Reports: 777 crash lands at San Francisco

Originally posted by Stealthbomber
In my line of work if I make a mistake it can put a lot of people's lives at risk and it's always something that plays on your mind.

The same with mine. I've seen a lot of people killed out here because someone wasn't paying attention, or was too tired, or something silly.

reply to post by Zaphod58


Yeah it only takes something small, 'thankfully' we get audited both internally and externally quite regularly so everything has to be up to an extremely high standard so, so far no accidents from anything we've produced besides the odd missing finger.

reply to post by Stealthbomber


They just pile more rules on us making the job harder. We get hit with inspections, but not that often. Been out here awhile now, and been hit twice, once was just paperwork, and once was testing and training on a new machine. Been out a year straight almost now (four days off back "home" for Christmas).

reply to post by Zaphod58


Exactly, people with no idea are the ones that set the rules, if people had common sense you wouldn't need half of the rules set.

Woo 100th post

The South Korean government has announced all 777s owned by Asiana, and Korean Air will have their engines, and landing systems checked.

look to the outcome and you will see why something like this was faked.

all this chatter and you haven't even authenticated the video or the story itself.

cui bono?

The NTSB hasn't said if all four pilots were in the cockpit at the time of the landing, but that's normal procedure with a pilot in training, making their first landing. That may have been another factor if they were all in there. That would make things cramped, as well as having more voices talking to you when you're used to only one.

There's apparently a new amateur video, taken post impact, showing the fire response arriving, and fighting the fire.

video.foxnews.com...

The pilots got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the aircraft, and assumed the autothrottles were maintaining speed at 137 knots. According to the NTSB, they passed through 4,000 feet and thought they were too high, so they set the vertical speed to 1500 feet per minute. Passing 500 feet, the new instructor pilot realized he saw red lights on the Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI), which indicated they were too low.

When he saw the red lights, he told Lee Gang Guk (making his first landing at SFO in a 777) to pull up. As he did, the aircraft yawed, forcing them to make a lateral, as well as vertical correction. The whole time they assumed the autothrottle was maintaining speed at 137 knots. One of them went to push the throttles off idle, and was told the other pilot already had.

The main landing gear struck the sea wall, which pushed the tail down. The impact of the tail tore a hole in the aft fuselage, behind the pressure bulkhead. The second impact with the runway (after the 360 degree spin), tore a hole in the #2 engine oil tank, which led to the fire that burned through the fuselage.

Lee Gang Guk, who was the student pilot on the crew, had been flying A320s for the last 8 years.

As US investigators interviewed the pilots of Asiana flight 214, a new picture emerged of a confused and chaotic situation inside the cockpit in the last 16sec before the Boeing 777-200ER's main landing gear caught the lip of the sea wall on the runway threshold at the San Francisco airport.

The captain flying, identified by Asiana as Lee Gang Guk, and the captain instructor, Lee Jeong-min, realized as they passed 4,000ft on approach to Runway 28 Left that they were "slightly high", says Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

At that point, the crew set the vertical speed mode on the visual approach at about 1,500ft per minute, she says. But that descent rate brought the 777 down too fast.

As they passed 500ft, Lee Jeong-min, who was making his debut flight as a 777 instructor, noticed the three glowing red lights on the airport's precision approach path indicator that signaled they were slightly too low, Hersman says the captain told the NTSB.

www.flightglobal.com...

It appears the auto pilot was only armed and not active.

It's always the little details.

You have to wonder if having 4 pilots in the cockpit added to the confusion.

reply to post by Zaphod58

But the automatic speed protection system, for reasons that are still unclear, did not maintain the aircraft at 137kt.

That's the first thing I've seen suggesting the possibility something besides pilot error may be involved. I don't know anything about that system or how it works. At this point I suppose it could be either a problem with the autothrottle, or maybe the autothrottle didn't malfunction, but the crew wasn't familiar enough with how to operate it properly and they didn't have it enabled like they thought they did?

Well, here's an interesting twist on the auto-throttle hiccup...

The 777 can catch you out with with what is known as the "FLCH trap."

When you are above the glide slope and need to get down in a hurry Flight Level Change (FLCH) is a useful mode to use. Normally you transfer to another mode like glideslope or vertical speed, or you switch off the flight directors.

However in this situation the glideslope was off the air so the ILS would not have ben selected or armed. If the flight directors were left on and the plane was descending at a high rate in FLCH the autothrottle would have been inhibited and would not have put on power so the thrust levers would have stayed at idle.
...
The 777 has autothrottle wake up, ie when the aircraft approaches a stall the power comes on automatically to almost full power. This gives pilots great confidence however autothrottle wake up is inhibited in FLCH.

So 777 pilots will be looking at this scenario and wondering if Asiana were in FLCH with flight directors on, too high, stabilised late and did not notice they were still in FLCH and that the autothrottle was not keeping the speed to Vref plus 5 untl too late.

www.theatlantic.com...

So maybe fatigue/miscommunication, the settings don't get changed, and all of a sudden we're sitting low and slow and exactly where you don't want to be.

reply to post by _Del_


I guess I don't follow this article from the Atlantic. The glideslope is a radio signal. If you don't have it, I have to presume no control that uses it will operate. Further since glideslope and localizer are something you program into the receiver, the pilot would notice the glideslope isn't there. This is step one.

I don't know about overseas flights, but generally the aircraft get a conditions report from the airport via ACARS. They don't need to talk to anyone, they just punch it up. I am very familiar with it on flights heading west into the bay area. They hit the Tonopah ACARS. [Easily the busiest ACARS site I ever monitored.]

So in other words, before they left China, they read the NOTAM. Then they probably get yet another notice via ACARS. Then the ATIS should say the glideslope is out. But if the pilot missed all these warnings, ATC would not let them do an ILS landing since ATC knows the glideslope is out.

T crossed. I dotted. Belt and suspenders in place.

I'm surprised FLCH inhibits speed protection. That seems like a poor design choice or side effect of another design choice.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


It may not have been a problem though. It sounds more like they were confused whether the autothrottle was armed or not. From what I'm reading, in the mode they were in, the autothrottle doesn't hold their speed they way they assumed it did. They failed to monitor their speed as they should have.

Yes, 106 kots indicated....I can't imagine...
back when , my pop went up to the Braniff orange 747.....when they were brand new....the first thing he told me was they approached at 145 knots..." and that's honkin' on"...he said.....106.....dagangga

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by _Del_

 

I guess I don't follow this article from the Atlantic. The glideslope is a radio signal. If you don't have it, I have to presume no control that uses it will operate. Further since glideslope and localizer are something you program into the receiver, the pilot would notice the glideslope isn't there. This is step one.

I think the idea presented is that they stayed in FLCH without switching precisely because the ILS was inoperable. Where normally they would have switched modes and the autothrottles would be active, they are inhibited by FLCH.

Originally posted by C0bzz
I'm surprised FLCH inhibits speed protection. That seems like a poor design choice or side effect of another design choice.

edit on 10/7/13 by C0bzz because: (no reason given)

It's definitely curious. While in descent using FLCH, the aircraft chooses to maintain the desired velocity by trading altitude/altering descent rate while putting the engines in flight idle. It doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to program an exception at low altitudes, although generally FLCH wouldn't be used at low altitude because you'd switch modes (G/S, V/S, HOLD, SPD, whatever modes the 777 has available) at that point.

Originally posted by Zaphod58
reply to post by SheopleNation

 

Because the new fire trucks have a metal hose that can punch through the side of the plane and spray water directly into the cabin to fight an onboard fire.

Oh wow, sounds real brilliant, a hose that can punch through an aircrafts shell? I imagine that it would fracture someone's skull or at the very least blind them. Nice try, but = Epic fail bro.

Yuh know, it's nice to believe that one has all the answers to everything, but you just proved that is not always the case. LMAO! ~$heopleNation

The vast majority of a commercial jet like that is empty space. You'd almost have to try to put it through a person.