The co-pilots were so used to all the automatic safety measures performed by the board computer that they didn't actually know how to fly the airplane when those measures had to be shut down because of a faulty sensor. I guess one of the dangers of modern planes and their sophisticated systems is that the pilots aren't as well prepared for emergencies as in the past when they had to do all the hard work themselves.
Not quite that simple.
Put it this way. It's not that they didn't know how to fly when the safety measures are gone, rather they didn't assess the situation in time before it got out of hand.
Take out the airspeed indicator, what do you have left? Altimetre, vertical speed indicator and pitch. At this time, the aircraft was in a stall. This meant that the altitude was dropping quickly, the vertical speed indicator was showing the drop rate and the pitch showed that the aircraft was nose high. In such a situation, you also see that the airspeed is very low. However the pilots didn't have access to this information. Nonetheless, with the other instruments on hand, they could have deduced what was going on. However, things can happen very quickly in a situation such as this.
The remedy to this kind of stall is pushing forward on the yoke, dropping the nose and regaining sufficient speed to once again fly normally. Getting out of a simple stall isn't difficult.
It isn't that the flight controls, autopilot and modern avionics make the aircraft so easy to fly that you forget how to actually fly. It's simply that pilots found themselves in a critical situation and failed to properly react to this situation, because they misread the situation*. These type of accidents also happen in general aviation (more frequently unless I'm mistaken), where everything is done "by hand".
*indeed, arguably a lack of training
Not sure if they had outside visual references to work with either, but they probably didn't. If the airliner had been flying by day and the crew had seen that the nose was up and the altitude was dropping quickly, they would have immediately realized they were stalling. I'm guessing it was dark outside and they didn't figure out what the aircraft was doing (in this case stalling). They probably assumed that the aircraft was diving and as such pulled on the stick to bring the nose up. The aircraft was already nose up and stalling, so it just continued stalling until it crashed. In their "defense", there's no force feedback in the stick in an A330, since it's fly-by-wire, so they couldn't "feel" their elevator, which would probably have also given them the hint needed to figure out what was going on.
It's kind of a stupid accident when you think about.
This is a good summary of what happend there. I actually watched a documentary on this last night, is quite sad but it was mainly the fault of the pilot Bonin, who right after they lost the indicators decided to push the nose up, and it remained up even after the other pilot took control, and when they finally discovered he had the nose up both of the other pilots were like no, no, no push it down.. but it was to late by then.
On March 12 2014 06:48 W2 wrote: They are saying there's no foul play going on, it was a mechanical failure that resulted in both navigation and communications/radio shutdown. The plane turned around and got lost. If that is the case, why did it take 3 days before we found out what happened. What was the crew, passengers, and everyone doing in these 3 days? Was nobody able to contact the outside world? How long is it before planes run out of fuel?
what? source?
wait you don't read the exact same articles as that guy?
i've never even heard the story he is telling before.
look at my post 4th from the top. It has some info.
The co-pilots were so used to all the automatic safety measures performed by the board computer that they didn't actually know how to fly the airplane when those measures had to be shut down because of a faulty sensor. I guess one of the dangers of modern planes and their sophisticated systems is that the pilots aren't as well prepared for emergencies as in the past when they had to do all the hard work themselves.
Not quite that simple.
Put it this way. It's not that they didn't know how to fly when the safety measures are gone, rather they didn't assess the situation in time before it got out of hand.
Take out the airspeed indicator, what do you have left? Altimetre, vertical speed indicator and pitch. At this time, the aircraft was in a stall. This meant that the altitude was dropping quickly, the vertical speed indicator was showing the drop rate and the pitch showed that the aircraft was nose high. In such a situation, you also see that the airspeed is very low. However the pilots didn't have access to this information. Nonetheless, with the other instruments on hand, they could have deduced what was going on. However, things can happen very quickly in a situation such as this.
The remedy to this kind of stall is pushing forward on the yoke, dropping the nose and regaining sufficient speed to once again fly normally. Getting out of a simple stall isn't difficult.
It isn't that the flight controls, autopilot and modern avionics make the aircraft so easy to fly that you forget how to actually fly. It's simply that pilots found themselves in a critical situation and failed to properly react to this situation, because they misread the situation*. These type of accidents also happen in general aviation (more frequently unless I'm mistaken), where everything is done "by hand".
*indeed, arguably a lack of training
Not sure if they had outside visual references to work with either, but they probably didn't. If the airliner had been flying by day and the crew had seen that the nose was up and the altitude was dropping quickly, they would have immediately realized they were stalling. I'm guessing it was dark outside and they didn't figure out what the aircraft was doing (in this case stalling). They probably assumed that the aircraft was diving and as such pulled on the stick to bring the nose up. The aircraft was already nose up and stalling, so it just continued stalling until it crashed. In their "defense", there's no force feedback in the stick in an A330, since it's fly-by-wire, so they couldn't "feel" their elevator, which would probably have also given them the hint needed to figure out what was going on.
It's kind of a stupid accident when you think about.
To add to the confusion, the stall alarm was activating when they pushed the stick forwards to drop the nose. So the remedy a stall was causing the stall alarm to activate. What was really happening was, the stall was so severe the alarm was cutting out due to invalid readings it was getting. Basically, the pilots had no access to angle of attack information, which is relatively simple to display, but for some reason, planes don't have it on their instruments.
The co-pilots were so used to all the automatic safety measures performed by the board computer that they didn't actually know how to fly the airplane when those measures had to be shut down because of a faulty sensor. I guess one of the dangers of modern planes and their sophisticated systems is that the pilots aren't as well prepared for emergencies as in the past when they had to do all the hard work themselves.
Not quite that simple.
Put it this way. It's not that they didn't know how to fly when the safety measures are gone, rather they didn't assess the situation in time before it got out of hand.
Take out the airspeed indicator, what do you have left? Altimetre, vertical speed indicator and pitch. At this time, the aircraft was in a stall. This meant that the altitude was dropping quickly, the vertical speed indicator was showing the drop rate and the pitch showed that the aircraft was nose high. In such a situation, you also see that the airspeed is very low. However the pilots didn't have access to this information. Nonetheless, with the other instruments on hand, they could have deduced what was going on. However, things can happen very quickly in a situation such as this.
The remedy to this kind of stall is pushing forward on the yoke, dropping the nose and regaining sufficient speed to once again fly normally. Getting out of a simple stall isn't difficult.
It isn't that the flight controls, autopilot and modern avionics make the aircraft so easy to fly that you forget how to actually fly. It's simply that pilots found themselves in a critical situation and failed to properly react to this situation, because they misread the situation*. These type of accidents also happen in general aviation (more frequently unless I'm mistaken), where everything is done "by hand".
*indeed, arguably a lack of training
Not sure if they had outside visual references to work with either, but they probably didn't. If the airliner had been flying by day and the crew had seen that the nose was up and the altitude was dropping quickly, they would have immediately realized they were stalling. I'm guessing it was dark outside and they didn't figure out what the aircraft was doing (in this case stalling). They probably assumed that the aircraft was diving and as such pulled on the stick to bring the nose up. The aircraft was already nose up and stalling, so it just continued stalling until it crashed. In their "defense", there's no force feedback in the stick in an A330, since it's fly-by-wire, so they couldn't "feel" their elevator, which would probably have also given them the hint needed to figure out what was going on.
It's kind of a stupid accident when you think about.
To add to the confusion, the stall alarm was activating when they pushed the stick forwards to drop the nose. So the remedy a stall was causing the stall alarm to activate. What was really happening was, the stall was so severe the alarm was cutting out due to invalid readings it was getting. Basically, the pilots had no access to angle of attack information, which is relatively simple to display, but for some reason, planes don't have it on their instruments.
pitch and angle of attack aren't the same thing
pitch is the angle between aircraft's nose and horizon. a simple gyroscope instrument is used to indicate pitch
angle of attack is the angle between the wing's chord and the direction of travel of the wing. this is usually between 10-15° most of the time. a stall is incurred when the the angle of attack goes above a certain value.
It's indeed possible to obtain information on angle of attack in flight, I know for a fact that F16s have them as I have flirted with F16 simulators before. I don't know what instrument is used to obtain angle of attack though, I'm guessing that it's a computer that calcuates angle of attack based of velocity and pitch, though I could be very wrong on this. As far as I know however, angle of attack isn't as easy to measure as speed, pitch, altitude, etc. The pilots should have guessed that they were stalling by looking at the pitch indications on the back-up instruments.
Stall warnings on small aircraft are made mechanically, there's a little piece of metal that gets pushed up when you're approaching a stall (because of high angle of attack). This little piece of metal then closes an electrical circuit which sounds a horn. I doubt that something so primitive is used on jetliners though and this is really a stall warning mechanism and not something that gives angle of attack.
Berita Harian’s report on search and rescue – Rodzali Daud
March 12, 2014
I refer to the Berita Harian news article dated March 11, 2014, on the search and rescue operations in the Strait of Malacca which (in Bahasa Malaysia) referred to me as making the following statements:
"The RMAF Chief confirmed that RMAF Butterworth airbase detected the location signal of the airliner as indicating that it turned back from its original heading to the direction of Kota Baru, Kelantan, and was believed to have passed through the airspace of the east coast and the northern areas of the peninsula.
"The last time the plane was detected by the air control tower was in the vicinity of Pulau Perak in the Strait of Malacca at 2.40 in the morning before the signal disappeared without any trace", he said.
I wish to state that I did not make any such statements as above. What occurred was that the Berita Harian journalist asked me if such an incident occurred as detailed in their story. However, I did not give any answer to the question.
Instead what I said to the journalist was, “Please refer to the statement which I have already made on 9 March 2014, during the press conference with the Chief of Defence Force at the Sama-Sama Hotel, Kuala Lumpur International Airport”.
And what I stated during that press conference was:
The RMAF has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar, and this resulted in the search and rescue operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters off Penang.
I request this misreporting be amended and corrected to prevent further misinterpretation of what is clearly an inaccurate and incorrect report.
The RMAF is examining and analysing all possibilities as regards to the airliner’s flight paths subsequent to its disappearance. However, for the time being, it would not be appropriate for the RMAF to issue any official conclusion as to the aircraft’s flight path until a high amount of certainty and verification is achieved.
All ongoing search operations are at the moment being conducted to cover all possible areas where the aircraft could have gone down in order to ensure no possibility is overlooked.
In addition, I would like to state to the media that all information and developments will be released through official statements and press conferences as soon as possible and when appropriate. Our current efforts are focused upon on finding the aircraft as soon as possible.
Thank You. – March 12, 2014.
* General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud is the Chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF).
* This is an official statement by the Chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force on the Berita Harian news articled dated March 11, 2014, on the search and rescue operations in the Strait of Malacca.
Also, it is unlikely something crashed into the Strait of Malacca and no debris has been reported for 3 days. That's like if an airplane crashed into the English Channel or the Straits of Hormuz. Something like 1/4th of the world's shipping goes through there so it seems unlikely. At this point, given no found wreckage, it may have gone down in jungle after turning back or something.
Malaysia's air force chief denied a media report that the military last tracked a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner over the Strait of Malacca, far from where it last made contact with civilian air traffic control when it disappeared four days ago.
"I wish to state that I did not make any such statements," air force chief Rodzali Daud said in a statement on Wednesday.
China's air force will add two planes to the search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner, the country's civil aviation chief said on Wednesday, adding that search and rescue efforts would be broadened to include land areas.
The co-pilots were so used to all the automatic safety measures performed by the board computer that they didn't actually know how to fly the airplane when those measures had to be shut down because of a faulty sensor. I guess one of the dangers of modern planes and their sophisticated systems is that the pilots aren't as well prepared for emergencies as in the past when they had to do all the hard work themselves.
Not quite that simple.
Put it this way. It's not that they didn't know how to fly when the safety measures are gone, rather they didn't assess the situation in time before it got out of hand.
Take out the airspeed indicator, what do you have left? Altimetre, vertical speed indicator and pitch. At this time, the aircraft was in a stall. This meant that the altitude was dropping quickly, the vertical speed indicator was showing the drop rate and the pitch showed that the aircraft was nose high. In such a situation, you also see that the airspeed is very low. However the pilots didn't have access to this information. Nonetheless, with the other instruments on hand, they could have deduced what was going on. However, things can happen very quickly in a situation such as this.
The remedy to this kind of stall is pushing forward on the yoke, dropping the nose and regaining sufficient speed to once again fly normally. Getting out of a simple stall isn't difficult.
It isn't that the flight controls, autopilot and modern avionics make the aircraft so easy to fly that you forget how to actually fly. It's simply that pilots found themselves in a critical situation and failed to properly react to this situation, because they misread the situation*. These type of accidents also happen in general aviation (more frequently unless I'm mistaken), where everything is done "by hand".
*indeed, arguably a lack of training
Not sure if they had outside visual references to work with either, but they probably didn't. If the airliner had been flying by day and the crew had seen that the nose was up and the altitude was dropping quickly, they would have immediately realized they were stalling. I'm guessing it was dark outside and they didn't figure out what the aircraft was doing (in this case stalling). They probably assumed that the aircraft was diving and as such pulled on the stick to bring the nose up. The aircraft was already nose up and stalling, so it just continued stalling until it crashed. In their "defense", there's no force feedback in the stick in an A330, since it's fly-by-wire, so they couldn't "feel" their elevator, which would probably have also given them the hint needed to figure out what was going on.
It's kind of a stupid accident when you think about.
To add to the confusion, the stall alarm was activating when they pushed the stick forwards to drop the nose. So the remedy a stall was causing the stall alarm to activate. What was really happening was, the stall was so severe the alarm was cutting out due to invalid readings it was getting. Basically, the pilots had no access to angle of attack information, which is relatively simple to display, but for some reason, planes don't have it on their instruments.
pitch and angle of attack aren't the same thing
pitch is the angle between aircraft's nose and horizon. a simple gyroscope instrument is used to indicate pitch
angle of attack is the angle between the wing's chord and the direction of travel of the wing. this is usually between 10-15° most of the time. a stall is incurred when the the angle of attack goes above a certain value.
It's indeed possible to obtain information on angle of attack in flight, I know for a fact that F16s have them as I have flirted with F16 simulators before. I don't know what instrument is used to obtain angle of attack though, I'm guessing that it's a computer that calcuates angle of attack based of velocity and pitch, though I could be very wrong on this. As far as I know however, angle of attack isn't as easy to measure as speed, pitch, altitude, etc. The pilots should have guessed that they were stalling by looking at the pitch indications on the back-up instruments.
Stall warnings on small aircraft are made mechanically, there's a little piece of metal that gets pushed up when you're approaching a stall (because of high angle of attack). This little piece of metal then closes an electrical circuit which sounds a horn. I doubt that something so primitive is used on jetliners though and this is really a stall warning mechanism and not something that gives angle of attack.
He's correct about the warning.
What happened was that the A330 had a stall warning which sounded when the AoA was high, as you would expect. However, in the Air France flight, they ended up in a situation where the alarm disabled itself because it thought it was getting nonsense readings (I believe because the airspeed was out of range).
When the pilots pushed the nose down, the airspeed sensor began to get reasonable data again, and the AoA immediately reactivated the alarm. However, if they pushed the nose back up, the airspeed sensor would begin reporting nonsense once more, disabling the alarm.
The net result was a situation in which performing the correct action (lowering the nose) caused an alarm to come on, and doing the wrong thing caused it to turn off again. That would have been confusing as all hell.
On March 12 2014 12:03 itsjustatank wrote: Malaysia's air force chief denied a media report that the military last tracked a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner over the Strait of Malacca, far from where it last made contact with civilian air traffic control when it disappeared four days ago.
"I wish to state that I did not make any such statements," air force chief Rodzali Daud said in a statement on Wednesday.
If the report that the plane was detected in the Strait of Malacca was false, why has there been a major search area in the Strait for some days? Or is that false too?
"The B777-200 aircraft that operated MH370 underwent maintenance on 23 February 2014, 10 days before this particular flight on 8 March 2014," a statement said.
"The next check is due on 19 June 2014. The maintenance was conducted at the KLIA hangar and there were no issues on the health of the aircraft."
Wow so surely wasn't a mechanical failure? hmm
Why "surely?"
Because it had been serviced 10 days before the incident took place. I say "surely" as if they were doing their jobs properly there was nothing mechanically wrong with that plane or it would of been spotted before hand. On board computers can spot most of the problems before take off during checks im sure. Add that with a service 10 days before surely there was nothing wrong with it.
So barring a problem under the surface that would only come out under the scrutiny of an investigation, you think we can confidently rule out the aircraft itself as a factor in its own disappearance as surely there was nothing wrong with it.
PORT DICKSON: A group of fishermen found a life raft bearing the word “Boarding” 10 nautical miles from Port Dickson town at 12pm yesterday.
One of the fishermen, Azman Mohamad, 40, said they found the badly damaged raft floating and immediately notified the Kuala Linggi Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) in Malacca for assistance to lift the raft as it was very heavy. "We managed to tie it to our boat as we feared it would sink due to the damages," he said.
When the MMEA boat arrived, the fishermen then handed over the raft into their custody. However, a Kuala Linggi MMEA spokesman said the raft sunk into the sea while they were trying to bring the raft onboard.
If that's indeed part of the plane then the crash location would seem to be well south of what they are searching for in the strait depending on current. This means that the plane did a complete 180 and flew back only to overshoot the airport and Kuala Lumpur instead of the earlier projection that it flew due west near Thai airspace.
That's just completely baffling. Did they have a problem where they couldn't initiate a landing sequence?
On March 12 2014 18:45 Antisocialmunky wrote: If that's indeed part of the plane then the crash location would seem to be well south of what they are searching for in the strait depending on current. This means that the plane did a complete 180 and flew back only to overshoot the airport and Kuala Lumpur instead of the earlier projection that it flew due west near Thai airspace.
That's just completely baffling. Did they have a problem where they couldn't initiate a landing sequence?
I just looked at the flight plan, and then the news that the fisherman found the liferaft, and googled where that place was. I don't even understand. It would've been invisible for civilian controllers(transponder off = invisible), but for military installations an unidentified craft entering airspace(assuming that it was out of range when it disappeared) should've at the very least resulted in some attempted communications. It didn't just overshoot Kuala Lumpur. It overshot the entire country of malaysia, and landed in the middle of freaking nowhere in the ocean. That just raises more questions than answers because a plane that big would've been noticed for sure if it was flying low to try to avoid radar, and if it was flying high up there's no way a target that big disappears off a military radar.
PORT DICKSON: A group of fishermen found a life raft bearing the word “Boarding” 10 nautical miles from Port Dickson town at 12pm yesterday.
One of the fishermen, Azman Mohamad, 40, said they found the badly damaged raft floating and immediately notified the Kuala Linggi Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) in Malacca for assistance to lift the raft as it was very heavy. "We managed to tie it to our boat as we feared it would sink due to the damages," he said.
When the MMEA boat arrived, the fishermen then handed over the raft into their custody. However, a Kuala Linggi MMEA spokesman said the raft sunk into the sea while they were trying to bring the raft onboard.
On March 10 2014 03:51 Grobyc wrote: ^Probably depends on the area you fly in/to. When I flew last month and was leaving the Cancun airport I had my passport swiped/scanned at arrivals and at security.
Yeah it really depends. I have a friend ou used to work at a French airport and they just do quick check. When journalists took a knife on board of a plane (or something like that) and show it with a hidden cam, my friend's boss told them they needed to do full check for passport.
Basicly full check takes around 2 to 4 minutes per persons.... So queues formed, (because basicly the time for checking at arrival because WAY MORE LONG) people were unhappy, extra security was added because people fought (i was there before you etc...).
So most passport checking are depending on how much procedures are respected.
It was kind of before new passport (the biothingy ... biometric ?) was mandatory for external travelling though.
On March 12 2014 20:53 arbiter_md wrote: Could that have been brought that far by the waves?
It may just be another red herring. Though now they are reporting that villagers interviewed on the east coast heard a loud bang around the time the flight disappeared.
The co-pilots were so used to all the automatic safety measures performed by the board computer that they didn't actually know how to fly the airplane when those measures had to be shut down because of a faulty sensor. I guess one of the dangers of modern planes and their sophisticated systems is that the pilots aren't as well prepared for emergencies as in the past when they had to do all the hard work themselves.
Not quite that simple.
Put it this way. It's not that they didn't know how to fly when the safety measures are gone, rather they didn't assess the situation in time before it got out of hand.
Take out the airspeed indicator, what do you have left? Altimetre, vertical speed indicator and pitch. At this time, the aircraft was in a stall. This meant that the altitude was dropping quickly, the vertical speed indicator was showing the drop rate and the pitch showed that the aircraft was nose high. In such a situation, you also see that the airspeed is very low. However the pilots didn't have access to this information. Nonetheless, with the other instruments on hand, they could have deduced what was going on. However, things can happen very quickly in a situation such as this.
The remedy to this kind of stall is pushing forward on the yoke, dropping the nose and regaining sufficient speed to once again fly normally. Getting out of a simple stall isn't difficult.
It isn't that the flight controls, autopilot and modern avionics make the aircraft so easy to fly that you forget how to actually fly. It's simply that pilots found themselves in a critical situation and failed to properly react to this situation, because they misread the situation*. These type of accidents also happen in general aviation (more frequently unless I'm mistaken), where everything is done "by hand".
*indeed, arguably a lack of training
Not sure if they had outside visual references to work with either, but they probably didn't. If the airliner had been flying by day and the crew had seen that the nose was up and the altitude was dropping quickly, they would have immediately realized they were stalling. I'm guessing it was dark outside and they didn't figure out what the aircraft was doing (in this case stalling). They probably assumed that the aircraft was diving and as such pulled on the stick to bring the nose up. The aircraft was already nose up and stalling, so it just continued stalling until it crashed. In their "defense", there's no force feedback in the stick in an A330, since it's fly-by-wire, so they couldn't "feel" their elevator, which would probably have also given them the hint needed to figure out what was going on.
It's kind of a stupid accident when you think about.
I actually agree with you.
My conclusion might be too simplified, but as you pointed out, they had more than enough time and working instruments to correctly assess the situation. They made very basic mistakes you wouldn't think an Air France pilot certified to fly such a plane is capable of making.
Yes it was a lack of training, but I would argue that their lack of training would have become apparent much earlier if it wasn't for the automatic systems.
On March 12 2014 20:53 arbiter_md wrote: Could that have been brought that far by the waves?
It may just be another red herring. Though now they are reporting that villagers interviewed on the east coast heard a loud bang around the time the flight disappeared.
In another development, Deputy Communications and Multimedia Jalaini Johari told the Dewan Rakyat today that some irresponsible internet users were hurting the feeling of the passengers’ relatives by spreading unverified information on the missing plane.
EPT
