As a commercial jet pilot (not airlines, small jets by Cessna), my reaction to much of the coverage in, say, the NYT, was much the same. This was an "ordinary" event from a training perspective, and has a straightforward set of responses - fly the plane, memory items, checklist items (the QRH mentioned), etc. Indeed, as they mention, in a crew environment things are even more calm and responsibilities are (or should be) well defined.
I've had an engine failure in cruise flight (on a multi-engine piston plane) in a single-pilot situation. (I later wrote about it in a magazine article.) We train for that too - although not as frequently as airline pilots do who train at least every six months. It was also a non-event from a "what to do". In fact, the only time my single passenger mentioned she was made nervous (after we landed) was when ATC asked for the number of souls on board (which they knew from my IFR flight plan but they always ask). "When did I become a soul???"
One thing my best instructor always told me about an emergency: "First, wind your watch." In other words, don't panic and do things hastily and make things worse. Especially in cruise.
So, kudos to the flight deck crew for doing exactly what they had trained to do and successfully putting the plane on the ground after dealing with the emergency!
Kudos to the rest of the flight crew for what must have been total chaos and fear among the passengers and for doing what I'm sure was their absolute best to save the unfortunate victim.
And, in the end, let's all remember that this (seemingly) slightly uncontained engine failure could have been much, much worse and be glad of that. Let's also be thankful that the training airline pilots receive generally have situations that are much less benign than an engine failure in cruise and have it drilled in to them how to handle it.
The "first, wind your watch" reminds me of this (possibly) apocryphal story from Debugging by Dave Agans. I think about this when everything is crashing around me, and have a small thrill of recognition.
Change One Thing at a Time
On nuclear-powered subs, there's a brass bar in front of the control panel for the power plant. When status alarms begin to go off, the engineers are trained to grab the brass bar with both hands and hold on until they've looked at all the dials and indicators, and understand exactly what's going on in the system. What this does is help them overcome the temptation to start "fixing" things, throwing switches and opening valves. These quick fixes confuse the automatic recovery systems, bury the original fault beneath an onslaught of new conditions, and may cause a real, major disasters. It's more effective to remember to do something ("Grab the bar!") tha
"HERO PILOT saves the day by <professionally executing standard emergency procedures>" does seem to have become a news media trope.
"Military, and then decades of experience" has been mentioned for decades. But my fuzzy impression is it would be emphasized as it related to specific challenges of the event. That threshold seemed to drop over the years. The bizarre "hero" bit seems more recent, and perhaps increasingly common.
Spice for ambulance chasing. At least it raises the societal visibility of female military aviators. And of older women as professionally excellent.
I wonder if one might usefully engineer the addition of tropes to news media playbooks. Like "in an example of industry/profession/class groupthink/filterbubble, X said Y".
Or "trade agreement section X came from industry Y because Z" - the TPP now vs TPP under US leadership diff would seemingly make for accessible storytelling, but there's been little.
> the NYT, was much the same.
My lifetime paper, but... the NYT is ok with ambulance chasing. And regrettably ok with sloppy emphasis.
Faced with 9/11, setting the tone for the nation, given a menu of options like "stiff upper lip", "carry on", "spirit of Mumbai", and "back to work", we got... something else. Pulitzer-prize-winning ambulance-chasing death fetish? I've wondered, at the time and since, how might the nation have responded, if offered something very vaguely like <diverse 1/3-immigrant new yorkers>: "We are New York - f'em - we can build 'em up faster than the f'ers can knock 'em down"? Oh well - an alternate timeline.
I wonder if one could get a "carry on" trope going. Instead of "this passenger is taking it in stride - drat - turn off the camera and seek dramatic emotions elsewhere", perhaps a "person demonstrating a stiff upper lip" could become one additional troped story component. Once one exists, it would be easier for it's relative emphasis to increase with time.
I don't like the hero worship either. first time I noticed it was with the firemen during 9/11. Now it seems the media always wants to have a hero for each event. I don't want to diminish the pilots but as far as I know an engine loss is normal procedure and well understood. There are probably dozens of events every day where a truck driver is faced with an exploding tire or other problems that are as difficult or more difficult to handle.
Perhaps part of what's happening is the word "hero" is picking up new roles, while retaining old associations.
One can have a hero without something heroic. "Oh, not me, it's Joe that's the hero - he spotted that the meeting munchies were delivered to the wrong room." One can be heroic without heroism. "Thank you for your heroic efforts this evening to get the server back up." One can have heroism without bravery. "Your dauntless heroism in being here every single day without fail, has been critical to our success".
We don't seem to have a very rich or nuanced active vocabulary for describing excellence, or contribution, or sacrifice, or adversity? Or exemplars, or recognition, or celebration.
So meaning blurs. Especially when there's an incentive for it to.
The 9/11 firefighters (especially the first responders that went in before the towers fell) were heroes by just about every definition, though. They risked (and in many cases gave) their lives to try to try to save innocent people. They weren't trying to save their own necks, like a pilot would be. If that doesn't count as being a hero, I'm pretty sure nothing does.
I find it as a branch of this Military worship the US has fallen into, again since 9/11. Anything from "Thank you for your service" as an automated greeting, and applause when someone in a uniform walks into a bar. Nobody says "thank you for your service" to the guy who's just spent 12 hours shovelling shit out of the sewer.
Low effort comment - but I appreciate this breakdown of the story metagame that surrounds any event that receive coverage and that a big function of changing society is changing the structure and tropes of stories we tell.
As one of those immigrant New Yorkers, I too wonder what would have happened if we'd gone down that road.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t asking for the number of souls is basically asking how many people are (still) alive, as opposed to asking about the number of persons, which would also include deceased people? If someone died during the incident, given that the pilot is not a doctor with the medical authority to decide who’s alive and who isn’t, would that person still be reported as a soul?
The phrase “souls on board” derives from nautical usage. In radio comms, being brief and direct are critical. ATC requests how many living people (or not known to be dead people) are aboard in order to relay the number to search-and-rescue.
Being monosyllabic, its use in “aviationese” is a matter of economy of expression and not a political statement or invitation for handwringing. It also sidesteps potential fussy categorization along the lines of, “We have two crew and one passenger.”
In comparison with the above nine syllables, the relevant information requires two: “Tree souls.”
IMHO, "How many passengers? => 150" is very different from "How many souls? => 156" ... passengers necessarily may be interpreted as "people who paid for seats" and not include the 2 pilots and 4 flight attendants [as an example].
"A plane went down with 150 passengers, all 156 souls aboard were lost."
I guess "soul" is the universal term for "living human", regardless of their job, role, lot in life, etc.
> If someone died during the incident, given that the pilot is not a doctor with the medical authority to decide who’s alive and who isn’t
In many states (not sure how it applies to a plane in air), doctors are certainly not the only people to determine or legally declare death.
In my state EMTs and Paramedics can call death legally in many (relatively obvious) circumstances:
- rigor mortis
- livor mortis
- decapitation
- incineration
- decomposition
- body position incompatible with life
- evisceration of brain or heart
In those settings, while most would also include the attendance of a medical examiner or coroner, a physician does not have to "pronounce death".
Similarly, in resuscitation scenarios, we can discuss with a physician ECG rhythm/s found, length of resuscitation, circumstance, interventions attempted, and the physician can delegate to us the ability to discontinue resuscitation and call the time of death at that point.
Essentially it'd come into play for "mangling" that hasn't resulted in actual evisceration - entire spinal column snapped, bent at 90 degrees (as opposed to transection that leads to paralysis), head twisted around, and so on. Probably almost exclusively the result of high impact trauma.
Come on, man. No one should need this spelled out for them. Not even a kindergartener would fail to understand bodies positioned in unsurvivable poses. I'd almost surmise this to be a troll post.
Folding the head at the neck, too far in any given direction ruins the spinal cord, with out breaking the skin. If you see a person slumped in such a way that their head has clearly been badly twisted, and flops over, they are most assuredly dead.
This puts us right into breathing airway, if the neck is not supporting the trachea, or indeed folding the trachea shut, it's often apparent from a glance. But folding at the waste is just as bad for the diaphragm. When someone looks like they've been put in a stress position, and demonstrates no distress, it's likely they've expired.
In any event, instinctually, you can look at a person, know how hard it would be for you to hold a crumpled pody position, note the time while while remaining attentive for labored, heavy breathing, and if even 60 seconds pass, they might be dead.
Breathing and airway are primary obvious signs, but limbs sprawling and draped at odd angles can intuitively indicate that internal bleeding would be required for such a pose to be achieved.
There are only about 15 points of articulation on the human body, discounting fingers and toes, if you reduce the spine to the head and neck. Most people aren't escape artists or contortionists, even if they do yoga. And even contortionists, by at least some amount, exert themselves to achieve impressive poses, or fit themselves inside duffel bags and such.
Just surf the internet for pictures of dead bodies, and you'll quickly spot the ones that have mostly impossible body positions. [nsfw]
I'd wager yes. Because when the rescue team goes in they'll count bodies, living or dead. Doesn't matter if the person died before the plane landed, in a fire that erupted after it landed or made it out alive.
Airplanes do sometimes transport human remains in caskets and do not contribute to the count of souls on board. FAA Advisory Circular 150/5210-7D (Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting Communications)[0], for example, defines souls on board as “total number of passengers and crew.”
If the pilot says "50 souls on board", but is also transporting 2 cadavers, and the rescue team finds 50 bodies before giving up, it's possible there'd still be 2 people alive when they gave up.
Souls on board is a way of asking number of living humans on board — so there’s no confusion when asked how many are alive on the flight whether we should be including dogs, cats, parakeets or the dead guy in a cargo casket being transported.
Often times in health care, particularly insurance, reference is made to "how many belly buttons", which handles pregnancies and the like (no belly button until birth).
I'd always hear it was derived from Save Our Ship, but in reality, it's a backronym, and was chosen simply because it was easy and clear to transmit in Morse Code.
There's also the confusion between "passengers" vs "crew" vs "children" or "babies". Souls conveniently includes all of those groups and excludes irrelevant factors like dead bodies.
I doubt the pilots’ priorities during the incident is giving a casualty report. I don’t think it helps ATC land the plane any better, either. The number of people on the craft help determine the state the plane is in (weight, crewmanship/passenger ratio, etc.)
The most incredible part of this story is the fact that it is the first fatality in a US-registered passenger aircraft accident in over nine years and the first one in Southwest's 51 year history.
(Though looking into it, that overlooks two deaths in Southwest's history: one where a passenger attempted to enter the cockpit and was subdue by other passengers and later died and another where the plane overran the run way during landing and struck a car, killing a young boy in the car.)
We’ve chosen as a society to go all in on aviation safety due to the freakish and scary nature of aviation accidents.
Meanwhile the US lags the developed world in road safety. Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average.
With high safety investment comes higher costs of flying which pushes more people into driving instead, which kills more people.
Consider fatalities per billion vehicle kilometers -- Americans drive more than the OECD average. The Czech Republic and Korea have rates triple those of the next closest OECD country, and the US fares better than Japan and Belgium.
Not only is it not Mad Max, it's basically within the norms of the OECD.
I've been saying for a while that in the US, the real killer is the suburban infrastructure.
Forget guns. Way more people are dying in car crashes than from any other violent cause or accident type. And, as you said, Americans aren't bad drivers per se.
It's just that in the US, there are way more miles driven per person than in European countries. This number - and the car fatalities - drop in dense cities like NYC with public transportation that works.
"Driving in the US is like a mad max situation. Many unnecessary deaths are preventable. Road deaths are double the OECD average."
All of the recent discussion of road deaths and deaths per million miles, etc., usually have a clarifying post/comment which notes that these figures include motorcycles and commercial trucks ... which skew the numbers dramatically.
Does your own day to day (car) driving experience actually seem like a mad max scenario ?
Can you compare driving in the United States to, for instance, driving in Guatemala or El Salvador or Vietnam ?
> Lifetime odds of death by motor vehicle crash, United States, 2016: 1 in 102
If you only drive sober, always wear a seatbelt, and only drive cars with the highest NHTSA ratings then your lifetime chances are probably more like 1 in 300, if not less.
That said, your chances of getting seriously injured in a car crash are significantly greater than that.
Well that depends. If what I care about is not dying then going twice as far but still dying isn't an improvement.
Measure the thing you actually care about. After issuing metal helmets to infantry in WW1 the number of men hospitalised with head injuries climbed enormously. Were helmets a bad idea? Nope. To get hospitalised first you need to survive your injuries.
The fact that most of us on Manhattan don't own cars unfortunately does not mean that we walk through tree lined streets empty of large, heavy and dangerously driven motor vehicles.
For this subject matter per capita (should really be per licensed driver to account for different rates of public transit usage between populations but per capita is close) is appropriate because people care about the likelihood of something over a lifetime.
Miles driven would be useful too but not as directly useful in evaluating odds of any one random person dying in a car crash.
Regardless, I'm be interested in seeing the stats broken down by accident type (which is tracked by the police and insurance companies to some extent).
My suspicion is that there's several accident modes that are more common in North America that make up most of the difference.
I also suspect that just like pretty much ever other thing that's common at scale but statistically unlikely at the individual level socioeconomic status is the best predictor.
No - because those numbers are pulled from the actual driving population(where people drive drunk, sometimes don't wear a seatbelt, and drive in cars ranging built over 40+ years with a wide range of safety standards. To do better than 1 in 102 means you only need to behavior better than the population average, not perform perfectly at all times.
If a high-winnings lottery had these odds, I'd be playing every month. As far as roads go though, I choose to minimise my exposure to nearly all motorists by avoiding most roads altogether (this is possible to do in many places, but I concede not all places).
Its many orders of magnitude more likely for your kids to die in a car than be kidnapped by a stranger. Look at our paranoia in the US about 'stranger-danger'.. Humans on average don't comprehend the odds.. its about what scares them on the news.
Probably Houston where two thirds of drivers on the road weave in and out of traffic high on coke and drunk, have no insurance, regard for safety of themselves or others, a huge stack of arrest warrants, driving $200 salvage titled cars crumpled body work and partially collapsed frames from their last hit and run with the eternal doctored and expired paper tags and high-beams on at all times. A video of a typical day on the road can be found by searching "wwwy2000 houston"
Greater road safety. He's saying because of the high cost of aviation safety, more people choose to drive than pay that cost, but driving is statistically much more dangerous. So we should address road safety since so many people are driving...
Greater road safety. Aviation is a rare area where US government has done well regulating for safety. There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars. It’s a choice to accept risks.
> There’s no reason we can’t be as strict with cars.
There is. Money and lots of it. "Oh, poor, working class person; you can't afford $5000-6000 per year in exploratory inspections? Well, no car for you then. We really can't be too safe, you know..."
As an airplane owner, there's no way in hell the public would stand for the amount of maintenance and inspections given to aircraft for their cars.
"Every year, completely remove the interior of the car, pull up the floorboards, lubricate and check tensions on all control cables, check the engine compression and visually inspect the valves, ..." I think my A36 has ~50 hours of mandatory inspections (at $105-125/hr) every 12 calendar months. That's before anything gets fixed (and of course, whatever gets broken during the inspections is also fixed on my dime).
I'm not even sure that it particularly contributes to the good safety record, since most of the fatals are pilot-induced (just as most of the fatals on the road are driver-induced).
It doesn't need to reach that level of extreme immediately. Just follow what the Dutch did starting all the way back in the late '70s to address their road toll.
There are many many places that have far better driver safety records - start by learning from those. A lack of improvement isn't inevitable.
What do you think the ever-growing set of safety features it is illegal to sell cars in the United States without is for? The idea that nobody cares and nobody tries to enforce safety is quite questionable -- there's simply a lot more driving going on, and not only by highly trained professionals. It's a harder problem.
The difference is that one's own behavior behind the wheel is the primary driver of motor vehicle safety, while one's own behavior typically affects aircraft safety not one bit.
Agree with the later part, but with the former, I'm sure in a large percentage of auto fatalities the victim was not at fault.
But despite the statistics, I feel safer being in control. It's a funny cognitive bias.
I also like the recovery plan for a dangerous driving situation better (swerve or pull over and slow down) because the danger is usually mitigated in seconds. In aviation a dangerous situation can persist for minutes depending on how far away the emergency landing spot is and how high the plane is.
Are we counting drunk pedestrians getting hit by cars as car crash fatalities?
Being drunk near heavy equipment drastically increases the chances of said heavy equipment killing you but less so if you've got a bunch of safety systems to save your life when you crash said heavy equipment.
Flying does make me nervous. When the driving time to a destination is less than about 6 hours or so, I seriously consider going by car, even though I know it's more dangerous. At least in a car, I'm in control of the vehicle, and will have something to do in an emergency (try to swerve, pull over, etc.). As a passenger on a plane all I can do is sit and wait for my doom.
TSA makes me drive exponentially more than I would otherwise.
Dealing with the airport is terrible now. I flew probably 80+ times a year as a consultant in the 90s. My wife would drop me off 30 minutes before my flight (DFW), I'd curb check my bag and walk onto the plane and wait 5-10 so minutes until takeoff. It's hard to deal with the 2+ hours of bullshit security theater now.
I forget to take my knives out frequently, have never had them confiscated, but my toothpaste, yeah, that's a threat. Hell, the Lithium Ion batteries are probably the biggest threat, no issues there either.
If I have my ticket on my phone and I'm flying on a turboprop, I can literally arrive at the airport 5 minutes before they close the door and board the plane. I've done it before.
Even flying international is easy, took me a grand total of 10 minutes to go through security a few weeks ago.
TSA pre-check makes a big difference - almost like flying before, except you get to walk past all those other lines.
I didn't want to explicitly support the TSA, so I went with "Global Entry" - same benefits and more, and company paid for it. I have no idea if funds go to TSA or not, but I felt better about it.
People don't remember just how good it used to be. I used to lock my luggage securely, carry a knife on my person, and walk with my friends/family to the gate. Nobody asked pointless yes/no questions about the history of my luggage. When the airport wasn't busy, they might not bother to have the security station open at all, and just waved everyone through. A couple times, we drove to the airport an hour or two before the flight and bought tickets at the check-in counter (it was a very early flight that was never full), and this didn't arouse any suspicion. You didn't need to get out government ID for anything, since tickets weren't locked to the purchaser.
"TSA pre-check" sounds like it eliminates one inconvenience of flying in the USA in 2018, but not the other 34. I can't imagine what it might take to make me want to get on an airplane again.
The pre-check line doesn't involve all of the slow-downs the regular line does. I've seen it longer too but it easily moves 10x as many people through.
Nothing needs to be removed except metal in your pockets, you typically walk quickly through a metal detector instead of the slow body scanner, and while they probably shouldn't, bags don't seem to get looked at as thoroughly either, so no delays while your backpack gets sent through twice and then pulled off to the side to be inspected.
This is 100% the reason why I prefer driving. It is a matter of control, even if the numbers prove that won't reduce the risk to my life. I'm almost as nervous as a passenger in a car as I am on a plane.
I suggest you find and watch some crash videos. You are not in as much control as you'd like to believe. A lot of the time, one bad actor creates a scenario in which the others have no chance to escape.
Maybe we're ok with our roads being statistically less safe per capita in exchange for a far greater amount of personal freedom of movement per capita?
> Weather, distance, all the other cons of cycling (groceries, passengers, other large cargo).
The same applies for driving, yet somehow the Dutch manage to continue a high participation rate even during bad weather.
> Yes a bike is better in terms of absolute freedom but only in situations where the trade-offs are tolerable.
We are talking about tradeoffs here - perceived or otherwise. There isn't a perfect scenario, but what systems Netherlands has in place is arguably better. Better freedoms both for riders as well as those who must drive. Perhaps also think of it in terms of gun laws in Australia vs gun laws in America, and measure where the fear lies (are schoolchildren afraid? are parents? or just mostly men?)
> I can't go pick up a piece of furniture on my bike.
Perhaps. However there are many cases where it can be and is done without a great deal of drama. At worst, you can still use a car even if others have access to alternatives - it's not a total ban we're discussing but rather higher standards before vehicles are deployed. It should be about fairness when it comes to ownership of public space.
As it stands in much of the Anglophone world, driver licences are easier to obtain than they are to lose. In fact, it's commonly possible to continue driving the very next day (or hour) after being booked for drink driving. The system is broken, and lessons need to be learnt from not only aviation safety, but from countries that do it better. However, what's somewhat evident is that places such as Silicon Valley would rather reinvent the wheel and solve any social or community problem by selling more software rather than learn from existing best practice.
Right now, the system is so imbalanced in favour of private motoring that nobody wins (not even drivers). Suburban sprawl and "might over right" however is a very popular western platform for voters, for now. Driverless cars won't come soon enough compared to the other options that already exist in Netherlands, Sweden and even perhaps Germany.
Yes - those El Salvadoreans - since they are born with only 3 fingers on each hand, they have a very difficult time using tools that were designed for people with 5 fingers on each hand.
Or.... “In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.”
Many air carriers perform heavy maintenance checks (which are labor intensive, taking the interior of the aircraft out and later re-installing everything) in lower-cost labor areas, all the while under the supervision of FAA-licensed mechanics, to the same published standards, at the same schedules as if it were done at a US maintenance base.
US-based labor, unions, and other pro-US-labor supporters are up in arms over it, using typical "dirty, lazy, substandard foreigners" scare tactics and implying that the safety is compromised in pursuit of dollars.
mobilefriendly is implying that aircraft mechanics in El Salvador are somehow less qualified to maintain Southwest's fleet than (presumably) American aircraft mechanics.
Probably because they don’t have the same level of professional certification and legal oversight as the FAA ensures for maintenance work performed in the USA.
> The work is labor-intensive and complicated, and the technical manuals are written in English, the language of international aviation. According to regulations, in order to receive F.A.A. certification as a mechanic, a worker needs to be able to “read, speak, write, and comprehend spoken English.” Most of the mechanics in El Salvador and some other developing countries who take apart the big jets and then put them back together are unable to meet this standard. At Aeroman’s El Salvador facility, only one mechanic out of eight is F.A.A.-certified. At a major overhaul base used by United Airlines in China, the ratio is one F.A.A.-certified mechanic for every 31 non-certified mechanics. In contrast, back when U.S. airlines performed heavy maintenance at their own, domestic facilities, F.A.A.-certified mechanics far outnumbered everyone else. At American Airlines’ mammoth heavy-maintenance facility in Tulsa, certified mechanics outnumber the uncertified four to one. Because heavy maintenance is labor-intensive and offshore labor is cheap, there’s a perception that the work is unskilled. But that’s not true. If something as mundane as the tray of a tray table becomes unattached, the arms that hold it could easily turn into spears.
> There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check. In the past, when heavy maintenance was performed on United’s planes at a huge hangar at San Francisco International Airport, a government inspector could easily drive a few minutes from an office in the Bay Area to make a surprise inspection. Today that maintenance work is done in Beijing. The inspectors responsible for checking on how Chinese workers service airplanes are based in Los Angeles, 6,500 miles away.
> Lack of proximity is only part of the problem. To inspect any foreign repair station, the F.A.A. first must obtain permission from the foreign government where the facility is located. Then, after a visa is granted, the U.S. must inform that government when the F.A.A. inspector will be coming. So much for the element of surprise—the very core of any inspection process. That inspections have had the heart torn out of them should come as no surprise. It is the pattern that has beset the regulation of drugs, food, and everything else.
> ...
> Airline mechanics at U.S. airports who perform routine safety checks and maintenance tasks before an airplane takes off report that they are discovering slipshod work done by overseas repair shops. American Airlines mechanics contended in a lawsuit last January that they had been disciplined by management for reporting numerous safety violations they uncovered on airplanes that had recently been serviced in China. Mechanics in Dallas said they had discovered cracked engine pylons, defective doors, and expired oxygen canisters, damage that had simply been painted over, and missing equipment, among other violations.
You are probably not familiar with the U.S. Federal Aviation Regulations. For an FAA-registered aircraft to be airworthy, it must have an inspection within the past 12 calendar months signed off by a specially trained, examined, and certified Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) mechanic further trained, examined, and certified with Inspection Authority (IA).
Airplanes flown for hire, such as commercial airliners, must have the equivalent of an annual inspection every hundred flight hours, also signed off by an IA.
So are you saying the information in the article I linked is false? That's great but it doesn't seem to have the problem licked, based on the information there.
Unfortunately Southwest suffered a similar uncontained engine failure in 2016 (Flight 3472)[1] - there was wing and fuselage damage, but the passenger compartment was not breached. The only difference is not of severity, but ill-/luck on where the shrapnel ended up.
Both instances used the CFM-56[0] engine, and I was reading on /r/aviation about how this engine has had prior problems. I don't know too much about aircraft engineering so I can't comment.
Also apparently there is a disturbing trend of outsourcing maintenance to other countries which makes it harder for the FAA to enforce regulations[1]. Southwest for example sends their planes to El Salvador.
A few days ago, I read an article speculating on the cause of the CFM engine failures - I can't remember the source but it was by a former pilot and I found it cogent.
These engines are old, and very widely used. The author suggested it was metal fatigue in the turbofan which wasn't caught - microcracks are hard to find, but can cause structural failures at operational velocity. Southwest's engine overhaul regime for this engine is every 10 000 miles, but that will probably need to be reduced pending the results of the investigations.
10,000 miles? That seems like way too often for an "engine overhaul".
For example, Southwest 1380 (this recent flight) was a New York to Dallas trip, 1264 nautical miles (roughly). That means an "engine overhaul" (and I'm not sure exactly what that entails) would be required after just eight of these flights -- or, say, four round trips -- and possibly even seven if it's 10,000 statute miles. I'm not a pilot or jet engine mechanic but that seems a bit too frequent.
If that standard is specific to this engine because of its age or history of issues or something (and "regular" engines have a much lower standard), that would make more sense.
You are correct:10,000 miles is ridiculously low, that was off the top of my head and wrong. I should have said the SW 1380 plane had 10,000 flights logged since its last engine overhaul before the accident[1] - the article doesn't say how long the intervals are (but they are >10,000 flights).
Thus the “engine failure then land single-engine” is something that a mid-career airline pilot would have done 500 times or more in a sim that is so realistic it can be logged as time in the actual aircraft.
For actual evidence of how common this is, look at avherald.com --- as I write this, there are over a dozen engine-problem incidents within the past week.
I really like these videos - basically, however, they have a chat, talk to ATC, put the seatbelt light on, read the checklist and turn off some things, monitor the engine. There's no noticeable flurry of activity, it's like watching an accountant talking to her secretary, just they have nicer views.
I'm always impressed by the unparalleled professionalism when listening to these cockpit recordings during emergencies. Professionalism by literally everyone involved: the tower, the other surrounding planes that are being delayed and most of all the affected flight crew. It's the epitome of "Keep calm and carry on".
I often think about these when sitting in meetings with people who get far more emotional over issues that are the farthest thing from an emergency.
EDIT: My comment was more a reaction to the recording of the SWA flight in question that's linked in the OPs article:
Imagine if in cars people ran a checklist and reminded themselves of training when things went sideways. Instead, we road-rage, swear, honk, scream, yell and let our days get ruined and sometimes our lives get ruined out of nothing but sheer ignorance and stupidity. Sure, sometimes accidents just happen and people die, but more often then not when we get into cars people are assholes. When we get into planes, people are generally professionals. (as far as crew / pilot / captain is concerned)
People take things way too personally on the road. Other people aren't assholes. Road etiquette is just different. You shouldn't get bent out of shape when someone cuts you off. That a normal occurrence.
Driving is a skill like anything else. The fact that a large part of the general population doesn't drive in a manner that's optimal for safety is perfectly normal and should be expected. The general population has to manage their own finances, budget their own time, cook their own food, etc and few people do any of those optimally. There's no reason to expect the general population to do anything optimally.
In a car you usually don't have much time between things going south and crashing. An aircraft typically has a lot of time before it runs into anything.
Mechanical failure is a negligible factor in vehicle accidents anyway (if it weren't you'd probably see insurance companies giving people in non-inspection states discounts for getting one anyway). Most of the time the car just coasts/grinds to a stop on the side of the road.
Comparing airline pilots (qualified professionals who've worked their way up the chain) to the general population isn't quite right either. Being level headed is part of the job. The same is not true for the average person going about their day.
That's exactly the way you want an emergency to be. Lots of time to deal with the problem so you can make sure you follow all the steps correctly. If they were to have an engine failure on final or at a much lower altitude then things can get much more serious quite quickly. For example US Airways 1459 had less than 5 minutes between the bird strike and landing in the Hudson.
Edit: I should say, on the part of the pilots and ATC. Here's an even better audio of the event from more perspectives - https://youtu.be/tE_5eiYn0D0?t=83
The only disconcerting thing was that their runbooks don't seem too well organized. At one point the flying pilot was looking at the wrong section of the book and had to be corrected... don't know what that was about.
That's why you have 2+ people. Unlikely that 2+ people will make the same mistake.
Unless you're on Asiana or another provider where junior crew are taught to defer to the superior at all times. Which is a problem most of the industry recognized a while back and thus makes sure that the staff is usually around the same level of seniority.
Crew Resource Management is important and became a standard in the industry after United 173[1] ran out of fuel because everyone was distracted by a failed light. The low fuel was noticed by co-pilots who were not assertive about the seriousness of the issue to the more senior captain. As a result the NTSB made a specific recommendation that all crew members be taught to be assertive.
I can't remember where I read this, but I think that played a part in another accident. I think the airlines then put colored tabs in the manual to help eliminate confusion.
That's no different for the pilot at that moment, you fly the airplane exactly the same. Loss of pressure is trained for too - a lot. What happened here is remarkable but that does not play a role for flying, more for what happens after landing (for example, the whole world covering the incident...).
I'm a measly PP-ASEL and while I applaud the captain all the "hero" and especially the "only a fighter jet pilot could do this" articles are ridiculous.
>That's no different for the pilot at that moment, you fly the airplane exactly the same.
Disagree — I find it hard to believe the flight characteristics wouldn't change with this level of leading edge damage: https://i.imgur.com/aEWw6UG.png
(On the other hand, compensating with more right rudder! won't feel too unusual!)
>Loss of pressure is trained for too - a lot.
Agreed. But the two together compounds the problem and makes it a more dangerous situation that's trained for less.
>What happened here is remarkable but that does not play a role for flying, more for what happens after landing (for example, the whole world covering the incident...).
Well, not exactly. Loss of pressure would prompt the pilot to dive to breathable altitudes, the rate of which might really matter given what we've seen of passengers wearing oxygen masks improperly. A slower rate of dive might have resulted in some real injuries from hypoxia. (That said, it seems like a higher rate than the performed 3000 fpm might have been justified.)
>I'm a measly PP-ASEL and while I applaud the captain all the "hero" and especially the "only a fighter jet pilot could do this" articles are ridiculous.
Same, and agreed. Did the pilot do her job as described? Yes. Could a lot of people have died if she hadn't properly followed procedure? Definitely. Did she go above and beyond and pull off a near-impossible feat like US1549? Probably not, but there probably wasn't anything above and beyond that could be done — following procedure and training was the right move.
Does that make you a hero? That just depends on your definition. Certainly she's as much of a 'hero' as the fireman who saves people from a burning building, as his job specifies.
I would say that that is not the point though. More dangerous, more spectacular - what matters is that you have to fly the airplane. Whether the situation is more dangerous does not directly influence the flight characteristics, that's "meta", something you can think about later on the ground, "Wow, we were sooo close! If that piece had hit a few inches further left... or if xyz had also happened...".
> Does that make you a hero?
I don't really mind that question as such - but the hero worship that happens, which is so mindless. It feels all fake, like theater, like the media does it following an established procedure, unthinking. Are you a "hero" for being competent? I would have thought that word has an element of volunteering, going into danger when you don't have to (plus also being competent, i.e. succeeding).
> I'm a measly PP-ASEL and while I applaud the captain all the "hero" and especially the "only a fighter jet pilot could do this" articles are ridiculous.
I'm not yet an expert in any field, but given the number of times I hear something on the news containing lacklustre research/reporting (including from reputable organisations), none of this surprises me. I'd go as far to guess that nearly everything covered with publication deadline has quite a few major errors or omissions. I'm not suggesting that the stories are "false" per se but more that they're usually superficial since organisations think most of the audience aren't experts and therefore don't care.
I don't get my aviation news from the news but on the other hand, the general public don't care about aviation news enough to follow what we follow.
Superficially reminiscent of QF32, although that one didn't result in a cabin breach or any injuries - the wing did cop a fair bit though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32
The most extraordinary effort performed that day was, judging from early reports, done by two passengers who pulled a dying woman's broken body back into an aircraft undergoing depressurization. That and figuring out how to cover the hole in the fuselage strike me as more "heroic" (a loaded term, maybe) than piloting the jet while it was down an engine, or even calming the passengers and helping them don their oxygen masks.
Egotistical tone to this article... good explanation of procedures on an airliner but for background the author of the blog post made a boat load of money on Web 1.0 and fancies himself as a pilot. It's way too easy for a part-timer like him to pretend this was no big deal and he could have done it too.
He writes this article with a tone of jealousy or something that the captain is taking too much credit or didn't really have a hard job or something.
The captain of the SW plane didn't even want to be identified, the press took care of that. The fact that the rest of the crew wasn't identified doesn't mean the captain is taking too much credit or that everyone thinks the rest of the crew didn't do a great job too.
No reason for him to try and take the captain down in his post, a simpler blog post praising the rest of the crew would have been better.
If you were looking for it you could probably claim an element of sexism too since he's acting like the co-pilot isn't getting any credit because he's a man. That probably takes a reader who was predisposed to that viewpoint though.
It’s way too easy for a part-timer like him to pretend this was no big deal and he could have done it too.
The author’s FAA credentials include[0] Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) Airplane Single-Engine Land (ASEL), ATP Airplane Multi-Engine Land (AMEL), ATP Helicopter, Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI), Multi-Engine Instructor (MEI), CFI-Instrument (CFII), CFI-Helicopter, and CFII-H. He flew as First Officer for a regional airline.
I got a similar read from it, just because it was "routine" doesn't make it any less impressive. There were ~150 lives in the hands of that captian and keeping your cool in that situation should be commended (esp compared to situations like Air France where panic seemed to play a large factor).
Right. Doing it in the simulator and doing it in real life when the engine has exploded and the cabin has depressurized and you've got serious injuries and panic onboard are not the same thing.
Practicing in the simulator is routine, landing a plane that's had an explosion is not.
My father used to be involved in law enforcement(and still does a bunch of public safety stuff). As I was told you can train for something constantly and yet you won't know how you react until you're put into the situation.
In my mind, praise costs you almost nothing while saying "well, actually..." just makes it you look petty.
The concept that saving ~150 people was "just a part of your job" and nothing special is insane. The fact the pilot did everything right IS commendable, it shows dedication to her job, the skill and knowledge required to do it, and the execution of all of that in an exemplary fashion that resulted in many lives saved.
As a society we spend days talking about presidential lawyers, talking heads and celebrities regardless of how much they deserve to be discussed or focused on. I can't think of a better example to offset the mindless drivel then to stop and appreciate someone for doing a job well done with the lives of so many entrusted to them.
Impressive to whom? Regardless, I think debating down this avenue is moot since to me the opinion piece was in response to the media hysteria, rather than the crew's specific actions.
also omitted from Greenspun's article was the fact that the plane first listed more than 40 degrees and had to be recovered from that attitude.
But this completely contradicted his narrative that the autopilot just takes care of that sort of "mis-rigging".
Yes, the pilots practice for it, yes they are experienced, and yes they have help on a large plane. But a successful outcome is not a foregone conclusion, and a hundred things could go wrong that would end it in disaster. Acting like it is no big deal is a really bad take, and the pilot and crew deserve every accolade for getting it right.
For some blog sites I agree, but here it is Philip Greenspun who shares his email, phone number and physical mailing address on his website! I've sent an email about the typo at that address.
I usually look for an email on the blog site, then on thier other/main sites, then a direct message option on twitter, then a contact in whois for that domain, then, as much as it drive me nuts that it could be corrected so easily, it's just a tipo after all, and I try to let it go.
I completely get you, and as someone who cringes at Linus Torvalds's "touch" typing style (which makes me wonder if that's where some of his overall "style" comes from), I wish there was an easy package or plugin that could be popularly applied to publishing and posting software (e.g., web browsers). It doesn't need to be mandatory, but I'm sure many people wouldn't mind the option so long as it's not open for abuse.
I've thought about this before too, especially with forums. Here, for example, there are lots of non-native speakers who make little mistakes that I would like to correct. But some people see that as rude or as being overly picky. But when I'm learning a foreign language I want people to point out my mistakes.
I like the way that StackOverflow does it where you can request edits. That way it doesn't waste other people's time or interfere with the conversation.
>But some people see that as rude or as being overly picky. But when I'm learning a foreign language I want people to point out my mistakes.
As a Dutchman and non-native speaker of English who learned most of it online I can tell you that I've always welcomed 'grammer nazis'. Especially before mobile phones made spellcheck a constant, online posts would engrave words in your brain with the wrong spelling.
I wished every board had a 'pull request' feature to privately let posters know about typos, like StackOverflow.
We still need to fix pronounciation though. When I was 14 I always thought Windows was telling me my copy was Genuine (Guh-nine) in stead of Genuine (Gen-you-in). But when do you ever hear that word on TV? Took me years before I stopped saying 'Guh-nine' in my head.
pronunciation - not pronounciation. :) (Is that what you meant by "there is one in here for ya"?)
But yes, I too have the universal "simple typo fixer" software idea on my Ideas list. Far too often, I come across atrocious spelling or grammar but don't want to fix it lest I be called out for being pedantic (or worse: not be called out and instead be silently scorned).
I'm not talking about writing beautiful prose (something I can't do), but just simple things such as usage of apostrophes. Apostrophe usage is probably the one that is most misunderstood for people who can otherwise write reasonably. [Never use an apostrophe unless it's for ownership or "is" - I think that's the best rule of thumb I can think of that will almost always work.]
People who write for a living also can be surprisingly regular offenders yet those are the ones who are often completely uncontactable (for obvious fair-enough reasons).
> but almost certainly not because flying a large jet is 'easier'.
That's not really what the author asserted. He said that flying a large jet with autopilot+two human pilots is easier than flying a small plane with just one human pilot. That probably is true, though I agree that it is hardly the only factor.
It would be easier in the same way that programming is easier than manual data entry. You guys are conflating two different meanings of easy, and, as usual, you're not right from your own points of view.
It's easier to learn to fly a small aircraft as a beginner. Once you're an expert, it's easier to use the automation and process tools at your disposal in an enterprise aircraft.
I can take off and fly in a single engine plane, never tried a landing though I've done a couple of 'mock' landings where you almost land but then go again. I wouldn't know where to begin to do any of that in a jet unless the other pilot did all the work and I was just along for the ride.
At risk of joining a buried tangental thread, I don't think it is a good analogy.
Anecdote: In my software flight sim experience (I know I am not a pilot), I've had a better initial success rate with the heavier planes than I have with the light ones. Did I fluke it? Probably. But then again, I've learned some tricks on a bicycle that are widely seen as more difficult to learn than learning to ride a bike but I don't think they were that hard to learn in hindsight.
Anyway, we are so into hypothetical territory now that I'm not going to further embarrass myself with more comment on this.
Is learning two or three new programming languages for a programmer harder than learning a single new programming language as a novice?
People don't always mean a single thing when they say "easier". I think philg is using "easier" to mean that the workload is lower, while you're using "easier" to mean that the skill level required is lower.
Modern jets are actually pretty easy to fly, as long as nothing goes wrong. To the point that when Mythbusters tested that “guiding a passenger through landing the plane when the pilots die” myth, they interviewed ATC who said something along the lines of “that would never happen, but if it did it’s like 2 buttons to engage the landing autopilot and we could easily do it over the radio.” Apparently some subset of flight attendants are trained on basic flight ops for this kind of situation.
When things do go wrong, you still need a pilot experienced in the way that aircraft works or non-problems can turn into a catastrophe. AF447 was the latest reminder of that... so you are right that the amount of skill required is greater.
There have been several experiments done for youtube videos where an untrained person is talked through a landing, sometimes without the benefit of ILS autoland. The latter is... not always successful.
I wonder if someone used to simpler aircraft might have done better at identifying the problem in AF447. Any pilot should know that given full power, an unknown airspeed, a nose-up attitude and a high descent rate that the airplane is probably in a stall.
That was part of the conclusion of the definitive piece of journalism about the crash: Air France had a habit of training pilots fresh up on a jumbo jet, accumulating the required flight hours in a certified simulator (the “company babies” referred to in the article). Part of the confusion was that under “normal law” (typical flight computer rules), that jet literally cannot stall due to pilot input. Thus they dismissed the stall warnings as erroneous because they assumed the flight data was unreliable in some way.
Indeed, once the more senior pilot (who flew light aircraft) was on the bridge, it didn’t take him long to figure out what was going on... and once he did his ability to think coherently broke down because he knew they were in a high speed stall and probably going to die any moment.
Well, it isn't where I live. Kids from about 1-3 years old get these little 'walker bikes' that have no sidewheels or anything (no chain or pedals either), they use those to learn balance, then after that they get their first bike (age 3 and up) which they usually can ride on right away. By the time they go to grade school they can cycle with the best of them.
Learning how to cycle at a much later age is far harder.
Yeah, that's what I know if as a balance bike. Once mastered moving to a pedal bike is much easier because you've done the balance bit.
We did that bit by removing the pedals and lowering the seat. Once they can cruise then stick the pedals on, adjust the seat, and they're away ... but that's not just "getting on a bike", that's a progression of training.
The thread parent said "never picked up a bike", you transmuted that to "used a training bike and then picked up a full one".
Not pertinent to the thread but the flaw in this technique (balance bike) with my kids has been they learn to brake with their feet and that instinct is hard to break.
While the plural of anecdote is not evidence, I may as well pitch mine in: I hit practically every parked car in the neighborhood trying to learn how to ride my bicycle. So the original point rings pretty true for me.
Single engine is easier in the piston and turboprop world (as the multiengine plane seems like it's trying to kill you if you lose an engine at low speed and high power [like on takeoff]).
In the jet world, multiengine ops become easier again, as the airplane is less trying to kill you in the event of a failure (much lower drag from a failed engine, no runaway prop concerns, less yaw from asymmetric thrust) and you have massive amounts of surplus power at low altitude. There are situations in a jet where you can lose an engine on the takeoff roll, even prior to lifting the nosewheel, and for the safest course of action to be to continue the takeoff, take the problem airborne, and consider a return or divert in the air. (Failures after V1 ["takeoff decision speed"] and before Vr ["rotate"].) There are no such times in the piston or (edit to add: light) turboprop world.
The safety rates and reasons are frequently debated. As a pilot who frequently flies my family around and is strongly disinterested in making the numerator part of the statistics, I read every NTSB fatal, every crash of the types I fly, and most of the serious crashes of other types.
My thoughts are that the pilots are, by a wide margin, the weakest link in general aviation (non-military, non-commercial) piston singles, making poor decisions on fuel, weather, and other dispatch-related topics. I'd bet that 3/4ths of the piston single fatals have pilot or dispatch (also pilot) as the root cause, not engine or mechanical.
Multi engined propped aircrafts are notoriously hard to insure because of these characteristics (and not unrelated, why you can pick up a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron for around $60,000 while a single-engine Bonanza will cost you 3-4 times that amount).
It seems so easy: when one engine fails you still have the other left to power the aircraft, right? People often forget that the prop on the stalled engine creates a huge amount of drag, like a stuck paddle on a canoe. You have to compensate for the drag, feather the prop (adjust the angle of the blades to minimize drag) and adjust for that again. When you have sufficient altitude that can be done, but on takeoff or landing you'd have to be a really cool cat to pull it off...
As for pilot error: I think that number is actually a lot closer to 100%. This also rings true for car accidents, and I bet most planes are maintained a lot better than cars...
Accelerate-go is definitely used in twin pistons and turboprops. For example, in the DA-42, V1 is specified as 75 kts. In the King Air 350, V1 is typically around 100 kts.
I do stand corrected on the King Air 350 (and it's likely that the P180, Dash-8, ATR-42 will also be similar and come with balanced field restrictions). Thank you for that correction.
Accelerate-go calculations do not necessarily mean that engine failures before rotation are to be taken aloft. My 58P has accelerate-go charts published (they're not pretty at heavy weights on high/hot days). Nevertheless, any engine failure with the nosewheel on the ground is an abort/RTO.
The DA-42 I can't find any reference for V1 below Vr and to take an engine failure prior to Vr aloft. That was looking in the QRH and checklists for the aircraft. I see both specified at 75 knots and the checklist response for engine failure on the roll is only the rejected takeoff instructions.
I don't really have a problem commending the captain for safely landing her aircraft. Yes, she was trained for it. But plenty of people have performance anxiety even when the stakes are low -- how many people perform perfectly when losing your cool can lead to you killing yourself and hundreds of others?
And, it's not like airline captains always follow their training. Look at Colgan Air Flight 3407. The aircraft aerodynamically stalled. To recover, the captain pulled the control column backwards, the exact opposite of what training called for, while the first officer silently reduced the lift of the wing by reducing the flaps setting, the exact opposite of what their training called for. They killed 49 people on board and one in the house they crashed into.
So yes, it's easy to say "that was nothing, they're trained for that", and while true, sometimes the training is not executed as precisely as necessary. Not messing it up is commendable.
That incident is a good case study into the concept of the accident chain. Both pilots were tired. The first officer complained of feeling ill. The captain had a history of failing four checkrides and three airline check events. Crew coordination was poor. The captain evidently had a complete loss of situation awareness.
Richard Collins (not the pop singer) in Air Facts Journal called it a system error[0].
Absolutely. But you can apply all that to the Southwest incident; the captain didn't fail her checkrides, she didn't come to work tired or ill, she managed her crew resources effectively, etc., etc.
On some level, I agree that nobody is a hero for just doing their job. But when not doing your job leads to people dying, it sure is nice when you do it efficiently while under pressure.
> "There are some items to do from memory, with the two pilots cooperating so that they can agree on which engine is the dead one and should have its thrust/fuel lever cut off, for example.
Airline training stresses the use of the autopilot in an emergency, which frees the human pilots to concentrate on the checklists and not pulling back, for example, the thrust lever on the running engine."
Who is going to read the book he recommends at the end -- 9 Minutes, 20 Seconds? A well-written in depth look at a 29 person plane crash and the people involved? Sounds terrifying.
I have read the full, final NTSB report on the accident.
I was the on-duty Flight Control Manager at the time of the incident and received the initial contact (via landline) from FAA. (Due to the specifics of the failure mode the crew did not radio their dispatcher.)
Incredibly, within minutes, the accident was already on local broadcast as breaking news while we were still putting together the Go Team.
In my current position (DevOps) people have commented how cool I am when important stuff goes off the rails — I usually just say "compared to my previous career, this is nothing."
In case someone asks "childish question" why airplanes do not have parachutes, of course they could have those, but the cost of design and implementation on such large scale of tens of thousands of planes, outweighs any outcry caused by few crashes that occur per year. Hence no law that would force airlines/airplanes to implement those and airlines/airplanes are last when it comes to lavishly spending money out of their free will, even if it means saving one extra life.
> the cost of design and implementation on such large scale of tens of thousands of planes, outweighs any outcry caused by few crashes that occur per year
Or it would remove money from where it could be better spent. There are some light aircraft (such as some experimental ultralights) that do have parachutes. Frankly, I'd prefer to fly in an airliner or other planes that don't have such warning bells and red flags all over.
Here's an example: What would the effect be if all passengers who board a plane or cruiseliner were required to wear life jackets before take off just in case of the remote chance of needing to face a disaster over water?
And a possibly more controversial example: Helmets and bullet vests can save some lives. At what point should the focus be on legislating on their mandatory use, versus fixing the problems at the source?
I'd also wonder if it's a net positive - being forced to stay on the plane and hope that it ends well vs. potentially jumping early when it turns out to not be necessary. Untrained, panicked people jumping out of a moving plane sounds like a recipe for disaster.
If a pilot lands a broken plane safely, she may just be doing her job, but to a passenger on board, they may feel she saved their life. That feeling is justifiable and should in no way be minimized by having a "well, technically" attitude.
As for the media, well, they're going to get caught up in the emotional side of it. That's just a given.
Oh, FFS. Yeah, we know, you can fly and land with a single engine, that's what ETOPS is more or less, noone questioned that. And yes, a two engine turboprop might have more problems with a single engine, but no idea how relevant that is.
But please. She had a situation at her hands where 140 people are injured, perhaps dying and she talks to the tower with a stony calm. Even the famous "Houston Center voice" of the Tower Controller was shaken a bit when he asked back. That's what made everyone astonished.
That's just embellishment. 140 people were not injured or dying, she was told what the situation was. A Navy fighter pilot with over two decades of commercial flying is not going to get rattled by one engine out on a jetliner. It's not like the landing gear was broken.
> A Navy fighter pilot with over two decades of commercial flying is not going to get rattled by one engine out on a jetliner.
Spot on. Some seem to be going out of their way to embellish the stakes as if it's necessary to credit the pilot with being highly skilled. She already is, no question!
She doesn't need the exaggeration, it seems patronizing..the situation is what it is, no more no less.
This is horseshit. She had an engine explode and shrapnel ripped apart the fuselage, it’s not remotely a “one engine out simulation”. Was the wing damaged? How badly was the fuselage damaged? Was the plane actually on fire as the indicators showed? She was accounting for a large number of unknowns that the armchair crowd here is not even considering. She was also told that someone was ejected from the plane. Do these not have an impact on the pilot’s mental state? She retired from flying fighter jets only to be shot down by her own poorly maintained engine while carrying 150 other people? This is looking at a good outcome and deciding that it looked easy.
Aye. I'm not going to say she did the impossible, threaded the eye of the needle or anything like that. But there was plenty of opportunity or circumstance for things to horribly wrong. But she's got a ton of experience and in the moment of truth she didn't choke and everyone who could be saved was saved. That ought to be enough for anyone.
The status of 140 people in the back has zero bearing on the situation in the cockpit.
The situation is that one engine has gone offline and there has been a sudden depressurization event.
The airline industry realized long ago that people suck under pressure so they write checklists and explicit sets of procedures for dealing with basically everything.
Your job as the pilot is to execute that checklist, as best you can and not be a cowboy.
Even getting the plane ready for takeoff is a checklist you must complete and file before every takeoff.
Even the Miracle on the Hudson was a pilot completely aware of what could and should be done even though the exact scenario had never been practiced. Experienced pilots have been through enormous training sessions these days and even tossing them something no one has ever faced is still based on them understanding the limitations and potentials of a plane in distress. It doesn't always come out perfectly (planes do still crash based on pilot error) but I'd trust a well trained experience airline pilot without question in life or death in an airplane.
Losing all thrust shortly after takeoff is a particularly nasty emergency. Pilots of single-engine airplanes talk about the impossible turn for a reason. It’s really closer to a 270° turn than a 180° turn and requires aggressive maneuvering at low altitude to avoid a stall-spin accident, which has claimed many lives. Unless the pilot is particularly proficient at the maneuver, common advice is to plan on landing straight ahead until reaching 1,000 feet AGL.
Having multiple engines makes it not twice as safe but thousands of times safer, at least with respect to losing all thrust. (Multi-engine aircraft have other ways to kill you.) A multi-engine turbine aircraft — turbine engines being far more reliable than pistons — is so unlikely to lose all thrust, i.e., in all engines simultaneously, that they didn’t bother training for it. This worst-case scenario happened anyway.
The Southwest incident took place in the flight levels. Altitude is insurance and gives lots of time to consider options. The airplane still had thrust from one engine so may have been capable of (slow) climbs and certainly of level flight. The big unknown in the moment was whether the airframe would hold together, so they still wanted to get on the ground as soon as possible.
Given the choice of emergencies, one would take the Southwest circumstances easily. Both pilots did great work managing terrible situations that could have ended up much worse. Loss of all lives on board was in the realm of possibility for both.
I don't know how accurate the movie was, but it is my understanding that the NTSB initially questioned whether the pilot made the right choice to land in the Hudson rather than turn back to the airport.
That is a natural question for them to raise, even derelict if they didn't raise it. Once it was raised and investigated, I think it was conclusive that the Hudson was a very reasonable (and probably the) best choice.
Exactly, the pilots had to evaluate the situation and make a decision, I don't think they had a checklist that told them what to do. They made the right decision- and executed beautifully.
Source? Double engine failures are incredibly rare, and I've not been able to find anything that indicates Sullenberberger was involved in any prior to 1549. In simulation, probably.
In the recording of the tower communications, she specifically mentions the person that was sitting next to the broken window, it doesn't sound at all like she believes that most of the passengers are (seriously) injured.
I think she might have also never entered the cabin, so therefore got the information secondhand. This probably helps with calmness and focus. "Crew Resource Management"?
I've had an engine failure in cruise flight (on a multi-engine piston plane) in a single-pilot situation. (I later wrote about it in a magazine article.) We train for that too - although not as frequently as airline pilots do who train at least every six months. It was also a non-event from a "what to do". In fact, the only time my single passenger mentioned she was made nervous (after we landed) was when ATC asked for the number of souls on board (which they knew from my IFR flight plan but they always ask). "When did I become a soul???"
One thing my best instructor always told me about an emergency: "First, wind your watch." In other words, don't panic and do things hastily and make things worse. Especially in cruise.
So, kudos to the flight deck crew for doing exactly what they had trained to do and successfully putting the plane on the ground after dealing with the emergency!
Kudos to the rest of the flight crew for what must have been total chaos and fear among the passengers and for doing what I'm sure was their absolute best to save the unfortunate victim.
And, in the end, let's all remember that this (seemingly) slightly uncontained engine failure could have been much, much worse and be glad of that. Let's also be thankful that the training airline pilots receive generally have situations that are much less benign than an engine failure in cruise and have it drilled in to them how to handle it.