this, but surely how is it possible that none of the pilots noticed the end of the runway coming up?

Children of the Magenta

By now we are seeing the grandchildren of the magenta.

The children of the Flight Director.

The real question is will we ever know the answer?

Are authorities in the Emirate likely to investigate?

They will investigate. They just won’t publish.

Flight of the Navigation Director.

It's not an open or democratic country but it's aviation investigation branch did deliver a credible, reasonable report into the EK 521 crash (the idle thrust go around).
I understand there is no shortage of SOPS in EK. Once the button pressing has been figured out the real issue is the safety culture and training. If pilots are just flying the QAR and petrified to correct any automatic system or call out that's clesrly wrong then something has to change. Not that it will.

just asking
 

Hi,
I read about Children of Magenta, of Flight Directors not beeing followed....
How about assuming that the 4 (!) pilots have a basic sense of self preservation and tried their utmost to get airborne as they had on many other occasions, undoubtedly....

but they couldn´t ....

because something didn´t work as it normally would ? Something - don´t know what´- might have been mechanically wrong, or blocked , or whatever ?
Think 737-MAX.
??

.

The problem with that theory is, that they then flew an aircraft that was not working properly all the way to Washington?

Best advice ever - Flight ‘Suggesters’ notFlight ‘Directors’

It's quite astonishing that in 2022 we have a situation where Boeing aircraft automation is so poorly understood that it leads to both real and near disasters in a way that Airbus aircraft have never. Yet Airbus took the flack for many years for building overly automated aircraft. Having the FD point at the ground when radar altitude is less than 100ft in the takeoff regime (regardless of the MCP setting) is an example of 20th century avionics engineering that needs to change immediately. It's a completely nonsense command.

Hence "look through" the flight director, or even more revolutionary "look outside"

I currently fly a Boeing “classic”, and given the training, flying and access to all the relevant manuals - my sense is that traditionally, Boeing has designed its planes with the assumption that pilots will have the appropriate skills to deal with almost any scenario.

Perhaps that assumption needs to be re-evaluated ?

Not flown Airbus, so can’t comment (would like to though, for comparison!)

Hopefully the report when published will prove informative.

We tried this in a 777 full motion sim a few days ago with altitude in the MCP set to 0000 to see if we could recreate it.

On the take off roll the FMAs read THR TOGA TOGA as usual.

We rotated to 14 degrees. The flight director was giving appropriate pitch demand during rotation and until just after lift off.

FMAs changed to THR LNAV ALT just after it got airborne.

The autopilot was engaged at 100' AGL, Normally it would be at 200 feet minimum but we were interested to see if automatics would make it worse.

With ALT engaged we would have expected the flight director demands to give a descent and take the plane down towards 0000. However it didn't.

After Alt capture It lowered the nose to about 7 degrees pitch up. This resulted in rapid acceleration and approached flap limiting speeds. However the flaps retracted just in time so THR remained constant.

During acceleration to flap up speed the plane climbed at about 300 feet per minute and reached 1100 feet and stayed there and did not descend or climb. It just stayed at 1100 feet in Alt Capture despite the 0000 in the MCP window.

So interesting and slightly different to what I would have expected. This was done at max landing weight so would have been much lighter than the real event.

Edit to add: Very interesting, suninmyeyes. So that points towards a malfunction on the EK jet?


@CW247: I agree. Having a flight director to show you how to pitch up to rotate.........is that really necessary? All you need is a pitch scale and a speed tape.

If so, I think that SIM recurrent training clearly needs to focus much more on the basics: pitch + power + instrumentation - NOT flight directors - because we are now seeing pilots making mistakes in both seats who don't have the many years flying on 'basic T' instrumentation on simple turbo-props that pilots used to have before getting onto the big jets.

How dark was it that way on that night? Somatogravic illusion? Mistake made, then subsequent flat acceleration felt like pitch up? Subsequent confusion and the error not picked as they thought they were climbing… I’ve been through DXB a few times in the dark, and with the ground lighting wouldn’t have thought it likely, but if both pilots had head down staring solely at their magenta lines like the pilot from the other major UAE airline in the YouTube video, who knows.

What I’m interested in, what did the GPWS do during all of this?

Even if it was dark, you can see when you pitch up, (your landing lights illuminate the runway ahead). You can feel that you have lifted off, you can hear that you have lifted off.

Plus, your PFD pitch scale shows you pitching up, and the altitude scale and V/S and Rad Alt, all show you climbing.

Maybe I should have been more verbose. The “mistake made” referred to the possible following of the FDs commanding level(ish) flight. Once that (sin) was done, maybe the illusion of climbing was created through the acceleration complicating an instantaneous pitch up recovery.

Secondly, the illusion may be present even with all that information in front of you. The information stops you succumbing to it.

You really need to look at Airbus accident reports.

What would a 777 do if the mcp was set
to 0000 and just before V1 the autopilot was engaged by a confused PM ? Not saying this happened . Would auto pilot engage ? Would flight directors maintain level flight ? How long to turn off auto pilot and rotate it including some startle factor ?

Torukmacto wrote With the autopilot engaged on the ground it feels like the controls have jammed. The software was changed after the Air France incident so that the autopilot cannot be engaged on the ground with the aircraft moving.

-.-.
Hmmm..... well, that would then be a rather questionable course of action . Taking a somehow not correctly working airplane up to high altitude and flying on ...
Would be only be reasonable if the issue had definitely and benignly been resolved. Can´t think of what that might be, however.

Ok, I guess it´s best to await the results of the investigation - if there is one.
?

Thanks for that ,

Sun I don't see how that 'test' proves anything? Where did the '1100' ft come from? Thrust reduction or accel alt in LNAV?

I don't think suninmyeyes is trying to "prove" anything. He/she is merely telling us that 'this is what we tried, and this was the result'. I certainly find that result to be interesting and illuminating, on it's own merits.

Thanks to suninmyeyes for trying it and reporting it here!

Ok - i'll re-phrase "Where did the '1100' ft come from?" For this to be of value, any 'random' alt acquire needs looking at, does it not?

DNF
 

Been on mine for years, along with the other 2.

42go. As stated above I was not trying to prove anything, I just wanted to see what happened in a similar scenario. I have no idea where the 1100 came from. It is possible the automatics did not want to descend below the programmed acceleration altitude or that somewhere in the brains of the AIMS there is some bit of intelligence that does not want the aircraft to descend in ALT to 0000.

There was no GPWS call out in the above simulation.

Reluctantly, and with no intention to scaremonger, I enquire as to whether the professional among us pundits have considered the 'unthinkable', as opposed to an inadvertent 'misuse of automatics' explanation.

I put forward no details of my thinking, just a suggestion that the Flight Data Management System will provide the analysis of all flight and engine control inputs throughout the delayed take-off and subsequent extreme low altitude/height climb-out.

It is the responsibility of the carrier and the UAE authorities to rapidly analyse and explain exactly what happened; the crew are alive and with us.. They too must contribute to the explanation.

I cannot honestly believe that this was a deliberate act of one person, nor technical sabotage, and yet fail to see how any professional crew could permit this to happen, and then continue the flight. Surely ATC must also have had this departure flagged and analysed? They too must have reported the incident. Perhaps a wall of silence has been constructed and enforced

I, like so many others, remain baffled.

Agreed.

I wondered earlier if there was a pitch problem, and if there was then it almost certainly would have revealed itself only after Vr was called, by which point they were obviously well past V1 and therefore committed to the take-off.

There could well have been a serious brown trouser moment, while the 4 pilots tried to work out what the hell was going on as they accelerated down the runway - too late to RTO; and they eventually managed to haul it into to the air at the last moment.

They then might have convinced themselves that they must have done something procedurally wrong, and there was nothing faulty with the aircraft, so they continued their flight and perhaps did not put in a report, hoping it would not be spotted?

Maybe like neither pilot realised who was PF/PM after the thrust was set. A rotate call should have prompted a reaction or, if the call was missed, PF would surely rotate before they ran off the end. Neither seems to have happened. Fatigue, distraction, who knows. But as neither Airbus of Boeing procedures use FDs at take off, there is some other factor in play.

Well I guess it's right back to basics then ................ henceforth the control column will now be known as the "HOUSES LEVER"

Used to train/examine in a very large airline (high quality, international not mid east) which brought 250 hour cadets into a long haul, big jet environment ........... we reckoned that as they were getting command of their 777 fifteen years or so down the road that they had less than 15 hours of hand flying (i.e. autopilot in 100 feet after take-off and out at 1,000 feet before landing). So, if and when the info comes out i.e hours and years flying, more detail is required to get to the root of it.

I often flew the first commercial sector of a cadet's career and indeed the first time they had flown a real aircraft bigger than a light piston twin with 3-400 people down the back. I have also had to recover the aircraft in an extreme condition when the cadet did something that I would not have believed that a pilot would ever do (looking down vertically on the runway numbers through the copilot's window circa 50-100 feet was one ........ got the wind check at 1,000 feet - he decided there was a crosswind and over the threshold promptly and forcefully pushed full rudder ....... xwind factor was, in fact, about 2 kts but hey, rudder for a crosswind isn't it or at least that's what his course buddy told him. There is a lot of blind leading the partially sighted going on.

Company also had a lot of heavy landings until we figured out that pilots were using the FD to flare ..... not looking out at all.

Don't get me wrong ....... I would never have made it through these courses to a widebody jet with 250 hours. At those experience levels you need to grab every piece of info you have to get you through the course.

However, there is an other side to it ........ now training/examining on turbo props in my retirement and we have a major problem with poor skill levels with highly experienced airline pilots.

.......... where are we going .............

There are a relatively small number of people who get to fly 350-ton airplanes in their career. The number of people who train on those airplanes is smaller. An even smaller number of those trainers get to train on 350-ton airplanes at a number of airlines around the planet.

That last group can tell you a few stories (if they are willing to be candid) that would reveal that quite often you have 300 innocent passengers who are entrusting their lives to flightdeck occupants who are utterly bereft of any skill, awareness or initiative, and are visibly uneasy and uncertain at every phase of flight.

A personal sim favorite is to clear two of these occupants for a visual approach. There will be a two minute flurry of FMC programming and then the approach will be flown from downwind all the way to the threshold without anyone ONCE looking out the window until they are forced to at 50' when the pitch bar commands level flight.

The threat goes way beyond any degradation in manual flying skills as these never existed in the first place - there are any number of active widebody pilots who are temperamentally unsuited to the chair.

SLF for many years starting in the 60s. I always had confidence that the guys up front had, at the very least, the necessary stick & rudder flying skills. It didn't prevent accidents but, arguably, their skills avoided many more. I honestly have to say that these days I'm a lot more concerned about who is on the FD than I ever was before. Many of the above comments from professionals, such as Dropp the Pilot and others, echo what I have felt for some time simply after reading official accident and incident reports. I'm very selective about which carriers I fly with but there are no guarantees!

The longer version of the same video was uploaded yesterday. The PF looks down immediately after the rotate call at 25:23 and glances out the window maybe once in the next 2-3 minutes.

Yep, and this seems to be the fixation in most of the young pilots these days- to get their 2 minutes of fame and glory on youtube or any other forms of social media rather than focusing on their real skills or professionalism.
The nauseating flurry of flight deck selfies with the obligatory “shades” on to look that extra bit cool for their page or channel is incredible. I do genuinely worry for the future of the profession and the downward trend of flying skills and knowledge as excellently outlined in the posts above.

Got my ATPL in 1999, ATP, 5 types, 15K hours with passengers in the back since. Was always instructed that the moment you get airborne, you fly by instrument reference. Not sure her looking at her instruments is the big issue here. I do switch off the AP/AT/FD whenever I feel it's okay ( no company limits on that), and if I screw up, I will get a call from the safety department asking how training can get improved to prevent that from happening again. I am sure that the last sentence will get lost in the EU/ME culturere, but I really feel it's the way forward.