pusidriver,

"a few words" ?

What more do YOU need to accept that they simply didn't fly the plane?

The above statement is scary. It implies a "it can't happen to me" belief. Until we know why the pilots screwed the pooch any of us are vulnerable of catching this disease.

I'll be watching for the next similar accident that doesn't involve only a Turkish airline.

lompaseo, you're right.

There are folk here making highly critical analyses based on scant information. Is that because they have access to comprehensive information which has not yet been published, or because they feel happier shoving the blame towards their deceased colleagues on the grounds that they feel superior to them?

There's little doubt in my mind that the latter is the case...

That is an interesting statement, related to what I was trying to say in my previous post. Naturally, my personal interest is in private GA accidents, where very few accidents have anything new to teach pilots. It's the same mistakes repeated over and over and over, and the underlying reason is usually insufficient skills, violations, or commonly both.

What troubles me is that I am starting to see the same pattern of insufficient skills in commercial aviation. Maybe it's because the competence is dropping, maybe it's because we have managed to solve so many safety problems that pilot competence is now sailing up as the new prime element.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

The piloting performance of PPL holders, almost without exception, is training limited. They would perform better if they had more training. But what is the situation for ATPL holders? The current school of thought is that their performance, at least as far as flight safety is concerned, is not training limited, but "human factors limited". They do not make safety critical mistakes because they lack skills, but because they are human.

I am questioning whether that view represents the whole truth; I think a large group of (or even most?) ATPL holders are actually training limited. If that is the case, more training would bring a significant safety benefit.

None of this will convince lomapaseo however, since I didn't bring any data. I wonder what type of data could actually prove or disprove the above reasoning? Any suggestions?

Furthermore, and this might interest busidriver: If pilots are training limited, saying they are incompetent is not the same as saying they are bad persons. It means their failings are due to their company, and by extension, the industry, failing to train them sufficiently. So I think it should be possible to discuss pilot competence without being stuck in the blame game.

Edit: Rainboe and I obviously crossed posts there!

Rainboe,

spot on!

Very well said, exactly my feelings about this "accident".

“The day I make a mistake like that …, I will hang up my wings.” - Rainboe
The day that you make such a mistake, then if appropriate, you might get a new set of wings from St Peter!

Based on the details available so far, the crew in this accident appear to have crossed the boundary of acceptable professional behaviour as judged by the profession. However, the wider public judgement appears to be still open to the investigation and reporting of the facts, or further deliberation in a legal process.

Many members of our profession are defining, in hindsight, a boundary, which is biased towards the ideals of a safe industry – where ‘safe' (acceptable behaviour) is a relative term often judged in the eye of the beholder. In seeking to allocate blame we focus on the human element, often overlooking the natural fallibility specifically ‘built in’ to enable learning and flexible response when dealing with hazards.

Consider an ‘identical’ crew, behaving exactly in the same manner, in the same situation except that the RA fault occurred at a slightly higher altitude; the small increase in altitude being just sufficient for the aircraft to recover (luck).
Would this crew be judged in the same way?

The contributing factors of a ‘hot & high’ initial approach, the workload and distraction of a training flight, and the inexperience of the handling pilot, are all common occurrences which other crews accept and manage. Yet these crews operate safely (safe enough) even though they exhibit ‘errant’ behaviour; thus are we to judge a particular crew on luck?
No. There is no place for luck in the safety of our industry.

If human behaviour is unreliable (not always safe), then we must look at the environment and the guidance provided for crews’ during operations. This is not to excuse less-than-professionally-acceptable behaviour, but it is to seek an understanding of what led to apparently unsafe behaviour in particular circumstances – a means of determining where ‘the boundary’ of acceptable safety might be.

A major problem is that the eyes of the beholders judging safety, are split between the regulators, the safety investigators, the profession, and the public; each with potential for bias. Also, these viewpoints are in a rapidly changing time frame relative to scenarios (situations), regulations, and training – we (the groups) can change our minds very quickly, often without due thought, which like in many crew operations is a source of error – a mistaken judgement.

What the profession should seek to establish is how often errant conditons arrise, why apparently there are so few safety reports of the the potential for an accident as at AMS. Why aren’t we reporting the hazardous contributing factors (RA faults), weak behaviours, less than ideal training - aspects that are in every day operations. By failing to do so we do not refine the boundary of safe operations and the acceptability of professional behaviour; aren’t all of us exhibiting error, and thus blameworthy?

Good enough:ok:

We now have a new thread "To Err is Human...." on this forum to get this stuff out on the table of learning without crossing political boundaries.

Considering the well thought out issues spiking our discussions on this subject as well as the Over-the-Limit pilot alcohol threads there is hope that PPRune can still manage to add value here after all :)

There has been much discussion about the technical faults which contributed to this crash. Alf5071h brings in some behavioural aspects. I will be fascinated to hear the CVR. There should lie the answers to so many questions. In the very beginning there were thoughts of complacancy; not monitoring etc. This could imply a state of low alertness. This is where I am confused.
It was training flight. The F/O was on a conversion trip and was not inexperienced. The T.C should have been alert and aware.
They were a little too close in and high on energy; so it is said here.
It was not CAVOK and they were using the automatics to operate the approach. Thus not a relaxed visual base leg.

All these factors should lead to a state of high alertness. I assume the T.C knew how to use the automatics to recover the situation. I assume the F/O knew how to manually fly and recover the situation; and perhaps from his B737 classic experience also knew how to use the AFDS. It's not that different in this situation, and the map gives even more situational awareness. I assume both pilots knew how & when to make a G.A.

The question for me remains how come they behaved as if in a low state of alertness when the opposite should have been the case? The CVR should help with the answers. I hope this was not an 'in-shalah' moment. Nor a Chinese Airbus "what is it doing now?" moment.

I'm sure the final report will tell us all. Meanwhile so much speculation seems wasted energy. Is it not time to wait and see.

Dont assume too much.You'd be surprised just how many dont know what to do in this situation.The data shows that in this case he(TC) did.VS used with 1400 fpm ROD.Whenever the PNF alone knows the way out of a bad situation,theres always delay,distraction,mis-communication etc.He might try to "coach" the PF verbally of just how to do it but time is against him so might end up making the MCP selections himself.If the checklist isnt done and the PF is oblivious to what is going on and distracted from his scan then things can go from bad to worse.The TC(PNF) has to have the extra capacity to be able to handle it all the minute the PF becomes a passenger.Recovery,checklist completion and cloudbreak may have been one distraction too many for him and so the fundamentals(scan) lose out.When stick-shaker comes,hes totally caught out and firewalls but removes his hand from the levers again,oblivious to the AT mode problem from the get-go.
I understand Rainboe's frustration but I dont agree with him.Basic errors have caught crews out before.A very experienced crew flew a serviceable L-1011 right into the Everglades.Nobody was flying the plane.Fly the plane.Always.

Assumptions, such as the assumptions about experience and alertness above are often at the root of accidents.
Questions to be answered:
- was the FO sufficiently ‘experienced’ (training) to deal with an unusual abnormality? Consider if it was his first flight into Europe, first into AMS with an unfamiliar chart, with minimum English language, etc; then his workload / capacity for attention might be at a minimum.
- did the TC over-focus on the autos, was he trouble-shooting another problem, coaching, etc; e.g. why couldn’t the FO select a dual approach (a resultant of the RA fault). Thus was the TC ‘out of the loop’, something that might be tolerated with a balanced crew, and which could have been achieved with a ‘qualified’ P3, but apparently this was not P3’s task.

While we ‘wait and see’, consider the plea to ‘fly the aircraft’, but exactly how should we be flying, how is this taught, and what is the required experience for a line training operation.
One safety defence against the hazards of unusual / abnormal situations is not to expose a training flight to such situations, which in this instance appears to be the high energy approach set up. What ever the cause of this situation, the acceptance of an unstabilised approach during a training flight is a definite No No.
But then again which crew member would have had spare capacity to detect the unstabilised approach – issues of workload again – a training flight. In these situations even more thinking ahead is required, thus can we detect that an approach will become unstabilised before a check ‘gate’? But that’s what experience is about – was the TC that experienced?

apologies if this has been pasted previous:

YouTube - Turkish Airlines 1951 crash ATC recording - Feb. 25, 2009

Question from non-pilot. Granted that there is a delay between selecting maximum thrust and the engines responding, would not the noise level on the flight deck rise as the engines spooled up? Also, would not the noise level fall again as the throttles retarded? Are ANPR headphones really that effective? Apologies in advance if this is a silly question.

In a sterile (quiet) cockpit you can hear the engines even on the CVR. However, the human ear has trouble hearing background noise if bells horns annunciations and/or command challenges are occuring at the same time.

What we are missing on this board are details about what's going on in the CVR, so I await those facts eagerly.

I haven't read the full transcript as it wouldn't load for me, but the papers here in the UK were full of 'flirting'. What I have read of it, it wasn't flirting, rather normal cockpit banter, with a nasty situation creeping up on them unawares. The key to it is experience, experience to bring on that uncomfortable feeling that 'something is wrong!' I've seen it when inexperienced pilots just don't get the cues some of us old hands do. And i wonder how much of that was in the Turkish crash. Someone should have had the feeling 'something is wrong, or at the very least- not right!', and they didn't. Maybe it was inexperience- I'm not sure I'd count military F4 Phantom time to the 'experience' ticker. But we have 2 accidents with similar complete and utter failure to recognise the true danger of a hazardous situation until recovery was all but impossible.

I find the desperation to get into the left hand seat prematurely rather exasperating. I had to serve long time in a constipated seniority system before moving over. You need a long time to develop those survival instincts in an unnatural environment in the air. Both accidents give the impression of inexperience- something I fear we will see far more of quite regularly.

Experience or focus? Or the experience to know when to be focused?

Both accident crews were negligent in their duties by allowing things to deteriorate to the point of an imminent stall, but that's were the similarities end.

The TLH crew initiated the recovery from an imminent stall correctly and but for the further intervention of the auto thrust, would likely have prevented the stall and successfully executed a go around to try again. The Colgan crew on the other hand, don't seem to have had the 1st clue about how to recognize and recover from an imminent stall.

Just my 0.2c

Yup, spot on.
The young button-pushers of today will not like to hear this, of course, however the fundamental fact remains....long experience normally pays large dividends that no amount of automatics (whether working working properly, or not) can counter.

Rainboe, you're including a fair few commanders at a certain Irish carrier in that description....

Rainboe

IMHO your post raises a very interesting issue.
Do pilots need skills or do they need training? I mean people is born to became a pilot or can be thought to be a pilot?
Can the two things be blended?

A late call by me, Rainboe, but I wonder how much military F4 time you have or anything similar. A take-off and landing every 90 minutes or so, an aircraft that bites extremely quickly if you don't pay attention and an aircraft that needs quick responses in the military environment.

I admit that it lacks the 'fly by committee' element and there are no SLFs to worry about.

For what it is worth, I agree with every suggestion that reflects on the lack of selectivity in training. If the system graduates every student that pays the fees then the result is mass mediocrity.

If I am SLF I always try to select an airline that I think employs crews who are good enough. I won't list the brands I will not fly here although there are many.

soddim
well... a quick look at the database of aviation safety network under the flight crew contributory causes gives a very large number of accidents...if I should not fly all the airlines in such list I would be grounded!!!

On the other hand I agree that there are some airlines, which I will not fly with (and I am SLF)

FSLF