Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Colgan 3407 crashed because of a profound and astounding lack of basic airmanship and knowledge of the effects of icing on aircraft performance.

Yes, the autopilot helped mask the knowledge problem and presented them with a situation where that demonstrated lack of knowledge (that it takes more power to fly an airplane with ice on the wings) contributed to a stick shaker event (a warning of impending aerodynamic stall due to excessive angle of attack) whereupon the captain (and it's hard to use that term given the airmanship circus that ensued) decided to hold the stick back, exacerbating the stall condition rather than doing what every 5-hour pilot is taught to do upon a stall warning: level the wings, lower the nose, and add power.

The autopilot is a minuscule contributor to that accident, IMO. At most, the presence of autopilots allowed unqualified airman to not wash out of airline jobs, but to blame that crash on the autopilot is to misunderstand how non-complex that situation was that swallowed the crew and all aboard.

In flight school one of the very first things they teach you in flight is what to do when the stall warning goes off. You always nose down.

This story sounds like if I were driving a car and gradually started to drift into an oncoming lane, and upon the car's warning system alerting me to this, I jerked the steering wheel into the oncoming lane instead of out of it. At some point the pilot is just incompetent, you can't just blame the automation.

> Colgan 3407 crashed because of a profound and astounding lack of basic airmanship

I agree. I think the New Yorker just picked wrong incident to try to advance their theory. The particular pilot in Colgan 3407 flight FAILED a check ride in another airline. I understand this check ride is after you have already flown hundreds/thousands of flights and he somehow failed it.

It's not just the Colgan incident; investigation into the Air France 447 crash concluded the crew did not recognize a stall, and may have been relying on an incorrect belief that the aircraft would not accept inputs that would produce a stall (which, for Airbus aircraft, is true except in alternate-law situations which occur when -- as with AF447 -- the flight systems notice a fault in data).

AF447 is also a wrong stall response, but with different reasons: the pilot was incorrectly second-guessing what the plane was trying to tell him.

In this case; this is absolutely true. But compare this to e.g. the Airfrance crash a few years ago...

The AF case was (also) presumably caused by pilot error - i.e. the pilots continueing to pull back on the stick - but this was a concious effort by one of the pilots due to an interpretation error of the engaged autopilot mode.

Problem with the more modern automation systems in aviation is that they become harder to reason about when you have no sound understanding of underlying software/hardware interactions. The day that the autopilot modes are as simple as 'follow the line' (i.e. flight director bars), maintain this speed and/or maintain this heading/altitude is gone with the Airbus flight control system incorporating 4 different 'laws' (modes of operation) with varying submodes.

Complacency is somewhat understandable given the increasing complexity of said systems.

The Colgan pilot pulled back on the yoke due to the belief that the aircraft had accumulated, and was stalling due to, ice on the tail. A correct response in this case is actually to pull back, rather than lower the nose as in a typical stall.

Explain. The tail typically flies with negative angle of attack, so it seems like pulling back will require more downforce from the tail, making it more likely to stall.

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