How to Land a ‘Completely Uncontrollable’ Passenger Jet (2018) | Hacker News Reader

How to Land a ‘Completely Uncontrollable’ Passenger Jet (2018)

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"How This Aircraft Flew Two Hours With No Controls" ( Air Astana Flight 1388 )

https://youtu.be/5ywaMkMTwWk

00:00 - Intro

00:27 - Chapter 1: Routine Maintenance

01:43 - Chapter 2: Cable Issues

02:48 - Chapter 3: Roll Axis

03:40 - Chapter 4: A Hybrid Aircraft

04:41 - Chapter 5: The Crew

05:16 - Chapter 6: The Flight Crew

05:52 - Chapter 7: Pre-Flight

06:53 - Chapter 8: Taxi

07:47 - Chapter 9: Takeoff

08:46 - Chapter 10: Rollercoaster From Hell

10:25 - Chapter 11: The Ride Continues

14:38 - Chapter 12: Two's Company

15:59 - Chapter 13: Landing Attempt 1

16:54 - Chapter 14: Landing Attempt 2

17:22 - Chapter 15: Third Time Lucky?

18:07 - Chapter 16: Sickbags At The Ready

19:01 - Final Chapter: What Went Wrong?

Air Astana Flight 1388

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Astana_Flight_1388

"While all on board were shaken, there were no injuries apart from one passenger who suffered a leg injury."

This must be the understatement of the century if you look into the details of what the crew went through.

VASAviation Video:

https://youtu.be/kIc8Rr-cKd8

Final Report:

https://reports.aviation-safety.net/2018/20181111-0_E190_P4-...

The plane was scrapped afterward, as it had experienced stresses well beyond design limits while they tried to get it back under control.

Always check that your control surfaces are doing the right thing before you take off. After is a very bad time to find out they are not working right.

> The investigation revealed that the aileron cables were installed incorrectly. This caused reversal of aileron controls. Since the roll control surfaces include spoilers, which weren't affected by the mistake, the situation couldn't have been handled with just reversing inputs.

> The investigation blamed the manufacturer of the airplane for the poorly made maintenance instructions, the supervising authorities for lack of oversight over the maintenance crew, who lacked the skill to perform the heavy maintenance, and the flight crew for failing to notice the condition during pre-flight control checks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Astana_Flight_1388

Bad instruction manuals, poorly trained people trying to follow them, and lax preflight checks by the crew. It's a miracle nobody died.

It's not a miracle -- most of the holes in the cheese lined up [1] but the final protection (good CRM in the cockpit and capable, well-trained pilots) worked. They certainly screwed up in pre-flight, but they redeemed themselves ten times over in the air.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

I remember the advice I gave to someone connecting the cables in his first computer: "Don't worry, all the connectors are different, they will only connect correctly. The ones which can be connected in more than one way will have no problem being connected in any possible way".

Aircraft cables should be made like different computer connectors that only allows them to be connected correctly.

I built a computer recently for the first time in a decade and it still strikes me how foolproof the process is. Even more incredible is how the connections are standardized among countless vendors selling interchangeable parts.

The AT power supply connector pair was a notable exception, where you had to take care of lining them up correctly so that the ground wires go towards the middle. And even though it is keyed, stronger people had no problems plugging in the 5¼" drive Molex connectors upside down.

This isn't really relevant in this day and age, but I once read about someone plugging a floppy power connector into a CD audio header after being told that nothing could be plugged into the wrong place while building a PC.

> Eventually, the pilots regained control and, escorted by a pair of fighter jets, flew south to an airport with good weather and landed safely.

Anyone know how being escorted by jets helps in a situation like this?

The jets can shoot you down if you're on a trajectory to crash into something worse like the WTC.

There is no need to do that. The pilots can crash the plane easily enough using literally any working flight controls or engines. They were out over the ocean until they gained control of their plane.

In the US, the aircraft sent up are not armed. There is no need for them to be.

During the 9/11 attacks, if Flight 93 hadn't crashed, one of the proposed plans was to ram the airliner with an F-16.

> During the 9/11 attacks, if Flight 93 hadn't crashed, one of the proposed plans was to ram the airliner with an F-16.

To be fair they were also very limited in possible responses on that day. There were only 14 armed fighters in the continental US with a couple hundred others off in Alaska playing war games with a simulated Russian attack: http://web.archive.org/web/20020917072642/http://www.aviatio...

The ground track in the article does not show them as over the ocean at any time during the flight.

If you listen to the ATC recordings, the Air Astana pilots repeatedly asked for vectors to the ocean with the intention of ditching the aircraft. They had trouble following headings provided by ATC, though, and then eventually regained enough control that they abandoned the idea of ditching.

It's amazing how they couldn't control the aircraft accurately enough to set a course for the ocean - something that covers most of the Earth's surface and was available 50 miles to the southwest, west or northwest - but then recovered enough to line up with a 50-metre wide strip of tarmac. That's an improvement of three orders of magnitude!

Yeah, the initial issue was that they couldn't hold any heading at all, because the autopilot wouldn't stay connected (and would not have worked correctly even if it had), and the control reversal [1] meant that in manual flight, any course correction they attempted didn't have the intended effect.

[1] It was actually even worse than control reversal, because this aircraft (like many modern jets) uses the spoilers as part of roll control, and those controls were not reversed, while the ailerons (primary roll control) were. The resulting aerodynamics are... complex! So even if they'd been told exactly what had happened to the controls, the pilots still likely would have had to figure out some modicum of control by trial and error as they did.

They turned off the autopilot very early.

Their difficulty is better revealed by the altitude and airspeed trace than the ground track. By the audio recording, just keeping the plane flying was so hard they couldn't afford attention to know what direction they were going, or even wanted to go.

Report is that the plane was actually landed by someone who had been jumpseating. Whether that is because he was a more versatile pilot, or because he was not completely exhausted by just keeping the plain flying for two hours, is not said.

They did not plan to ram it. An order was given to shoot it down. From a moral standpoint it was an example of a real life Trolley Problem.

"Trolley problem": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem"

The consensus on these type of problems leads to the conclusion the order was immoral.

"Behind the 9/11 White House Order to Shoot Down U.S. Airliners: ‘It Had to be Done’"

https://www.history.com/news/september-11-attacks-shootdown-...

It wasn't a trolley problem - that would be "sacrifice person A to save B, C and D". This was "person A is going to die, no matter what. Killing them now instead of in 30 minutes saves B, C and D".

The subtle but crucial difference is that A is not an uninvolved bystander, but instead someone who was dead either way

The jets guided them in. The airline pilots didn't need to deal with navigation, they just had to follow one of the jets. The other jet could do visual checks of the outside of the airplane.

Fascinating story but a fairly unsatisfying article. It would be nice to have a lot more colour on what happened, what the experience was like, and how they bought it down in one piece.

The Youtube video linked earlier however is heart stopping! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ywaMkMTwWk

If you are into that sort of thing here is United Airlines Flight 232 where they lost all control except for being able to throttle one remaining egine (and consequently steer but only to the right) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=099cHWSbAL8

AVHerald has (as always) a fairly comprehensive article about this event, with more details and less narrative: https://avherald.com/h?article=4c04438e

This reference is great. Includes a video taken from the Portuguese F16's that were escorting the plane. It shows the landing: https://youtu.be/98z41SwaVOQ

An interesting example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBY2dCnjr7c

The aircraft was not "completely uncontrollable".

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