A company I worked for was in the old Thurston Aircraft plant in Sanford ME so we were right on the airport. The company president got his license and bought a plane. The idea was to be able to meet clients without having long drives. One nice day he jumped in the plane and headed for Kennebunkport, about 20 miles away.
The coast of Maine can brew up some industrial strength fog on short notice and he got into it. He was able to climb out, and get back to Sanford. He landed, kissed the ground, and put the plane up for sale.
A few years later I was going for a license with the same objective but I never got to the point of buying a plane. I realized that VFR is great for joy riding on nice days but isn't a reliable method of transportation. Even if the weather is okay, Podunk International Airport is usually 10 miles from town and the restaurant consists of stale peanut butter crackers from the machine if you're lucky.
I never had any drama other than flying in Indiana. I learned in Vermont and mountain flying keeps your mind occupied. Flying in indiana is as boring as driving so you have plenty of time to imagine all sorts of disasters.
Did a 1999 Piper Saratoga autopilot have the capability to recover from unusual attitudes or a stall/spin?
But really, if someone is going to play air-taxi pilot, at minimum they should have a current instrument ticket in their pocket.
Pretty simple stuff if you stayed awake during training and all the aircraft's engines/controls/avionics are working. It's not rocket surgery.
As always, when shit starts breaking, the game changes and the real pilots are separated from the posers. Truth be told, the only reason I'm still alive is because I never experienced any system failures. ;-)
I see your point. Maybe the button would have to be labeled "urgent concern" :) If it's already too far gone then I would guess typical autopilot isn't going to be able to recover it. I had in mind that you're starting to get into trouble, so you push a single button that then keeps the wings level and it flying straight. But if you think you can handle it, gradually lose control and it's too late, then it would need a more advanced system. I was thinking of just using what's basically already there.
How hard is it to engage the typical auto-pilot? If it's very easy and non-IFR pilots would know how to do it, then I guess my idea of one button push doesn't add much.
We had a recent crash in NYC where a helicopter wound up on the roof of a midtown building, luckily there instead of on a busy street or inside a building. The pilot was killed. Many were praising him as a hero because they say he must have chosen that building roof to crash into. Not sure there is indication he really chose it. But despite working for a company to fly passengers and having many years experience, he had no IFR rating. He was also a fireman, former chief I think of the local volunteer FC company where he lived.
Flying passengers and no IFR sounds very bad to me. It's only a matter of time before you're in a situation where you have some flight scheduled and now the weather is marginal and the pressure mounts to proceed when you really shouldn't. That isn't exactly what happened in this case, but close. He had flown a passenger to the heliport in Manhattan and the weather apparently changed to a lower ceiling. IDK how low or how marginal it was on the way in. Also, I think he picked the passenger up in Westchester, NY, so I think he came in from the north. The return was to Linden, NJ to the south west. He waited some period of time, I think a couple hours, then decided it had improved enough to go. Within a few minutes he reported being unable to find his way and tried to return, he never made it. That guy had quite a bit of experience, was flying passengers, was supposed to be such a responsible guy, I'm left wondering why he never got an IFR rating?
I've read a lot of accident reports where similar happen to VFR recreational pilots. They go off with friends or family for a day trip or a weekend somewhere. The weather changes after they are there, so now what? They can probably wait an hour or two, but if it's more than that, would require staying overnight, maybe several days if the poor weather continues, the pressure increases to convince yourself that some marginal condition is not so marginal.
I read it and it looked like a hit piece to me that ignored the real reason of the crash, lack of training. Perhaps Boeing has some culpability in not insisting on more training but isn't this really the responsibility of the airline and the regulatory agencies? The 737MAX was put in service by the Obama FAA so that is one you can't blame on Trump, only an inept government agency but isn't that redundant?
It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or Boeing. The blame lies with the fly-by-night airline that put a 200 hr pilot in the right seat. That's criminal.
Boeing is responsible for a shockingly disasterous design that never should have been in the plane. It was capable of shoving the nose down hard, repeatedly, with just one faulty sensor input.
The pilots are responsible for not being able to deal with a runaway trim emergency, which is part of their basic training. That's true in the first crash and in the previous flight that avoided crashing. The pilots in the Ethiopian air crash, it's less clear that they were responsible. The co-pilot identified it as a runaway trim and followed the Boeing procedure, he was unable to turn the mechanical trim wheel because the plane was nose down too hard and going too fast. It was over for them in just a couple of minutes. Fretwell is right, that if one of the pilots had remembered how MCAS works as was evident after the first crash, they could have applied flaps to quickly rectify it. Even if they were not sure it was MCAS or what was going on, that the trouble started just as they retracted flaps should have triggered something. I mean if I'm operating anything and just as I change something all kinds of trouble starts, my first thought would be to undo what was just done.
The FAA is responsible for certifying a design that never should have been designed.
One thing for sure, I can't understand why that Boeing CEO still has his job. And I no longer trust any new Boeing plane like I did in the past.
FYI, the 200 hour pilot in the right seat was the one who correctly identified the problem and followed the runaway trim procedure. He cut off the electric trim and tried to trim manually. He's heard on the CVR saying he was unable to do so, most likely because the plane was too hard nose down and going too fast. And that problem exists in ALL
737s and likely other planes too. Five other experienced pilots were unable to do that. (2 on LA that crashed, 2 on the LA flight right before,
1 on EA)
Boeing recognized that problem, decades ago they included that fact in the manuals and told pilots to put the plane into a dive to relieve the pressure on the control surface so that the trim wheels could be turned. They dropped that from the manuals over the years, another Boeing wrong. And that can work at 20,000 ft. At a few thousand feet, on take-off, there is no altitude for a dive. I suspect that the only reason we don't see more crashes from runaway electric trim is that it's very rare. Rare that is until Boeing came up with a design to easily cause it.
BTW, has anyone heard anything about a root cause for the AOA sensor malfunctioning? These are brand new planes, what was wrong? I heard they thought maybe a bird strike in EA, but LA it was busted while on the ground.
Of course not, they never had the AOA sensor that MCAS uses fail, creating the unusual and dangerous emergency. If it had, the results might very well have been similar. We know that the AOA only failed on three flights. Two out of three crashed. And no airline has been flying them for over 6 months now.
'Sullenberger's experience in a 737 MAX simulator made him see how pilots ran out of time"
"I recently experienced all these warnings in a 737 MAX flight simulator during recreations of the accident flights. Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have solved the problems. Prior to these accidents, I think it is unlikely that any US airline pilots were confronted with this scenario in simulator training," Sullenberger said."
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Daniel Carey, president of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American Airlines, noted Boeing's strong safety record generally, but he criticized the aerospace giant for making "many mistakes" in order to reduce costs, while still developing the Max plane so that it would feel as much like the previous version of the 737.
He (Sullenberger) and Carey dismissed suggestions that the crashes could not have happened in the U.S., where pilots are required to have a lot of experience and more rigorous training before flying commercial airliners.
"Some (U.S.) crews would have recognized it in time to recover, but some would not have," Carey testified. Sullenberger agreed, saying it's unlikely that more experienced pilots would have had different outcomes, adding, "we shouldn't have to expect pilots to compensate for flawed designs."
"These two recent crashes happened in foreign countries," said Sullenberger. "But if we do not address all the important issues and factors, they can and will happen here."
“Our current system of aircraft design and certification has failed us,” he said.
The most I saw was that there was a report from maybe one flight where the crew said there was some unusual behavior with the plane changing altitude or something along that line, that they had no idea what caused it, nothing about it suddenly nosing hard down, stall warnings, or anything that would indicate it was MCAS related. If it was MCAS and like what happened in the three foreign flights, they would have had to declare an emergency and return to the airport and it should be well documented.
I cited the specific quotes from Sullenberger and the president of the Airline Pilots Association. Does the fact that CNN and NPR reported it and quoted them make what they said invalid? Are you suggesting that they never said it? Why are trumptards so stupid? This is extremely dangerous, when a significant portion of the population starts denying the actual truth, the actual fact, what was actually stated, simply because a lying shyster leader calls the media the "enemy of the people". And instead, they start believing insane conspiracy theories, like that Crowdstike is a Ukranian company that meddled in the election and the DNC server was spirited away to Ukraine. Just look where believing that insanity got Trump.
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