Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
onemileatatime.com
onemileatatime.com
It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. Memo should be to training / recruitment - where did you find these pilots to fly a 777?
So they obviously didn't pre-flight the flight. And they don't seem to have used their takeoff checklist either? That should get them through flap retract and 2,000 feet or so.
Takeoff checklist might have rotate at 160 or so. Then you get to positive climb and V2. You then clean up the plane (flaps / gear etc), maybe hit 2,000 feet / 210kts?
This is all checklist stuff. I've no idea what's Emirates has as checklists, but this is like 101 entry level flying stuff. What was pilot monitoring doing during all this?
They still on ground at 215 kts? 262 kts at 175 feet?!
> I’m a captain at a U.S. major airline with a lot of time in 777s. [...] Also, this is something that SHOULD have been caught by at least two separate checklists, which they obviously didn’t do.
- Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above literal accuracy - Has lower-level officials that accept bribes - Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades
Assume any complex high-risk engineering system run by that culture will occasionally fail in major ways.
How many countries does that leave? And why only low level, why not also high level? Doesn't that rule out the US as well?
> - Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades
Also sounds arbitrary.
low level officials taking bribes means you can do stuff like never wear a seatbelt, just pay the cop $20 USD if you get pulled over. get pulled up for smoking indoors? $20 USD. run over an illegal immigrant and kill them? USD 1000 to have their records completely erased. Sim card? $5 USD cash. rape? what? the police here hung up on my friend on a 911 call because they spoke english and not the 'national language' (police do speak english here).on a different note, it is legal to rape your wife here
low level corruption causes immense problems and injustices in society. here, everyone drink drives. driving a car while extremely drunk here is default behaviour.
ye high level official bribery will cause probelms, but the low level stuff is what completely craters the system and causes the catastrophic failures in complex engineering systems.
i am in the country of mh370
the plane acting funny on landing in jakarta, sort of jumping around, weird turbulence
when it land, he look outside and see that one of the major aileron has fuselage completely missing and had been replace with electrical tape
the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron was replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by international airline technician
importantly, if this plane crash, nobody will ever admit this, cctv record deleted, etc. they will just blame beooing
This is wild speculation, based on second-hand information from your friend, who, given that they referred to it as electrical tape when anyone in the industry would know it's called speed tape and has no similarities with electrical tape, probably doesn't actually know which part of the aircraft is the aileron.
Speed tape on the wing is quite common anywhere in the world on any carrier, and is safe if done properly.
Lion Air and Indonesian aviation has a lot of problems in general, but I doubt this issue was genuinely a safety issue. Your friend probably felt some turbulence on landing.
Sorry, but that doesn't mean anything.
I hate that this thread descended into chauvinism and generalized cultural value judgments. The problem of excessive deference to authority plagues all cultures. By not being obsessed about saving face for our own society and acknowledging our own flaws, we make it easier for all of us to learn together.
There was actually lots of additional interesting technical detail from Mark D which I also left out; the part that was germane to the comment I replied to was the bit about the checklists, since that backed up the notion that the Emirates notice was messed up and weird.
The conclusion though, "Don’t fly on these types of carriers", can easily be interpreted as a sociocultural swipe, even if I'm inclined to believe Mark D meant something else and just botched the wording.
Takeoff configuration warning can be silenced, but is an abort before the 80 knot callout.
Wouldn't that much speed cause the plane to ascent naturally, even with zero pitch, just by the body lift? (Although, it is quite possible that real life planes have negative body lift, I have no idea)
I believe that while smaller planes will naturally pitch up as speed increases, jumbo jets are much more lumpant even with the correct flaps. That's the terrifying thing in my understanding: the plane basically had no manual pitch due to incorrect config values, and were barely gliding off the ground from minimal natural lift. Meanwhile the two potatoes at the helm were fiddling with the config values instead of pulling on the yoke.
The flight director did the right thing — displayed how it would manage level flight
The pilot did the wrong thing - copied the misconfigured flight director instead of flying the plane
If there’s more power than needed for the trimmed speed, the airplane will climb. If there’s less, it will descend.
262 knots is well within the trim range, so it’s impossible to say without knowing the trim setting, but if the airplane was programmed to hold an altitude at 262 knots, it could (by driving the stab angle of incidence higher or lower, as needed)
I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's crew. Train each crew to assume the plane they're prepping for their next flight is FUBAR in every way, checklist everything, fix it as necessary, and go from there. Don't rely on the prior crew for anything.
Emirates has a pretty good rep but this doesn't help.
This is very bizarre. I once had a morning flight out of Denver (not too long ago, August 2008?) and talking to people there apparently the plane had an electronics malfunction of some sort. They said they would fly us out as soon as the plane was ready but about ten hours later, they gave up and flew us out on a plane with a different airline (which I assume was not free for them, I doubt American Airlines would fly a plane for free for United). Point is the initial problem, at least what they told us, was some lights failed to turn on but they refused to fly. I thought flight crew were very risk averse but clearly not everyone.
These guys even flew the plane back instead of being replaced by another crew, and that's with a plane that has just been used way in excess of its design parameters on more than one measure.
There has been another incident where an Emirates crew lacked any kind of basic aircraft handling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Flight_521
Their main problem is a very bad rep for working conditions. Crews being overly fatigued, arcane labour laws in UAE, that makes it harder for them to hire pilots and to retain experienced pilots. Combined with a local market that doesn't have a big aviation history so less people to build on.
Really throwing failures at pilots without them knowing what's going on seems to mean too many fail or rather there is not enough time to train pre-discussed scenarios and do scenarios that aren't announced.
I'm not sure it's really what you'd want.
I'm just asking if it's really a reality as i previously got the impression airline training wasn't quite at that level. As in mostly you get an engine out because that needs training every time. And if the unexpected scenario is an engine out most of the time ... it's not really unexpected.
I wonder how often stuff like static port blockages and even maybe the flight director being wrong during takeoff are trained in an unexpected fashion. I'd expect quite rarely if at all. That's ok i suppose as it's rare failures, but the descriptions here kinda suggested a level of random scenarios being thrown at pilots ... which isn't quite realistic i think due to limited simulator time alone.
All pilots are trained to know the immediate actions required for a whole set of scenarios (we call these memory items) the point of the sim check is not to learn them but to check that you know all of them and to keep some recent experience. Because these things happen so rarely in real flights.
I've had for example only once had an engine failure after takeoff and it was a partial failure without fire. In the simulator I think I've done it at least 100 times and most times they put it on fire for good measure so you're in a hurry to get on the ground. The real world one was very uneventful, return to the airport, taxi back, do a lot of paperwork.
And that is how it should be. Pilots must be able to handle every possible failure. They don’t need to know every single procedure by heart, they’ve got the manuals in the cockpit for non-urgent procedures.
My father loves _flying_. He’s from a generation that trained on airplanes with little automation. He often talked about younger pilots relying too much on instruments. He would get annoyed with pilots that didn’t appreciate manually flying a plane.
At first I saw they might have been fired and thought damn that is strict.
It makes sense that there’d be a “clean cockpit” magic button to push, but not only would the magic button need to be tested in every aspect of flight, in every configuration, in every combination of working and broken sensors… but airplanes are flippin’ complex, and flying modern airliners as part of an airline is even more complex.
Even if something was missed, it's very strange to not realize that the plane is still on the ground when you can see the end of the runway, despite what the computers are saying. Usually pilots have trouble trusting the instruments over their own senses, but in this case it's like the opposite.
Nothing can help you when you refuse to operate the plane correctly.
Why on earth would you give the pilot an instruction that would almost certainly lead to a crash ? It seems like there aren’t enough sanity checks. Any such dodgy situation should trigger an alarm and disengage the auto pilot imo.
Commercial aviation is designed around highly trained people following defined procedures. Auto pilots are not supposed to second-guess the inputs because that adds to confusion and cognitive load on the pilots. Pilots tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.
What _should_ have happened here is the pilot monitoring should be watching the instruments and calling out flight stages. When the pilot flying didn’t initiate a proper climb they should have called this out, or taken over control until a safe altitude was established. This wasn’t an autopilot issue, this was a breakdown on crew resource management.
It's hard to say if it's a good thing or not, imagine an incorrect flight plan is entered but non 0, you could fly straight into another flight path or an obstacle, like a mountain.
> I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's crew.
It's not a matter of responsibility, it's a risk mitigation measure. Adding the additional check is common in aviation. Yes, it is the next crew's responsibility, however if you can mitigate a risk by adding some procedure to what the previous crew does, at little or no cost until a software update is released fixing the issue, you do that every time.
A button like that would be pretty dangerous. Just imagine somebody pressed this in an emergency...
In general flying a plane is already complex. You need to be able to understand what is going to happen to the plane when you press a button. Something that resets a lot of other settings would have extremely complex consequences.
It is; there's a picture of it on https://www.godsavethepoints.com/emirates-flight-231-takeoff...
Imagine having an intermediate system in your Tesla, one between fully manual and the autopilot. This system uses the navigation capabilities of the autopilot to draw in the big screen some squares that guide you to your destination without the need to look outside. Something you may find in a videogame. This system is helpfull and easy to use, and allows you to pay attention to more important matters.
Well, now imagine getting so used to this system that you forget how to drive without the squares telling you what to do every single moment. So used that if the squares guide you to drive straight to a wall at 100mph you do it without hesitation.
This is what supposedly happened in this case. The flight director is there to help you, but you are supposed to know how to fly without it.
When you rotate an airliner the initial pitch is around 15 degrees nose up, that way your rate of climb and the optimal climb speed is maintained.
They kept the nose almost horizontal, against any natural instinct for a pilot. They almost overrun the runway without rotating, and they barely rotated just enough to be able to keep the flight director centered in their screen.
It seems that the speed went beyond the structural limit of the tyres (around 200 kts) and if they didn’t retract the flaps, beyond their structural limit too. And then they proceeded to fly almost scratching the obstacles in their path.
Why does something like this happpens? Because in an airline like Emirates actual piloting skills are actively punished!. You are not allowed to fly the plane manually, nor disconect automatic systems if they are available.
They expect robot like precission applying procedures, modern airliners log dozens of instruments and have automatic reports when procedure limitation are exceeding (is a big brother like work environment). This may seem a good philosophy, but it actually creates an situation where pilots loose necessary skills, and when computers or procedures fail, as they often do in airplanes, pilots are not able to react properly anymore.
I’m sure Emirates will punish the pilots and will set new procedures over the current ones, to try to avoid this kind of situations in the future. They will solve nothing, they will only make it worse. Is a culture of fear and punishment. This also happens in other middle east airlines like Qatar. Airlines in Asia are making this mistake too.
In contrast airlines in the US and Europe (except Ryanair and some other British carriers) give pilots much more freedom regarding manual flight, which helps them to keep their skills honed.
Hope this gives a different perspective on the problem. The wrong altitude selection is the minor of the problems in this case IMHO.
I am an Airline captain with 22 years of experience (737, MD88, A320, A330 and A340) and more than 14k flight hours.
Edit, some typos and making a couple of sentences more clear.
The worst landing I ever had was when I landed with no sensation of touching down on the runway (a zero feet rate of descent.) Both myself and my CFI went nuts trying to figure out if we were down, or still flying along the runway and about to bounce.
I've never flown anything where I couldn't just look out of the window to check so I don't know but it feels like there should be :)
This was at night also.
An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway and you have to get the hook down.
He was recently bemoaning the following situation:
1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!)
2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time.
3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!
This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again, failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.
Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.
Any kind of pressure on pilots to make connections or to reduce the number of go arounds or even alternates should be pushed back against hard. It can only lead to more accidents.
After falling asleep for 10 minutes over the mid-atlantic at some point before I was born, apparently all the pilots in the airline agreed to sleep in shifts for safety reasons, and never told management about it...
He also has a story about a frozen Canada goose coming through the windscreen at FL300 above a dark cloud, but that's a story for another day...
I'd love to hear your dad's stories, there isn't a pilot that I know that doesn't have an evening's worth of material, so if you have the time to write that one up that would be great.
Edit; never mind, I looked at your profile.
One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew into the ground. He said he'd be damned if he was going to do that, and kept one eye on the lead and the other eye on the ground.
He spent some years as a flight instructor, who sits in the back seat. There were incidents where the student would panic and crash the airplane. That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.
(That Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic a few years ago was an example of the junior pilot panicking and holding the stick back till it crashed.)
That's awesome haha. Hope your dad is well.
One problem AF447 faced was that the closest thing to instructor who could whack the panicking pilot returned to cabin too late to fix it...
He is two months older than Betty White! Sadly, he passed at 93. I sorely miss him. But thanks for the kind thoughts, I appreciate them.
But in that case (I think you mean AF447) there was a lot more going on with confusing warning indications. They did however fly a perfectly functioning aircraft straight into the sea.
but the gp point has validity.
if the controls were physically linked, like they are in boeing aircraft, the pilots who were putting in opposing inputs would have realized what was going on pretty quickly.
It would be like alleviating a motorcycle manufacturer from responsibility of a bad design by claiming riders wouldn’t be hurt if they were wearing all their protective gear. It may be true while also being sub-standard design practice for a safety-critical system.
Pilots are.
I’m wondering how to avoid flying on airlines who have bad practices but at present I’m not sure how to tell.
Your safest choice is a US or EU legacy carrier. But for example in Asia you will not have that choice for local routes. Then there aren't that many things you can see on the outside. But one thing that can help is going with a large airline that also operates long haul flights into the US and Europe. There is a list for example of airlines banned from operating into Europe. You get on that list by having questionable safety or maintenance practices. So being allowed to operate flights to Europe is a small positive signal.
They really have high standard and try their best to have the best safety standars. Is not for lack of trying. Is that their system has gome far too much in one direction that is now backfiring.
Absolutely you may have an airline that allows too much manual flying and too low procedure standars (it is what happened at first in commercial aviation). There is a sweet spot between standart procedure and manual proficiency, and some airlines have been going way beyond that spot for some time.
I thought Ryanair were Irish?
Also, why are Ryanair et al doing this? I mean, obviously Ryanair have a bit of a reputation.
Why imagine there is hope of that? Is there some question as to the credibility of the reporting here? If this memo claim were fake I imagine Emirates would deny the report and initiate some lawsuits. The story linked here is based on the reporting[1] of one Gilbert Ott of godsavethepoints.com over five days ago which includes a image of the 'memo' Emirates issued, so someone has actually put their name on this story, including the report about the memo.
Blatant dysfunction should not be discounted through false hopes. This airline is clearly operated by incompetents, both in the cockpit and among its management. Someone will doubtless feel compelled to cite some safety record or another; this carries no weight if you cannot eliminate the contribution of aircraft designers and the automation they've provided. And you can't.
[1] https://www.godsavethepoints.com/emirates-flight-231-takeoff...
The only hope one may legitimately cling to is that the problem space is mostly solved by the automation and the autopilot operators occupying the cockpits of these aircraft continue to not interfere with it too much.
That's pretty bad. Here in NL was have a similar situation where the state is shareholder of KLM/AF leading to all kinds of bizarre decisions in recent times. But at least I'd hope that some people at the regulator would resign rather than avoid doing their jobs when safety is on the line.
Then we need to be prepared to fund the regulators appropriately. I think part of the problem is they are stretched so thin it becomes impossible to know enough about each system an individual regulator is expected to verify/certify.
Where's the basic pilotage here?
I'm a US CPL holder and there are numerous basic airmanship systems in place to prevent this. For one, you note your acceleration rate and how far down the runway you are. Then you have V1, V2 speeds where you rotate.
How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. You ignore them and figure out what went wrong when safely in the air.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics...
Insane
The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.
Actually doing that is a memory item, intended to be prompted by a "Vr" call from the pilot not flying. As far as I know it's not yet clear whether the PNF gave that call, but the PF certainly waited to rotate until well after reaching Vr. This is where the "sanity checking" appears to have failed, with the PF heeding the misconfigured flight director when it disagreed with other instruments and the situation visible out the cockpit windshield.
I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in the tires to blow.
At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn well like it or not, with the only exception being (I believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway.
Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.)
Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?" and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are completely boned if you lose both engines.
The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere even remotely close to the end of the runway.
Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the captain should have taken control a second or two after the first officer failed to rotate at V2.
My guess is that the captain was flying and the first officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell, and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that. Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of his buddies.
Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.
V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway.
V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous.
Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated).
The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case).
Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.
The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.
What does that have to do with anything?
The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 550 people.
If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the smallest aircraft in their fleet.
And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.
The Middle East doesn't have nearly the pool of pilots to start with compared to North America, and even NA is suffering from an extreme shortage of pilots. (Wonder why the airlines no longer fly to your small town? Probably because of a shortage of pilots)
There is a low-paid and debt-heavy portion of the career. However, Medical students aren't paid and even the lowest-paid pilot is making more than the average phd candidate.
Also it's probably easier to get student loans for medicine than it is for piloting.
Maybe the regional carriers should pay more and have better conditions but funny how they describe it as a "pilot shortage". It's just supply and demand.
You can, of course, easily solve the problem by raising wages for regional jet pilots, but it takes a few years for the excess pilots to propagate to the major carriers.
Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay
The problems that occurred here are neither unique to Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and complacency are global issues.
this is a training issue, is it not? So related to qualification to some degree
I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me.
If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.
It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.
We used to have a big pond in the frontyard. One day it was completely covered in duckweed (kroos in dutch) and one of my friends just walked straight into it, not aware of the water underneath.
Glad you didn’t try that out with your car!
https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compart...
I've ridden through Chiang Mai after a heavy rain when the streets were all a foot deep, so you'd get a nice foot wash riding along and despair for your flip flops when stopped.
And if you strayed too far from the car in front or cut a corner, you'd find the 4 foot deep drainage ditches and 12 foot deep canals along the sides of the main roads.
Think of how silly this is though. You offload driving to a car, then...demand passenger give absolute attention every second that car operates itself. For one, this is a pointless tool if you have to monitor it all the time. For another, it is impossible that humans will be able to focus their attentions fully when they aren't really doing anything to drive the car. The better self-driving gets (say, safe and effective 99.999% or any incremental level higher), the less the human monitor will actually be watching. Thus the more likely any error will be catastrophic.
Even the failures you see in the beta of Tesla FSD, aren’t catestrophic. The worst I’ve seen is a curb strikes in terms of actual “accidents”
Tesla FSD has many deaths and countless serious accidents under it's belt. Which doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but as expected a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does and the kind of mistakes that tesla does doesn't inspire confidence (but rather nightmare fuel that you just can't wake up from).
They should be banned until they have level 4 and take responsibility for their cars actions. Blaming it on a human driver and calling it a day is ludicrous.
I think this is particularly problematic because with other humans, we can at least develop a sense of what types of mistakes they tend to make and try to adjust our driving accordingly. Things like not driving in another person's blind-spot, etc. but also more subtle stuff. I feel like there a sort of hive-mind that develops amongst drivers and probably makes things safer than they would otherwise be.
There have been 0 deaths from FSD and as far as I’m aware only 1 crash. Do you mean autopilot? Or navigate on auto pilot?
The car also features a yoke instead of a wheel. Which makes holding the yoke while autopilot is driving almost impossible.
Autonomous driving is a mess.
“Nearly accident” is the same as “not an accident” and definitely not: catastrophic .
Just like bumping into someone while walking is way less serious than bumping into another car while driving.
Is crashing your car at 50km/h not potentially deadly or dangerous? Of course it is. So, what are you talking about?
When planes typically fly in the air, how many other planes are nearby? 0
When cars drive on the road, how many other cars or pedestrians are nearby? Often many
Just because planes get completely obliterated at the speeds they travel doesn't mean cars going much slower in accidents come out unscathed. This is like elementary school stuff here.
I agree that there is a lot more going on with cars, as traffic and road conditions vary more than air traffic and sky conditions.
But my response is the failures aren’t that bad in the car world. Autopilot (ie lane keep and cruise control) have been probably safer than human drivers. Navigate on autopilot is very stable, but limited to highway… that’s why I referred to the lower speed, because high speed is closer to solved. The hard part of full self driving, is city streets, which is typically lower speeds. The failure mode of FSD is typically for it to just stop… I have never seen a single failure where it full speeds into another object. This did seem to happen sometimes in autopilot in the past, but not FSD
What do you make of this near-miss posted recently? Allegedly, FSD was on when the car veered into the lane of an oncoming car.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/re7vxr/fsd...
As an aside, it seems strange to me that the high beams switch Off as they approach the oncoming car. Seems the driver disabled them… auto disabled would have meant they detected the car, which then seems unlikely they’d move into it’s path. But very hard to judge off camera alone… they might not even be on FSD. Shrug.
This is because drivers are giving 100% attention to monitoring the car in these scenarios. So again, this means the tool is useless (right now it is), or if the driver stops paying attention and becomes an unfocused passenger (the actual point of self-driving) then the tool becomes absurdly deadly.
Everywhere along this spectrum, as attention declines, catastrophic risk goes up. Self driving is vapor ware at best, a scandal at worst. It's not going to end well.
I would hope not. :)
of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from behind is at fault, but brake-checking is problematic
The car behind is always responsible for maintaining distance.
Realistically, if the tesla felt squeezed by a car it was passing, going a bit onto the shoulder would have been what I would have expected from a human driver. But no auto steering, tesla or otherwise, is going to do that.
I don't know where you live, but where I live (Denmark) brake-checking is a serious traffic offense which can lead to loss of license. While the driver behind has to keep distance, you cannot brake for non-traffic reasons. I.e. you cannot simply brake-check someone on the freeway because you think the driver behind you is driving too close (also a serious offense).
I don’t know where/why you are attributing sinister motives here… it seems a very understandable motive to make transport better.
Say what? Is this some kind of industry joke that I'm not getting?
> The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems
https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic...
Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asbestos_disease_medic...
Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium#Hazards
I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.
But they don't support the thesis that we might find something unpleasant about power electronics that we don't yet know about.
I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or government concern needs to become great enough to enforce it through regulation.
I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits, people like me don't want to give up convenient packaging etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and businesses at the same time by banning it too fast. Similar story for the climate crisis.
Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.
But that's not what the parent implied.
And then you have an entire car’s worth just strapped to the bottom of your chassis.
As is standard fuel used in combustion engines (which you know) so how does the argument of flammability hold stronger here?
Ford Pinto blew up due to tank puncture during an accident.
Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.
Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.
I'm very pro EV but lithium is spicy.
Material science improvements won’t overcome the fundamental fact that the third atomic element on the periodic table just really wants to light things on fire.
It's not far removed from flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.
If it’s good enough for us (two small cameras and two microphones all mounted right next to each other) why is it inherently infeasible for a computer?
Saying it's just cameras and microphones vastly over simplifies what driving involves for a human.
A fellow named Planck knew, when he used the expression E=hv to describe the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. You just missed class that day, I imagine. Fortunately it's never too late to learn.
All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.
Edit: Ah OP replied. It’s the Kia Forte in the US.
This is the crux of the intractable problem of AI/self-driving marketing vaporware, and why until this nonsense is shut down, the situation will probably have to get scandalously worse before it gets better (better meaning regulating fake "self driving" off the road as a public safety travesty).
And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work (phone calls, laptop, w/e) or sleep, and pay to be driven everywhere than to drive yourself. FSD lowers that income threshold tremendously and could be a significant boon to overall human productivity. If it ever happens.
Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly. Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely offloading the responsibility to the car and doing whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if it was public transit.
But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.
Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.
But aside from all of this theorizing, the actual product is NOWHERE near high 9's reliable. As it gets better, attention will drop but errors will still be pervasive. And with this as backdrop, the fact the marketing has ever even hinted at being general-AI type FSD (the name itself for example) is a scandal. The videos of people riding in the backseat, or any other instance of not monitoring the car fully because they think it can drive itself. I predict there's going to a be an endless stream of accidents from these cars then FSD will be shut down until fully proven, which won't be technically possible for a long long time if ever in our lifetimes.
Agreed. If I got a Telsa tomorrow I wouldn't do so with "FSD".
> Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.
I'm not sure what effectiveness you're measuring. There will always be fatal accidents with heavy vehicles moving at high speeds. It's more of a regulatory issue where the accident rate of auto-pilot systems is sufficiently lower than human drivers (because I believe it is already lower in many situations, just not sufficiently lower or ubiquitously lower) and we decide its good enough to no longer require monitoring by the driver.
Edit: I guess its even more complicated than that. Using hypothetical numbers, if the accident-free rate of a human is 99%, and auto pilot is better at 99.9%, but combined (auto-pilot with human monitoring and rare intervention) is 99.999%, can we justify allowing no monitoring in that situation? Can we expect people to follow the law or will it turn in to more of a speed-limit type grey area.
Search youtube videos of Teslas if you haven't seen them yet. The cars will randomly swerve into parked cars, inexplicably steer out of turns, aim directly at medians on the highway. Human errors on average do not equate to this if we want to compare human error "rates" to machine. What is the rate of a random catastrophic error? Machines are way way too high for the foreseeable future, and because of the nature of software bugs they arguably always be higher than humans. The scope of what AI has to be to achieve "general" driving on open-map roads with near infinite variables nearly equates to "general" AI itself.
You can't allow "halfway" monitoring the car. It's all or nothing. It's always monitored or it's not monitored because errors can happen at any time. But anyways, humans aren't robots. Their attention basically not focused if it's not focused completely... multi-tasking is false, and humans already fall asleep fairly easily driving manually. If they have to sit there "focused" but not driving this will lead to even more instances of sleeping or just not monitoring generally.
The numbers are a thought experiment what I mean by effectiveness or mistake or error is just the driver (man or machine) doing something they shouldn't have. Messing up. Humans have very low rates of these mistakes/bad actions/errors. They have very very low rates of catastrophic mistakes. I predict Tesla's won't be 99.anything for a long time. But think of how error-free they have to be to account for the huge domain of roads, signs, weather, terrains, other cars such that when they make their mistakes it doesn't result in disaster... or just "accidents" galore.
Still it is very weird when the car turn the wheel for you with your hand being guided.
No hand up display and not sure if just voice to tell me to drive to lake would I do that.
This along with the fact that in my 2020 Toyota Corolla those features can more than likely get you into an accident is the reason I have them turned off. I don't actually feel safe with them on after experiencing their performance. Also notice a stutter in acceleration due to fuel injection timing and response from the gas pedal that concerns me.
"OK Google zoom in the map by 2X"
nope
"OK Google don't hide all the businesses while on navigation mode"
nope
"OK Google show all street labels don't hide them from me"
nope
"OK Google rotate the map to the right 30 degrees for 5 seconds"
nope
"OK Google show me satellite maps instead"
nope
"OK Google pause notifications from Facebook while driving"
nope
... I bet most people have to fiddle with their screens due to OK Google's utter incompetence.
Meanwhile the people on the OK Google team are busy figuring out how to arrange a damn haircut which I never needed.
I've been wondering why we haven't really had any advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade - things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted to be able to perform.
Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the bottom and map is hard locked to current heading, when navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with zero visibility of the rest of the route as they still haven't bothered doing a projection and modifying rotation dynamically - they're not even trying.
All your examples are exactly the kinds of things that an intelligent system should be able to respond to, in order to be useful.
Getting that haircut ordered is the _last_ thing we need.
Wasn't their core business Advertising? Guess they are just not into these sidetracks much.
I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day. And here is the problem: management will ask: "so if we add handling for 'rotate the map 30 deg', how many people will appreciate it?". The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions". For an MbA trained manager that means there is no reason to do it. And its the same with every other similar discovery.
Running an NLP based tool requires staffing a 10-20 people full time, telling them to keep the quality high and leaving them the fck alone. Thats anathema for most companies that proclaim to be "metric based". Google is a prime example of this behavior.
But you control that to some extent. If more people are aware of the command and believe it will work (I wouldn't) then you'll probably get higher incidence rates. I wouldn't believe it would work because like the person two parent comments above, less than half the novel crap I try works. So I try novel crap less and less frequently compared to things that I know will work.
Especially that those systems can usually be "proven to work" because they succeed in millions of cases a day.
Never will I ever tell you what the arterial route you're currently on is called though. Sucker.
I just risk a fine and use my hands for a short moment instead of spending 2 minutes being distracted by siri.
None of these systems show you enough 'under the hood' to know why it's failing and so react. Clearly, here the voice recognition, tts are working well; some optional visual feedback would be great - like show on screen a list of responses:
- Keyword heard
- OK Google responding
- Voice1 recognised
- Input "navigate home"
- Input sent to maps
- Maps didn't understand
- Reporting failure
I guess Google know all this, at the time of the query, but as they don't know what I'm trying to do (though 'navigate home' is pretty clear, perhaps I was actually saying 'buy a gnome') ... doesn't seem like there's a proper feedback loop to help direct/correct the system?
The most hilarious example of how bad Siri is for me, is that literally 100% of the time that I'm playing something on Apple TV, if I say "Hey Siri, pause the TV" (or any variation, calling it Apple TV, including the name of the room, etc.) it always replies that there's nothing currently playing. And if I tell Siri on my phone to play on the Apple TV, all it can do is start Apple Music playing a random song on the TV. It can however respond OK to "resume on Apple TV" which restarts whatever I was watching that had been paused.
Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.
> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the top levels.
People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or because of fame rather than because they like it.
People that have some other favourable attributes to flying Emirates.
Lack of CRM on the cockpit.
But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't disagree with this.
This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it.
But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc. - because it generally has to be to cause a bad outcome or even get close to it.
Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. It was a near miss that needs to be addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.
Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.
This is the exact wrong way to think about it.
With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it.
With risk management by knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, you can make an ordinary practice of very risky activities very safely.
But when you are rolling the dice and getting away with it, you may get away with it for a long time, long enough to think you are safe, but it WILL bite you, and hard.
"Near misses" are very clear indications that your risk management has a failure mode you didn't account for - and you are now in the zone of rolling the dice. If you do not attend to that, you are about to get bitten.
So, just because no one was hurt or died — this time — does NOT mean you can be relieved.
That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.
Just because you are [using knowledge, technology, skill, & planning] to manage risk once does NOT mean that the job is done. It needs to be constantly maintained.
If it is not constantly maintained, you are slipping back into the zone of [rolling the dice and getting away with it]. It will bite you.
What comes to mind is the last video from the very experienced skydiver which was normal until chute-opening-time, then got very chaotic and ended - he'd become so comfortable/complacent that he didn't do his checklist, jumped with only a knapsack instead of his chute. I'm sure he started out checking everything well. But getting casual and complacent killed him.
It definitely was a failure in the sense of "we need to do failure analysis and make sure we don't get this close again", but it also was a success in the sense of "ultimately, something prevented a catastrophic outcome" (and studying that, and potentially trying to replicate those positive aspects at other airports, is also something that should to happen).
The most likely "something" was Pure Dumb Luck, just a random combination of factors that happened to work out favorably. Of course, on the chance that there was some particular factor/event/action that could be replicated and reliably prevent the disaster, then sure, we should have a look.
I'd definitely make a good survey for that, but the focus really needs to be further back in the chain of events to find out what thing(s) failed.
And of course to be in any way relaxed about this because they weren't scraping up parts from 300+ bodies this time is folly.
I’m not a pilot (I’m still very scared) and it’s been a long time so forgive me if my language isn’t correct. However, my understanding from that conversation is that this sort of thing is a system failure. Nobody got hurt and there may have been no damage, but they would consider this an overall system failure.
Several people made mistakes here. There was the pilot who made the near fatal entry. And many pilots failed to spot the error. They didn’t perform their pre-flight properly and would have had to forget a checklist.
They apparently didn’t even figure it out when the runway lights changed to signify “you done fucked up.” (Can a pilot weigh in?? Is that an aviation term?) :)
This system failed. It’s pure luck that everyone survived.
Events like this are not Boeing's fault and will continue until foreign airlines can get rid of corruption.
I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.
The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer.
The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.
I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.
This reminds me of the (in)famous "take a right" sketch from The Office [1]. Granted, that was a TV show and they were "piloting" a car, not a 777.
I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was focused on managing the computers rather than actually flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.
Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track 90° from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was look outside.
Wouldn't there also be a copilot who is double checking this stuff?
Let’s not fix the actual issue (not following the proper procedures) but something further down the line which looks like the cause if you have no clue what’s happening.
This seems like a fault of the crew (obviously), but probably more on the PNF (pilot not flying) than the PF (pilot flying). Article says 4 pilots were on board, but fails to mention that 2 of them (relief pilots) were likely not in the cockpit on the departure.
It’s hard for me to imagine that a qualified crew would fly such a non-standard departure with “we were following the flight director” as an excuse. There’s nothing above you to hit on departure; get away from terrain! Fly the calculated airspeeds. Where was the Vr callout?! That rotation to a pitch angle is what takes you off the runway, not the FD command bars.
Once they made the mistake and corrected it, I don’t have much concern with the continuation. 262 knots indicated isn’t that big of a deal that I’d worry about shedding parts from departure flaps and leading edge devices or stressing the gear (they likely pulled the gear up well before breaking 250 KIAS anyway). I’d be more concerned with the safety of an overweight landing than continuing. (A 777 can dump fuel, but the crew that just moments ago couldn’t fly an entirely routine departure isn’t the crew that I want to be calling an audible and figuring out how to safely dump fuel at night and return for a max weight landing. How would they program the FD for that?! ;) )
My prediction is that almost every pax had no idea how close to dying they came until they read about it later.
I catch heat every time I mention that air crew training and certification standards are not uniform across the globe and that I am reluctant to fly on many foreign-flag carriers. (However, Emirates and most EU-flag carriers are ones that I would not hesitate to fly on.)
1 255
5 235
15 215
20 200
25 190
30 180
262 is way high for 30 degrees with slats.
Edit: At least for the topic of this discussion. However, I'll now be able to win a bar bet when someone aks what flaps position for a heavy take off of a 777 would be
Do you want them declaring an emergency, dumping fuel, flying around at night, and coming back for a max weight emergency landing? Or do you want them continuing the flight, sending someone back with a flashlight to look over the wing trailing edge, and continuing on as normally as possible to DC? If my butt or a family member's butt is on that airplane, I don't want these yoke holders trying to figure out and execute the emergency procedure after flunking the standard day one of flight school procedure, while flustered from almost milking themselves, and knowing that they’re looking for a job in the new year. Take a few hours; paint a magenta line all the way to DC and fly it.
Has anyone made some sort of a rough list of which carriers one can feel safe on?
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/eu-air-safet...
I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the list before I did a project with them last year. After that, I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.
Does this include One World/Star Alliance members?
I DO know that even the airlines in NA/Europe etc. have their own share of... Challenges.. And a lot of those are saved by the regulatory / operating environment / culture, and those safeguards don't necessarily always exist elsewhere in the world.
Look up air Maroc flight 439
Are you able to elaborate? My email address is in my profile if you want to share in private.
Companies are actively trying to change it, but they aren't there yet and it's an uphill battle that has to start basically at the kindergarten level.
That culture also drives a major "image" focus, where how things look is more important that how things actually operate. I'm not from the Middle East, but this is what was communicated to us by our client / locals we interviewed.
Air France dropped of my list of airlines to fly on after AF447.
This is why you should keep the window shade open during taxi, takeoff and landing (a handful of airlines require this, but IME it’s the minority). In the event of a crash or other incident you also want to know what’s outside the plane. Maybe there is burning debris on your side, so you want to exit from the other?
It’s common for daytime ops from desert airports for the cabin crew to ask you to close them at the gate to minimize heat gain on the aircraft.
The 777-300ER has two jump-seats in the cockpit. I believe standard practice is for the "off duty" crew to be in the cockpit, in the jump-seats, for takeoff and landing (basically, any time the "sterile cockpit" rule would apply).
My understanding is that the 121 guys train to fly the FD and not "wing it." I think it's easier for us 91 guys to jump to the "just fly the plane" mentality.
That said, still a pretty baffling situation all around, especially the seemingly lackadaisical attitude towards post-exceedance inspection.
Perhaps they are "Children of the Magenta":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
... and I cannot recommend this video enough.
I am not a pilot and I have no interest in flying nor any particular interest in aviation, generally ... and I find this talk to be fascinating.
EDIT: you can jump to 3:35 where he gives a specific example of a situation where pilots need to choose between automation dependency and dropping down a level of automation. He's a really good speaker and you can tell the audience is very engaged.
I find it weird that we learn so little about aviation when the industry has so much to teach us. The checklist manifesto was a great attempt to try to implement checklists in the hospital and other places, but from CRM to workload management there is so much to benefit from what the airline industry has pioneered.
Regulators play an important role in life safety situations. Beware of regulatory capture (737MAX not getting new type certification).
Still watching it but wanted to comment.
So taking this away from aviation,the reactions and issues he shares are exactly my concerns with self driving cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WITLR_qSPXk
Might be easier to watch for anyone using a device with crappy speakers.
He had to do it manually because some FD/GPS system was not correctly functioning or was inop, and then after doing this there was no warning that the plane's current position was suddenly registered as several hundred miles away from its last position. (correction, there were some warnings that were noticed but disregarded as they were very short and disappeared momentarily)
On takeoff, the autopilot was engaged and dutifully turned its heading to the course believed to be from the current (erroneous) position to the first desired waypoint -- throwing the plane into an unexpected large turn in a low altitude risky phase of takeoff. The pilots correctly saw some problem, but incorrectly then carried out a series of mistaken recovery steps leading to full disengagement of the plane's normal coordinated flight controls ("normal law", etc) to try and get it to behave. Apparently, everything except just shutting A/P off.
Well, one thing cascaded on another, the plane couldn't be reset back into normal flight control mode, there was fog, etc. and they couldn't land back in MEL and had to divert several hundred miles to SYD or wherever and a whole incident. It could have been even worse.
Seems that complicated systems... can get complicated easily if you overlook or start off unsure of what has gone wrong.
Bad FMC data entry during preflight caused pilots to fly west, rather than east, until they were too low on fuel and crashed into the Amazon rainforest. Sun was setting, so cardinal direction was obvious, leading some passengers to ask flight attendants why they were flying the wrong direction, but they were brushed off.
The ghastly Helios accident [1] was also triggered by a misconfiguration (by maintenance staff). Sure, you’ll tell the pilots again to actually run their checklists, but you’ll also tell the maintenance crew not to screw up the standard settings.
Counterpoint: if you have a checklist item, and it is always in the desired/expected configuration already, you might start to skip it (with the concomitant consequences if one day it isn’t).
Maybe flight crews/maintenance staff should configure the machine randomly after a flight/maintenance, so as to force the next crew to actually run the checklist carefully?
Would you manually reinstall and reconfigure your workstation every morning?
Some settings should clearly start as blank and be required. Other settings could start as as a default value (defined by the airline) and the pilots would merely have to confirm that it is correct, or deviate from it.
The point is, we can do a lot better UI-wise than just reusing the settings from the previous flight, and with a little thought put into it the configuration process could be both safer and faster.
This reminds me a little of Adam Langley's advice for keeping software protocol extensibility points well-oiled:
You might want to define and implement dummy extensions once a year or such, and retire old ones on a similar schedule. When extensions contain lists of values, define a range of values that clients insert at random. (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html)
I also wonder about the decision to continue on after overspeeding the flaps. Takeoff flaps with full load on the 777-300ER is 15 degrees. Max airspeed with that setting is 215. They hit 260 at 175ft.
edit: omegant points out that the tires have been over-speed:
Just an amateur here, I could be wrong.
It is true that according to the article, autopilot was not engaged and the pilot was following the flight director during the take off roll. However, had the pilots obtained positive climb, and satisfied autopilot activation requirements, and turned it on, wouldn't it be catastrophic if the altitude had not been set properly? [0]
[0] See, eg, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46137445
That reminds me of Air India Express Flight 611, where the plane hit the antenna at the end of the runway and the brick perimeter wall(!) Even though ATC notified the pilots that they hit something, the pilots decided to keep flying for 4 hours. On landing, the plane was found to have a bunch of damage including a hole in the underside.
(The underlying problem was the captain's seat backrest collapsed during takeoff and he accidentally yanked back on the throttle, reducing their takeoff speed.)
The point is that pilots can hit something during takeoff, do severe damage to the plane, and totally not realize it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Express_Flight_611
Interesting video on the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kA6m1U0QUA
Suggest replacing 'Boeing 777' in the title with 'Emirates aircraft'
There is the radio-altimeter which uses ground based radar but that is for spoken-aloud altitude readouts and terrain warnings and as far as I’m aware doesn’t factor in Boeing or airbus autopilot.
At least in the U.K., the lingo has us refer to this always as height (ie, above the ground) and not altitude (within the air above a hypothetical sea level)
> It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.
It’s not, the pilots are complete fucking morons who ignored multiple checklists and basic knowledge about flying (210 knots on the ground is insane).
This wasn’t autopilot or anything like that. It’s just hints for an already manual operation.
The airplane should already have a terrain database in the ground proximity warning system, so triggering a warning in this case doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, should have very low false positives, and could improve flight safety.
Should it be necessary? Theoretically not, but pilots are human, and we have to choose whether we want to be smug about their stupidity while piecing together 300+ charred corpses, or account for humans doing human things.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56894/why-is-0-...
Besides: you can't fix stupid, if someone switches on the autopilot seconds after wheels up without checking what altitude it is set for it could be anything, including below ground level. Autopilots aren't magic, and pilots have a very large amount of discretion in how they fly the airplane, but these pilots weren't really prepared to fly the plane for one second more than they had to.
There is a reason they got sacked. Oh, and as to this being a Boeing issue: this setting can be entered on any autopilot. I'm all for giving Boeing shit when they are the ones that messed up but here they didn't.
Or you could put:
"Random plane had random incident. Somewhere. Airline."
/s.
Biggest flag is flying pilot apparently selecting autopilot on immediately after takeoff. Emirates note to their crews,is even more bizarre. Like an hospital reminding Anesthesiologists to check if patients are fully knocked out before operations.
Incident still under investigation but it looks bad.
"The aircraft performed the return flight EK-232 on schedule"
Not that I would have a problem with that. It's his site, I have not paid, so he can do things his style. It must be an unbelievable effort to gather all the information.
For passenger who are knowledgeable, this was certainly frightening. Ignorance is bliss for most of us.
Or is there some software that takes in the data from each flight and spots differences like this, there could be several more instances in the global data if this is a manual process.
Could be an interesting little project, although I guess the data isn't publicly available.
From a research perspective, the US has a strong model of voluntary reporting of safety events to NASA ASRS which is used by researchers. This is all human-generated rather than automated, but that's probably a good thing since am explicit goal of ASRS is to not be viewed as a punitive or disciplinary system. It has long been found that if people think safety incidents will be used for discipline or evaluation, then they won't report safety incidents - which is the origin of NASA acting as a neutral non-regulatory party to collect this data.
One 777 pilot commented to say that this issue should have been caught by at least two checklists, implying that neither checklists had been followed.
Tangentially: if my 2006 Mercedes is reset (battery disconnected) it needs to idle for 20 minutes to re-learn the idle pattern. The vehicle then needs to be driven around for a bit to re-learn driving patterns. I wonder if there are similar settings on a 777 that would need to be preserved between 'resets'.
No, it doesn't, clearly. It provides a procedure that can be followed to put it to a known state, but its existence does not put it into a known state, with certainty. A reset puts it into a known state, with certainty. That known reset state probable wouldn't be useful, but can be set to be least-damaging, where a checklist can then be used to then put it into a "good" state.
My assumption is that many planes don't allow a reset to be trivial, since levers and whatnot are involved.
I also assume the FAA/military has done research into this and, probably, found that requiring a manual checklist resulted in stricter adherence to the checklist.
I think you are correct -- not everything is a software setting. There are physical switches and dials and other mechanical controls involved.
Also having to poke the computer also helps check that the computer isn't obviously broken.
There are a ton of computers (FADECs for engines, fuel management computers, FMS (flight management), PFC (flight computers), weight and balance computers... and much more). All of these have state. Which way is up for the gyros. Proper direction for the compasses. Proper location on Earth for the navigation system... etc. Basically, a 777 has the mother of all POST sequences, so frames in line operation are rarely restarted, for operational efficiency.
Reminds me of the navigation systems for some rockets (Atlas, IIRC), that require 24 hrs sitting level on the pad to fully initialize their starting ground state (super precise gyros). This ain't like restarting your internet connected juicer.
234 knots is 433km/h.
I was kayaking with a long ago girlfriend and we were in the parking lot for the Winthrop boat launch. And I do remember we got into some conversation with a local and HE TALKED VERY LOUDLY. Which was something we joked about for a time.
You could actually land your boat at the end of Logan airport from there. But I assume if you were to do so, serious people with serious weaponry would pay you a visit very quickly.
The crucial job of the crew planning/taking off is to
a) calculate the decision points (speeds, distances) at which they have to decide to take off or not
b) monitor speed and progress along the runway
c) abort if they can't take off safely before the decision point
What they did suggests to me a complete breakdown of discipline and process in the cockpit.
The autopilot settings have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Incorrect runway lineup led to the plane only getting airborne after the end of the runway, after smashing through the ILS antennae. They then continued onto Qatar (13.5 hours away), with bits of antenna embedded in the tail.
737 NG (-6xx (736), -7xx, -8xx (738), -9xx (739)), MAX, and 787 are reasons not to fly on Boeing equipment. They have both obscure (Ducommun) and well-known history of cutting corners in design, testing, manufacturing, and who knows where else. Furthermore, Boeing pilots have huge cognitive dissonance issues around these matters because their salaries depend on it (remember Upton Sinclair's quote). They will overconfidently swear on their mother's graves that their equipment is "safe" on blind faith while unable to face the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Boeing isn't as bad as kit planes made in someone's backyard or Tupolev's, but the cutthroat profit-obsession culture is different than at Airbus in terms of priorities.
Human-piloted aircraft for routine transportation makes no sense. In terms of safety and ecology for long-distance travel, trains will dominate in the end because flying adds inherent risks and consumes much more energy.
1. Commercial airline travel is significantly safer than driving on a per mile or per hour basis
2. This flight was from Dubai to Washington. I don’t think there’s any train routes between these two cities.
1. I never recommended driving. It's awful for the environment and extremely unsafe.
2. Transoceanic train lines. Hyperloop or similar.
Do you have anything else to add?
These don't exist, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. What should we all do until then?
OK cool I'll just take a train.... uhhh absolutely nowhere as I live on an island with extremely limited inter-city rail.
Believe me, EK is nothing like a "chicken and goat airline". It's world class all the way.
>The maiden flight of A320 Air France 296: Official reports concluded that the pilots flew too low, too slow, failed to see the forest and accidentally flew into it. The captain, Michel Asseline, disputed the report and claimed an error in the fly-by-wire computer prevented him from applying thrust and pulling up. In the aftermath of the crash, there were allegations that investigators had tampered with evidence, specifically the aircraft's flight recorders ("black boxes").
Wrong details keyed in, or some undisclosed and supposedly heavy cargo? Though such a Bond-style mystery may not make any reason to it, as the destination was IAD. Well, the pilots should feel lucky that everyone is safe and sound.
Sensory overload?
Too bad this was at night. Would have been some wild Nest cam footage during the day.
The autopilot set to the lower-than-current altitude effectively set the flaps into descent mode so it needed higher speed than usual to start climbing up?
Also how come it finally started getting altitude even with destination altitude being zero?
Presumably what matters is the standards of pilot experience and training that an airline demands, not what country the pilots are from. Perhaps some of the Americans working for Emirates do so because they couldn’t get jobs at a US legacy carrier. (I don’t know whether this is indeed the case; I’m just claiming it’s plausible).
that sounds like a typical result of Six Sigma/5 Whys/<whatever spawn of the PM/MBA methodology hell they are practicing there>. If one thinks a bit (note: not a part of any such methodology) there is a reason why previous - ie. landing - crew sets the target altitude to that of that target airport... I wonder whether there is a narrow specialization - ie. the managers doing safety analysis of take offs are different from that of landings :)
It's just that post war, the US aviation industry was very dominant and the metric system never was popular there. For the same reason feet are used instead of meters for measuring altitude. And unlike with nautical miles, there's not much of an advantage for that. However, the units for altimeter settings are metric (i.e. millibar instead of inches of mercury) in much of the world except in the US.
For flight controllers and procedures they had to pick a unit for flight levels that everybody understands in the same way and since the US aviation industry after WW II pretty much dominated, a lot of planes would have used feet. Internationally, flight levels are used everywhere above certain altitudes. Those are basically feet divided by 1000 (kilo feet?, LOL). So, FL 29 would be 29000 feet at 29.92 inches of mercury in the US and 1013.2 millibars in the rest of the world.
The Russians actually used meters until very recently apparently and only switched to feet a few years ago after of course first supporting flight levels. And apparently, the Chinese still use meters: https://ivao.aero/flightops/divprocedures.php?id=CN and planes must actually be capable to switch their altimeters to using meters to fly in China. Likewise, North Korea uses meters apparently.
Certainly I would find kph/mph slightly confusing as you might expect it to correspond to some actual velocity, rather than something to do with air pressure.
Maybe we should measure airspeed in mbar instead?
(ofc navigation is a different matter, and there just history prevails)
Of course this is not perfectly accurate in several ways but given chart projections it's usually Close Enough.
The speeds given in the article are a little ambiguous in the details, the number given in the text is probably KIAS (but maybe not?) and the numbers from FlightAware will be ground speed.
- So that when kph/mph is heard a pilot knows they're referencing ground speed, whereas knots is air speed.
- Pilots use latitude/longitude, and a knot is "exactly equal to 1/60th of a degree of latitude. A 1/60th of a degree of latitude is known as a minute of latitude. Therefore, a knot is equal to one minute of distance. There are 90 degrees from the equator to the pole."
But reality is that changing international standards is very hard, and nobody wants to have the battle when knots works "well enough." It likely started because existing nautical maps were used for over-ocean flight planning and stuck.
Taxi speeds are always written in knots, so I suppose you could say it is "official" (in terms of aircraft handbooks, airfield directories, etc) to use knots for ground speed. Of course the situation of an aircraft's ground speed while on the ground is sort of an edge case.
On the topic of odd units, the operating handbooks for jet aircraft often use mach number for limits, which has some of the same properties as KIAS as far as being density dependent but is a little more precisely defined.
Who is using MPH/KPH in the course of flying a plane? Why would this ambiguity resolve to “that must be ground speed”? Why would there be ambiguity in a speed readout at all? Surely context and procedure should disambiguate this rather than units?
Aviation, broadly speaking, inherited all of its navigation techniques from the maritime world. In particular, prior to radio methods and to some extent today aviation navigation is based primarily on dead reckoning periodically corrected by observations, which is a technique that was pioneered in marine navigation. Since early pilots learned to navigate from seafarers, their units and conventions became strongly embedded in the field. It is, after all, still not unusual to refer to an aircraft as a ship, especially informally.
I think it was actually extrapolated from a survey of the length of France. No idea how they did that extrapolation.
This was a hot topic during the 19th century as different improvements in the techniques and devices used to measure the Earth showed that the first measurements were imperfect, however good they had been at the time, and that the whole idea is not workable because the Earth is not a sphere. This lead to the formal definition of the metre as the length of a prototype in 1889.
Of course, the metric system has not been in use since 1960, but this is also true for the SI.
> a knot is "exactly equal to 1/60th of a degree of latitude. ...Therefore, a knot is equal to one minute of distance."
I'm not sure what that quote is from, but it's is akin to saying "A metre per second is equal to one metre." Um, no. The units don't match.
I believe that the term knots originates from a method of measuring speed at sea by use of a twisted rope and a sea anchor, but perhaps that's apocryphal. Presumably though the definition in terms of NM was a later improvement.
While I don't have any real evidence for this, I would speculate that part of the reason for the enduring use of knots in aviation is that, much like the old twisted rope, it links the unit to the instrument. The speeds usually quoted for aircraft are in KIAS, Knots Indicated Airspeed, a measurement which is basically defined by what the instrument shows. It is intentionally uncorrected for various errors in the instrument design. This happens to be convenient because many of the same factors that affect the instrument calibration also affect the aircraft handling, so handling at 100 KIAS tends to feel similar even though the actual speed varies by altitude etc. KCAS and KTAS, Calibrated and True Airspeed, are both KIAs after correction for various errors and are useful for certain calculations but not nearly as often as KIAS. My point is that it might be helpful to use Kts rather than MPH or KPH because it helps keep these factors in mind and helps to reduce ambiguity about whether a number is indicated or true, although people very frequently just write knots when meaning KIAS.
Of course for ground speed none of this matters but ground speed isn't really a "flight" concern per se, more just used for navigation calculations.
Weight / volume changes from gallons to litres to cubic meters to cubic feet depending on US/RoW.
Height is always in feet.
For a similar reason airplanes have captains. A few decades ago they also had navigators. With a dedicated position in the cockpit.
It’s also customary to measure altitude in feet. Except in China (except Hong Kong), Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Russia is actually moving to feet at some altitudes. Turkmenistan similarly uses feet or meters depending on altitude.
The units themselves are irrelevant as long as everyone uses the same ones. Switching costs are significant both in terms of training and equipment.
That is how naval terminology entered the lexicon.
By now, it is so deeply ingrained that switching the entire world (well, there are exceptions) to the metric standard would likely cause some preventable loss of life.
At least the knot/mile system is fairly internally regular. We tolerate a much less regular one, with a lot of weird exceptions (the Gregorian calendar) out of inertia.
Does the system really display as "00000"? That seems like an odd design choice, I'd have thought just a single "0" would be far more legible in this scenario, especially if it's on a 7-segment display.
I don't think passengers would have noticed this as anything other than a regular takeoff, because ATC does request slow climbs (ie. slower rate of ascent) every now and then.
It looks like the aircraft didn't leave the runway until the runway safety area at the end. That is something any passenger looking out the window could notice. A normal takeoff has the aircraft leaving the runway well before the end.
I don't think so, because the departure was at 3:10AM local time (23:10Z). It would have been too dark to perceive.
What’s wonderful too is that the abbreviations are often based on non English words as well, so they aren’t intuitive. As an example, instead of typing “mist” in a METAR it is “BR” based on the French word brume.
When there are 50 pilots on the radio and things are moving fast there isn’t time to slow down and spell things out, and doing so can actually be more dangerous when extraneous stuff ends up on the radio and is misinterpreted.
https://pasteboard.co/el9EdvFEiiEC.png - took the KML files from flightradar24 into Google Earth.
These problems are often due to human problems or errors.
I thought this was solved by training none-western pilots, in particular co-pilots, to be empowered to challenge decisions by another pilot instead of just doing nothing.
actually i think i'd rather look at plots rather than images of tables of numbers. smh.
Are pilots making it up in simulators or are they rusty (no offence)
The only pilots in the middle east with absolute job security are the locals, and they get away with shit that would see any expat fired on the spot. You can hear stories about this from all the airlines in the region... Emirates, Qatar, Oman, etc.
What's that supposed to mean?
UAE doesn't have a high local population to begin with. Majority of people living there are expats. And among that low population only a few choose to become pilots.
You know, from the rest of the world American pilots flying in America also look like "local noobs".
Let's wait until the relevant authorities release their final report.
Maybe those particular pilots are questionable, but I don't think it's fair to blame the entire carrier.
Emirates is very responsible and it's definitely in their interests to run a safe airline.
----
(I'm probably going to get flagged but I don't care)
I've seen it again and again in HN. Whenever something goes wrong in Asia or Africa everyone's like "the noobs over the don't know what they're doing".
I can't speak to other cases you've seen.
> "the noobs over the don't know what they're doing".
I've heard from 3 different pilots from three different ME airlines, that the locals are untouchable, and get away with all sorts of bullshit that expats would get fired in an instant for.
There are two or three pilots in every cockpit. If two or three pilots miss something that checklists should have picked up, that suggests it's not the individuals, but the airline and it's processes that are at fault.
Oh really????? I find that hard to believe.
Anyway, I'll assume you aren't lying.
If you have conclusive evidence, why don't you do us all a favour and give it to the FAA and try to ensure those middle eastern airlines stay grounded or atleast out of American skies?
(If you aren't from America, do the above with the aviation authority in your country, and maybe FAA as well anyway)
If you're gonna say FAA is in the arabs' payroll and the whole system is rigged, then you're screwed regardless of whether the ME "local noobs" are bad.
> that suggests it's not the individuals, but the airline and it's processes that are at fault No it does not necessarily.
If this kind of incident regularly happens, then yes the entire airline might be flawed. But at this point there is no evidence to believe so.
> the locals are untouchable, and get away with all sorts of bullshit First up, why don't you ask your ME pilot friends the ratio of local and expat pilots in those airlines?
What makes you think the local pilots there are into "bullshit"?
Those middle eastern airlines aren't any worse than any other major airline from anywhere else. If you can prove otherwise, contact FAA.
> this is something that SHOULD have been caught by at least two separate checklists,
I wonder if this is not a detectable condition for the flight software - maybe in some cases you want the MCP to be set to low? Otherwise autopilot could either auto correct it or issue a warning?
If the takeoff depends on it, the next takeoff crew had better remember to set it. What's more, there better be at least one checklist that requires them to set it. And they had better follow the checklists.
As one would guess, it shouldn't have been on. Insight comes from a comment in TFA:
"I’m a captain at a U.S. major airline with a lot of time in 777s. Something this doesn’t mention is the that even if ground level was set into the mode control panel, the aircraft wouldn’t have descended if it was being hand flown. That means that the flying pilot here selected the autopilot on immediately after takeoff. This is unusual at Western carriers as we like to hand fly. To me this indicates a lack of experience or confidence or both."
To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight?
It seems completely mad that an automated flying mode could be engaged in such an obviously suicidal way on a modern bulk carrier aircraft, without so much as a blaring warning and red flashing lights.
You are assuming that there weren't blaring warnings and red flashing lights. Probably there were many.
> To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight?
Autopilots are much simpler systems. I don't know how much you know about them, but people in the general public believe they are some AI which flies the airplane from A to B. In reality they have much more common with a thermostat than an AI. You set a target heading and the plane will bank to match it. You set a target height and the plane will pitch to match it. Yes yes, they have many modes, and some modes can do much more complicated things than these, but it is not there to replace the pilot. It is a tool to alleviate dead simple piloting tasks so the pilots fatigue less on long flights.
Just as an example how simple stupid they are: You can command the autopilot to climb, and if you don't adjust the throttle appropriately (either manually, or by enabling the autopilot to adjust it) then the plane will use up all the airspeed during the climb and the autopilot will happily fly it into a stall.
Also just a general rule about aviation incidents/accidents: It is a good idea to wait for a proper investigation report before running far with all kind of assumptions about what happened, and therefore what you think should be changed.
Here[1] is an NTSB report detailing how the AFDS and the A/T work together in a Boeing 777. They enumerate several different combinations in which the autothrottle does not provide stall protection.
It also calls out as contributing factor the crew’s mistaken belief that the airplane is pretty much impossible to stall.
1: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
While there are airports with elevations lower than 0ft, this is a good design question to ask. In general, it's assumed the pilots will do the right thing to save the day, if needed.
> This sort of safety event will become more common as airlines hire based on equity, not skill.
I meet these people frequently in tech. It is never the Rockstar engineers making this complaint. Good to know it is not just a tech thing.