Where I work many of us have a "common type rating" between the A330 and A350 (-900 and -1000). While I commend Airbus for making them similar they are in no way common enough to justify the minuscule training course.
Flying the A350 you get lots of brilliant features like brake-to-vacate, auto wing leveling during a crosswind landing (when you de-crab), differential flap setting in the cruise for CP control and better fuel efficiency. And so on. However, coming back to the 330 after lots of 350 flying it's very easy to forget just what you have and don't have.
Both have very different cockpit layouts. Even something simple like cockpit lighting is totally different. They have significantly different limitations, speeds and procedures for dealing with abnormal situations.
Additionally, the A350 still has a fair share of teething problems. The list of Temporary Abnormal Behaviors is quite long and hasn't shortened much in the last couple of years.
Throw some fatigue into the mix and it's not much fun. My company's error rates have increased on the "common fleet" by almost triple.
Yet our regulator thinks it's all good.
That is Terrifying. It seems like the FAA has optimized for allowing the Manufacturers and Airlines to streamline changes and operations while slowly letting safety deteriorate. Perhaps these accidents will force what seems like a needed change in type ratings.
"It isn't just the FAA and Boeing."
It's a country in Asia to give you a hint. If you google for the fleets mentioned you can probably work it out!
Yeah that seems to be an important issue. You easily "get used" to a feature and I wouldn't be surprised if a pilot used to the 350 got in a bad situation on the 330.
Are those error rates taken from FOQA? And is the company raising the issue?
But once you are trained for several kinds of aircraft, does the airline treat them differently? For instance, will they happily schedule you to fly anything you are type-certified for, tomorrow? Or do they keep you on one type for a block of time, perhaps with a simulator day to remember before switching?
Also need to do at least one takeoff and landing in each (in addition to the three takeoffs and landings in 90 days), in 60 days.
Otherwise they treat them the same. I routinely get rostered to fly one type on a short sector, get in, change aircraft to the other type and fly it somewhere else.
Literally only an hour to adapt to the other type.
aka: window shades
This sounds like a UX design problem. Things that are the same should be the same, things that are different should be different.
The most dangerous thing from a UX perspective is always the slightly different, especially in sequences. Everybody knows if their way to work and way to the store is partially the same it's easy to take the wrong fork when you want to go to the store.
So if the things are slightly different, it often makes sense to make the sequence different from the beginning. Otherwise people often make these common path mistakes.
Neither Lion nor Ethiopian had stellar safety records, e.g.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/lion-air-crash...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_accidents_a...
The training hours should also be looked in the context of the total hours flown on that specific model - a pilot who just sat through the short training session would have a different perspective than a pilot who sat through the same training session but has also flown the plane for hundreds of hours.
It's also not a brand new airplane - it's a modification of 737, so the training is transitional. It's not like Boeing took a freshly minted Cessna 152 pilot, gave them a 2-hour seminar, and type-rated them for the 737 Max.
This ASRS report almost makes it sound like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386
That's quite a stretch from a 4-cylinder single engine, 110mph prop plane transition.
Ethiopian airlines is rated Category 1 by the FAA and can thus fly direct to the US and they are a member of the star alliance.
Just because they are the largest carrier in Africa does not imply dubious safety or maintenance.
So do European airlines and they have great safety records.
During the critical phases of flying both pilots will be engaged with the operation. While it's true that the first officer may execute the take-off the captain will be at the controls, alert and ready to intervene at any time.
Later during cruising the responsibilities may be split. For example: The captain may deal with administrative stuff while the first officer is actually flying the plane.
Especially since the crew knew that the plane can potentially behave in an erratic manner you can bet on the fact that an experienced captain is standing by and observing very closely what's happening.
Source: I had the oportunity to sit in the cockpit during an entire (short haul) flight, when that was still possible. Both pilots were always engaged during all critical periods of the flight and very specifically during take off and landing. Even when the first officer executed the operations.
As a sidenote: It's not like driving a bus up there. Both pilots were focused, concentrated and busy during the entire flight (this may be somewhat different on a long haul flight ).
I'm well aware of cockpit procedure; my brother is a 30-year captain, now retired and our family has been flying since before I was born. One of my earliest memories is of using the barf bag in a 172 while my father was shooting landings.
>> They had a 200 hour pilot flying in the right seat of the crashed airplane. Star Alliance or not, who in the hell defends a low-time student pilot flying right seat in an airliner?
The captain of the doomed flight ET302, Yared Getachew, was a graduate of the highly competitive Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy, and had more than 8,000 flight hours — a respectable total. “Yared was a great person and a great pilot. Well prepared,” a former Ethiopian Airlines training captain told me.
Doesn't sound as if he acquired his 8000 + hours on a crop duster.
In addition: Your statement that he was 28 doesn't quite jibe with what the NYT has to say about him[2]
By the time he was 29, Yared Getachew was the youngest captain at Ethiopian Airlines. Despite his relative youth, he had spent a decade with the carrier, eventually piloting wide-body jets that crossed continents and oceans.
[1] http://www.askthepilot.com/ethiopian-737max-crash/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/business/ethiopian-airlin...
Thanks for that information. I was having trouble crediting a 28 year old with 8,000 flight hours...
That said, it's very likely a big chunk of that wasn't on 737s, or even large commercial jets.
I think that's quite a lot more relevant than airline safety records. Ethiopian Airlines has a good recent safety record anyway. And the outcry, upon MCAS being publicly revealed, among the U.S. pilot community I also think demonstrates important relative concern.
And, quite a concerning story about U.S. 737 MAX pilots using the anonymous aviation safety reporting system to communicate their concerns, whether instead of or because of the normal channels for doing so.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2019/03/12/boei...
Oh cool 5 events in the last 23 years. That sounds like a stellar safety record to me.
For most countries "better safe than sorry" was an easy option. At the end of the day its airliners who are left holding the bag, but with some logistical wizardry everyone can still go on holiday.
There was just no reason for China, Singapore, the UK and the EU not to ground these planes. The airline industry has to deal with public perception.
Yes and I think that is what is at stake here as well. The airline industry at the end of the day is an industry. We forget that sometimes because it feels like a monopolistic or oligarlistic industry, but we are their customers, and if people start demanding that they not ride a 737 Max, and start to refuse to purchase routes that are serviced by a 737 Max, you'll see some changes really quick. I for one have told every loved one, and every person I know that travels frequently to not board these planes, and they agree as well. I additionally informed my boss and clients that if they need me to fly, it will absolutely under no circumstances be on a 737Max. I am 100% certain I am not alone in this.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victim...
> all the FAA can be thankful of is the dead are foreigners so it’s unlikely they’ll be held properly accountable
and that's what the answers are responding too, saying it's wrong and there are American victims as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/b08h03/737_max_mega...
If we want to start complaining about the FAA, considering more people have died in Indonesian and Malaysian air crashes in the past 10 years than have died in American crashes despite the US flying several orders of magnitude more flights. Lion Air wasn’t even allowed into the E.U. until 2016 because of safety. The FAA and NTSB are among the best agencies in the world when it comes to aviation safety and the data supports it. If anyone should be held accountable for the Ethiopian Air crash, the airline itself should be at the top of the list: the copilot only had 200 total hours! That FAA you are complaining about requires 1500 hours of experience to sit in the right seat. But apparently in Ethiopia, a 200 hour student pilot is good enough to fly right seat when over a hundred lives are at risk.
Do you have a source for this? This sounds anachronistic, or you've got parts confused with some other flight. If by anti-stall you mean MCAS, if it was disabled then what caused the erratic pitching, unstable vertical speed, and the eventual nose down and dive? MCAS is already implicated in that flight the question is whether it was disabled at all prior to the accident, which would have been the normal procedure. Yet you're suggesting that disabling it was wrong, on what basis?
Also MCAS takes angle of attack, altitude and flap setting as inputs. It doesn't take airspeed as an input. Further there are three separate airspeed sensors, each with their own airspeed indicators, as separate systems. A inoperable indicator is a deviation that will be evaluated by accident investigators, and it might be a cause for confusion and delay in making decisions if the pilots didn't know about the problem in advance. But if they knew about it advance as you're suggesting, they'd just placard the bad one, make a log entry and fly on.
There's no evidence flight experience is related to the crash. It's really common in most of the rest of the world, including Europe, and used to be common in the U.S., to pair very experienced pilots with less experienced pilots - which happens to have been the case with Ethiopian Airlines flight.
The whole bush plane, third world, and "apparently in Ethiopia" commentary sounds ignorant bordering on racist to me.