TAM Airbus 2011 incident report

And here we have another example of aircrew mismanagement leading to a situation that could have been much worse. Thankfully in this case all 101 occupants were safe afterwards.

A TAM Airbus A319 departing Santos Dumont airport was warned of hot air balloon activity in the terminal airspace. Despite this, during departure, as they passed through 12,000 feet, the captain began showing the first officer a flight management system in the cockpit. Neither pilot noticed a hot air balloon in front of them, until they were forced to take evasive action, which is when the screw ups began.

Both pilots attempted to make an evasive maneuver, which led to a dual-input warning. Despite this, the plane hit a banner being pulled by the balloon, shredding it. The banner shreds blocked three pitot tubes, and a total air temperature sensor.

The aircraft went into alternate law mode, with a non-functional autopilot and autothrust, and presenting several warnings to the crew. The captain ordered the first officer to disregard a warning about an airspeed discrepancy but then ordered unreliable speed procedures from the book. The first officer proceeded to use wrong weights to determine pitch and thrust reference data, and important steps were ignored (such as letting ATC know of the problem).

They climbed into RVMS airspace, despite the problems that made it unsafe for them to do so, and despite not meeting navigation requirements made the approach into Belo Horizonte.

It was determined that despite having 5700 hours in type, they were never trained properly for unreliable airspeed situations.

Yet another near miss by a crew that screwed up by the numbers,

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