dutchroll

Both correct. You can certainly have a partial failure or power loss for a number of reasons, but also the damage to the propeller can indicate roughly how much power it was producing if any at all.

Is it? Oh but for a few dollars every time I've heard that! Let's revisit this a month from now, and 6 months from now.

$139k isn't going to be an average annual salary. "Employee Costs" include leave (long service leave liabilities too), super, redundancy payments, etc etc. It requires a little care when doing averaging of employee costs to consider the way the average is distorted (e.g. the top 10% probably earn obscene money, but I bet the bottom 30% would look pretty ordinary) and what the costs actually include. By my calculations from the report, averaging the wages and salaries (excluding everything else) comes out to $102k. $37k less is a fair difference (over 25%)! And again, it's worth considering that the salary package numbers in the public service are not linear. The report shows CASA Senior Management salaries + bonuses was $6.2 million of those employee salaries. Just saying.......if we're going to throw rocks here, and be my guest because I have no affiliation with CASA at all, it pays to throw them accurately.

Well, I'm not going to be placing a bet on the impending reformation of CASA (unless some huge safety issue affecting RPT is exposed). It's wishful thinking. Very wishful. Now on the other hand, if someone were to point out to the Government how a complete overhaul of CASA would save them hundreds of millions of dollars, the overhaul will start tomorrow.

If it's one individual, I doubt very much that will cause whole empires to come crashing down and entire ships to sink. That's not how Government works. Everything is so entangled and interleaved that an individual guilty of misconduct, even a reasonably senior one, can be sent packing with minimal effect on the greater bureaucracy. This is especially the case with aviation, as no-one outside the aviation community (which is most of the population) could care less what goes on in CASA unless it's to do with major RPT/airline operations. It would barely even make a media story for 24 hours.

Always related to dinner the night before....

I have smelled a lot of pungent and nauseating odours in the cockpit over the years, most commonly after departure from south-east asian ports.

From AIP. Clearances are always requested. Reports are just stated.

Aplund, unique ATC clearance information is contained in the ERSA entry for that airport. You need to really thoroughly read the ERSA entry because there's not always a rhyme or reason as to exactly under what subject heading that information will be found. It's easy to miss it (done that myself, more than once). VFR Guides usually try to summarise this information in one place. Example: Gold Coast "ATS COMMUNICATION FACILITIES" Note 3 "Flight details and clearance requests should be advised to Brisbane Centre 119.5 well before the CTR boundary. Pilots submitting details should prefix these requests with the phrase “Flight Details”. Pilots should NOT contact Gold Coast TWR to submit Inbound/Transiting details." but....... "LOCAL TRAFFIC REGULATIONS" Note 7 "Aircraft requiring a transit of the GC CTR should plan to track via the VFR route depicted on the VTC as follows: Northbound transit via the highway (inland) and contact Tower 118.7 approaching Cudgen Lake for ATC clearance." So it tells me to call Brisbane Centre 119.5 for clearance. Except if I'm transmitting the CTR, I have to call the tower for the clearance. Why? I have no idea but there will something in the way traffic is coordinated between ATC agencies there which dictates it. As a general rule where you can't find anything to specify what to say, you should: 1) Call the controlling agency of the airspace (Centre/Approach/Tower/etc depending which airspace you enter first) 2) Tell them who you are 3) Tell them where you are (including altitude) - approaching a specific reporting point, or if not, a distance and bearing/quadrant 4) Tell them where you're going in a few simple words. 5) Advise receipt of ATIS where applicable 6) Request the clearance If there is extra info they need (e.g., military towers will want your POB) then they will ask you. If there's a unique frequency to call and you skipped over it in your ERSA study, they'll just tell you to remain outside controlled airspace and "call XYZ for clearance". It happens more than you might think, but store it away for next time.

I got hit right in the face by one a few years ago. I was in a Boeing 767 at about 500ft on final approach to Sydney. It did briefly make the news. They never caught him but if they had, I'd like to have chained him to a wall out the back of the cop station and let all 240 passengers file past and have a few seconds each to express their feelings towards him.

I've PM'd you.

RAAF training taught incipient spin recovery on the CT4 (fully developed spins in that aircraft being frowned upon). Advanced training in the Macchi saw us do fully developed spins, starting at 20,000ft if I recall correctly. If you left it in the spin for a few turns it would really wind up. Part-time civilian flying saw me doing spinning in the DHC-1 Chipmunk, in which recovery technique is critical. Moving onto civilian life I was introduced to inverted spinning on the Pitts S-2. Owning my own Pitts experimental variant now, I spin that from time to time. When practicing spinning I get as high as practically possible. If I stuff it up, I at least then get some time to fix it.

I do not blame you for being unaware of the inaccuracies in the book and the opinion of other crew members on that book. Nor do I blame anyone at all for being totally unaware of the aftermath. It's not something that people would understand and it's something that the other pilots just want to move on from. Again, I'm being extraordinarily careful here. In private conversation, I am somewhat more blunt. I'm regretting bringing this up.

Well the finer details are no big secret in our company, but you tread a thin line saying stuff in public. I have personally sat down over beers since then and chatted to particular pilots who were in that cockpit. Look, the Captain did not do a bad job. That's the truth. However he had some very good support along the way. One person who stands out and whose contribution has been way understated in public and in the media, is First Officer (now a Captain) Matt Hicks. Contrary to the way he was portrayed in the TV dramatisation as the goggle-eyed F/O who seemed barely able to speak from shock, while the Captain authoritatively barked orders, by all accounts he was as cool as a cucumber and in fact had the presence of mind to keep everything focused when it could easily have run off the rails a bit. His workload was astronomical given the multiple system failures they had. He had to actually "interpret", rather than simply "do", checklist actions due to these complex multiple failures and try to get some sort of meaning out of the indications they had. The others too made great contributions, but one particular person decided afterwards to head off on paid speaking tours, write a book, etc. That's all fine, but to make out (as the videos of these speaking tours would have you believe) like they single-handedly saved the day and did a whole bunch of unique stuff that you wouldn't normally do in an emergency in a Airbus, well that has left a bad taste in people's mouths. Especially the way much of it was done, the details of which I won't go into. It's not a matter of jealousy I can assure you. The others had no interest whatsoever in "cashing in". It's just a matter of respect. That's where it stands to this day.

Yes.

My above post was somewhat tongue in cheek but there's an element of truth in it. Some guys change a lot, some not at all. I don't think anybody really knows why (and probably the reasons vary between individuals). Also the guy in charge doesn't fly with other guys in charge, so "the way things are run" can start to diverge a bit. SOPs etc mitigate this but don't eliminate it. Bugalugs in the right seat has to deal with this and some guys make it easy whereas some do not. I've often heard F/Os spoken of as "the world's greatest diplomats" by all ranks and even by hosties!

You fly with one captain, get a late change, do nothing and he barks "well are you going to put that in the damn FMC or not?" You fly with the next captain, get a late change, go to put it in the FMC and he barks "don't do that, just look out the window!" First Officer job description: Advisor. Counsellor. Social Director. Ar*e Coverer. Chief Diplonat. First Officer Prerequisites: Infinite patience. Subtlety when needed. Bluntness when needed. Humility to admit when you're wrong. Humility to zip your mouth when the Captain finds out he's wrong and you already told him so. Ability to laugh at crap jokes and sound genuine. Ability to nod head looking sincere when Captain expresses political opinion. Ability to nod head looking sincere when next Captain expresses opposite political opinion. Ability to make Captain think better alternate course of action was actually his idea.

Hmmmm........very fortunate to have the crew he did.

Horrible. We were at the Sun N Fun disaster in 2011 watching planes get hurled across the field like they were cardboard cutouts while others were untouched. You thank your lucky stars it wasn't yours, then feel awful for those who've seen so much money, time and effort get destroyed.

Sorry I didn't mean to leave out the "different other lives" (non ex-military) of my airline brethren. For example, sitting there in the middle of a stormy night on a bank run in a single engine Cessna getting paid a pittance working for a boss who threatened to sack you if you didn't depart despite the standby AI intermittently malfunctioning.....

I've found most realise we've usually had other lives before sitting in the cockpit of a big passenger jet, and that getting out of the plane back in those days dressed in green wearing a 9mm semiautomatic pistol loaded with live ammo in a shoulder holster didn't signify the end of a cruisey sector on autopilot before heading to a 5 star hotel.

Actually you're taught to land the B747-400 based on the GPWS calls because it is difficult to judge flare height sitting that high. In the simulator you do get to practice without them - with mixed results, but the aircraft is pretty resilient! The "one hundred" is "ok get ready for it soon". The "fifty" is "slowly start your flare just after this call finishes" and the "thirty" is "you should be flaring by now, and pull the power off". The B747 goes on pretty nicely if you just set the right attitude at about the right time (its not a big flare, quite a small attitude change really). You don't need to fiddle with it. You adjust the rate of flare and what you do with the power based on the spacing of the calls. Airbus 330 works in a similar way but the flare is a bit later and more subtle. You almost just give the side stick a little "nudge" backwards. However flying an a330 in any sort of bumpy or gusty wind on final approach is something even seasoned pilots find hard. It can be a bitch of a thing.

I have no problem with explaining how stuff works. However I know that the probability that the explanation will be retained for longer than 5 minutes (that's being generous), is close enough to zero.

Lol....I didn't say "give up and die". I just said there's more to it than these videos make obvious!

I love these "How to land a passenger jet if the pilots die" videos. The average non-pilot person watching this video would be lucky to retain 1% of the information in it, and almost guaranteed to recall none of it at all in the stress of a "omg the pilots have died can anybody land a plane?" moment. The problem even with flying these things on autopilot is that to get it on final approach to the runway in the landing configuration, a bunch of things have to be done in the right order. Miss a step, hit the button next to the actual one you want, dial the wrong setting into an autopilot mode, and you can get yourself in all sorts of trouble. This happens in real life (more often than you might think) to pilots with thousands of hours on type. It's just that it only lasts a couple of seconds before you realise and correct it, or your colleague points it out. No such luck for Joe Average who has little or no flying experience and is there by himself! Even the very interesting video of the B737 instructor talking a girl through landing the simulator shows how much taking and explaining needs to be done, under controlled conditions where she has no fear of consequences. Now throw in a petrified passenger trying to fly it under remote instruction, some turbulence, some calls from the cabin, some missed radio transmissions. Then see what happens!