dutchroll

Geezus.....that's not a bar I was ever intending to leap!

Thanks mate. I know my posts - particularly those answering certain questions - are occasionally guilty of being a bit long, but the issues around the questions are often more complex than meets the eye, and I hate "editing" the info to dish out only part of the story!

The dispatchers are not "God" in the airline. The Captain is God in most countries, including here. However it's company policy that flight plans are always prepared with the bare-bones minimum fuel legally required. Eg, if a TEMPO period with thunderstorms finishes 5 minutes before the buffer period based on ETA, the extra hour's fuel will not be planned. There are however many pressures to carry the minimum flight plan fuel. Some airlines (eg, yours truly) have entire "fuel conservation" departments run by a senior manager. They are always publishing emails and memos about saving fuel or not putting on extra fuel. At various times they have published spec charts to all aircraft Captains graphing their relative "additional fuel" orders against everyone else's. This is an overt attempt to pressure them into carrying less additional fuel. Before anyone asks - no there is not and never has been a "fuel bonus". It's all done with procedural policies and not-so-subtle pressure from the fuel conservation department. It's also a requirement to do a report when you uplift over a certain amount of additional fuel. This is yet another way of pressuring pilots to carry less, because pilots hate paperwork. We are covered by CARs and airlines here in Australia know that very well. The aircraft Captain not only "can", but "must" uplift whatever fuel he feels is necessary for the safe conduct of the flight and there's nothing airline management can do about that here. Consequently I'm unaware of anyone in my neck of the woods - even those on the higher end of the fuel spec charts - who have had their careers threatened. Pressuring a Captain to breach federal laws would be taken pretty seriously by the authorities and the general public. It does actually cost fuel to carry extra fuel due to the weight increase (doesn't matter whether that weight is extra fuel or cargo or whatever). This number is always published on our computer flight plan. It is pretty trivial on short sectors, but reasonably significant on longer ones or when the aircraft is much heavier. Eg: on a short domestic sector this might be something like 10 kg of fuel per extra tonne of weight which we would consider insignificant. Looking at my most recent plan for an 8 hour flight, the extra fuel burn was calculated at 234 kg per tonne. So if we put on, say, 2 tonnes more fuel (or any weight) for whatever reason, we would burn an extra 468 kg of fuel during that flight. Again it's purely due to the weight increase, however the airline's point of view is that you don't make revenue carrying extra fuel, but an extra 2 tonnes of cargo will more than offset the 468 kg extra fuel burn with revenue.

They're not "complaints" as such, though they're not glowing endorsements either and you may well interpret it that way. The thread is "why do you fly?". I fly for a living (for nearly 30 years now). An idealised video was posted purporting to reflect that flying-for-a-living world. Though there are certainly good times, the reality is quite different from the video. Totally on topic, and vastly more so than some other threads! Not how it works in a very large Board-run airline in a comfortable duopoly owned by large institutions!

I could tell you some amazing facts about the grounding, but I won't detail them on this public forum. For example, certain individuals at the top actually issued directives which maximised the inconvenience to passengers (eg, leaving them stranded when they didn't need to be). This was a calculated move. When I saw the televised "apology to our customers" I wanted to vomit.

There has been a new breed of airline CEO coming up through the ranks in recent years. Young, university educated, ruthless, so narcissistic that he could technically be classified as a genuine psychopath, sucked up to all the right people, and totally new to the business of his company. They're passengers along for the ride, suck the company dry over a few years while fudging a few book figures, then they move on to the next one. Same for Board members.

No, I just did an unusual string of Singapores (I actually quite like Singapore, as opposed to most other Asian destinations of ours) all in a row. My penance will probably mean all-domestic next roster knowing my luck! Yeah you do have good days, but airline flying has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years. You work a lot harder nowadays and airline management has become quite adversarial in recent years - certainly where I work anyway. Used to be a team effort with a bit of give and take, but now it's very much "us and them" with only the CARs to fall back on.

Lol. Here's a synopsis of what is not shown in this somewhat idealistic video: 00:30 - After departure you fly through the rain shower only to be hit by moderate turbulence. It stays with you on your short hop for half an hour. Meals don't get served. Tea and coffee service is cancelled. Passengers start complaining. One is getting really irritated. Might need to call security on arrival. 00:50 - Dense traffic in the area. You need to change level but can't get a word in edgeways. Everyone is stepping on the transmissions. On your 7th attempt you finally get through. 01:20 - Tower trying to cram too many aircraft in the sequence. You go-around due to runway occupied. It's a mess. Busy airport and you get vectored on a very wide circuit. Now you're running low on fuel because the company always only wants you to take the bare minimum. Can't afford to go-around again. They better not stuff this one up. 01:36 - Turn into the gate. Red light on the aerobridge. You have to stop. No-one there to operate the bridge. Too short-staffed and they're all busy on other aerobridges. It will be a 10 minute wait standing off the gate. In the meantime you're blocking the taxiway and everyone else starts queuing up behind you. They all start calling up the company Ops freq complaining. "When is that aircraft going to get on the gate? We're already late! What do you mean a 10 minute wait? A scheduled service and you didn't know it was coming? How can you be short staffed?" 01:40 - Get to your hotel room. It's not made up. Blankets & sheets strewn everywhere. Back in the elevator. Back down to the lobby. Walk over to reception with steam coming out of your ears. It's been a long day, they've known you were coming in at this exact time for days, and and you really didn't need this crap. (Happened to me just the other day!) 01:45 - Coffee machine in the room doesn't work and spits some disgusting garbage into your mug. Phone call to housekeeping. 01:50 - Breakfast arrives 40 minutes late, and it's cold. Room service girl apologises because "it's just so unusually busy at the moment". 02:08 - You're on a short slip. You go to the beach to relax for the first time in ages. It starts bucketing down rain. 02:10 - I cannot believe we're drinking this beer. It's crap! 02:15 - Enjoying the local sights. Kid comes up and tries to pickpocket you. 02:50 - Video of the B747 which is blocking the altitude you want. At this rate you won't have enough fuel to get to destination if he doesn't get the heck out of the way! You slow down to get separation so they'll let you climb. Now you're going to be late. 03:05 - What the Eiffel tower would look like if it wasn't completely obscured by cloud. 03:46 - What a rolled up ball of foil would look like being blown around by your air vent, except that your air vent has been unserviceable for the last 7 days on an MEL due to maintenance having no time to rectify it. 05:00 - You put the gear down way early because ATC have cut you in short on a vector and held you up way too high, so without it there's no way in hell you'll get back on the approach path! 05:30 - They've parked you on a remote bay and you'll need stairs. Except there aren't any available for another 15 minutes. Short staffed again. 05:42 - Day off 1. Yeah right. You're still buggered from the back-of-clock flying and you're in no mood to do anything except sleep today! 07:10 - Commuting. You almost miss your scheduled operating flight because all the flights are full and the company gives you no priority as a commuter. 07:53 - What fireworks would look like if they weren't obscured by cloud. 08:28 - You fly under the contrail of another aircraft. You hit its wake turbulence. Galley cart upended in economy. Coffee spilled all over Chairman's Lounge frequent flyer in Business. 09:35 - Last sector touchdown. Thank god this trip is over!

The Blackhawk is a powerful and fairly sizeable helicopter. It is classified "M" (medium) for wake turbulence. This is the same wake turbulence classification as a Boeing 737. 30 seconds is nowhere near enough. Not even close, for a light aircraft doing anything behind a "medium" or a "heavy" aircraft. Refer AIP Enroute 1.4 for more information. The absolute bare-bones minimum wake turbulence separation is 2 minutes. It increases from that, depending on the circumstances. You just have to know that. The Blackhawk did not "take out" the Cirrus - all aircraft produce wake of varying degrees and that's not the Blackhawk pilot's fault. The Cirrus pilot did not account for the wake turbulence and flew right into it.

When you hover your mouse over the menu items you get a pop-up. That's all fine, but you can't hover the mouse down and get subsequent pop-ups because the first one is obscuring the others. Ironically you can do it in reverse, because the pop-ups appear below and so they don't obscure the menu item above. Where menus lead to pop-up items, it's nice to be able to hover your mouse over whichever item you want in whatever sequence you want, and get the pop-up appear however you do it.

All civil RPT twin engine aircraft must meet performance standards enabling them to fly on one engine from "V1" speed on the runway during takeoff right through until landing. The FAA/EAA/CASA certification requirements are all substantially the same in this respect. Of course this assumes your remaining engine is functioning normally! Some people get confused between certified twin prop passenger transport aircraft (Dash 8, ATR, etc) and small twin GA aircraft (eg like a Duchess or whatever) where an engine failure colloquially "takes you to the scene of the accident". The single-engine performance certification standards are very different - much more stringent for the passenger transport aircraft.

I should have written "may" have been trying to miss buildings. I would agree that he probably had no control judging from the extreme attitude the aircraft ended up in. The point being that when the media report that he was being a hero by saving people on the ground, it's highly unlikely to be true!

He certainly would've been trying to miss buildings, but not to save the people inside the buildings! It's unfortunate that the media interpretation of how an accident pans out almost never matches the reality revealed in the CVR tapes.

Could have been VMCA problems there. The way it severely yawed and rolled, coupled with the reported engine failure, seems indicative of loss of directional control with reducing airspeed to me.

Lol. Every time a new Government gets elected, approximately 49% of the voters say the other 51% are idiots. Repeat every election cycle.

The incident is true. The embellishment regarding "Arab crew" is completely false. Onboard the aircraft at the time: 1 ground test technician in the right seat (Airbus employee) who was conducting the actual engine run. 1 customer representative in the left seat to observe test compliance. 1 flight test engineer in jump seat (Airbus employee). Other factual errors: 1. The Landing Gear Control and Interface Unit (LGCIU) does send a signal to the GPWS regarding gear position, but you can turn off GPWS any time and it does not fool the aircraft into thinking anything. It just disables GPWS. 2. The GPWS has nothing to do with monitoring the takeoff configuration which is an integral part of the main Flight Management & Guidance Computers. Even disabling the flight management computers still won't disable the air/ground logic (which is through the LGCIUs). The reality: 1. The test engineer violated ground run procedures by running up all 4 engines to very high thrust, and did not chock the aircraft. 2. The parking brake was set, but the thrust applied exceeded the capacity of the parking brake (and the friction coefficient of the tarmac). 3. As the aircraft started moving, the ground test engineer applied nosewheel steering and manual braking in an attempt to avoid the wall, but the application of nosewheel steering further reduced the braking effectiveness. 4. In his moment of shock, the ground test engineer (Airbus employee) didn't even think about reducing the thrust.

Yes it's possible as Benny said, but until recently our sim sessions were quite ridiculously packed with CASA matrix assessment items giving little opportunity for "training", as opposed to box-ticking assessment items one after the other. There seems to have been a shift very recently and the "training" component is increasing with the box-ticking reducing. This at least is a healthy training direction to be heading, but I can't speak for other airlines. The Airbus "Unreliable Speed" procedure does give some basic attitude vs power practice, however I'd suggest the Airbus stalling accidents in recent times have much more complex roots than simply attitude v power techniques, and Airbus themselves design the system interfaces and drive much of the training so they have to take some blame here. Flight path awareness and recovery techniques have, I believe, suffered over the years - especially when it comes to high altitude stalling. Couple that with lack of systems understanding and some interface design issues and, well you see the result. What do I think of the Bus after 14 years on Boeings? Well, I really love the Airbus fold out tray-table. Seriously though, it's not "bad". It's just "different". Yeah it still ultimately flies like a plane, but I really do understand the old Airbus pilot joke: Inexperienced Airbus pilot: "What the **** is it doing now?" Experienced Airbus pilot: "Yeah sometimes it does that."

That's all well and good (though it didn't help them on GXL888T out of Perpignan) however being prepared and well briefed on a test flight in a canned setup (I used to do post maintenance test flights involving fully developed stalls on large transport aircraft in my previous life) I think is a bit different to the situation facing line pilots who might have varying attention/fatigue levels, competencies, training, company pressures, and inflight distractions they're dealing with all simultaneously. I mean, the A330 is a good aircraft too in most respects. But when you have an OEB just out a few weeks ago on a jet which has been in service for > 20 years with memory items requiring you to force it into an alternate flight control regime by deliberately crippling the triple redundancy of its air data systems in the event that it gives an uncommanded pitch up or pitch down which cannot be overridden by either pilot...... Well I think they (Airbus) need to sit down and have a serious think about the man-machine interface and/or training, which is mostly driven by them. :)

A fully independent "ISIS" (integrated standby instrument system) is located on the left-side centre instrument panel. It's a little bigger than a 3 1/8 instrument. It looks to me like they had full instrumentation available anyway. There's nothing so far to indicate any instrument or air data failure, which makes it even more perplexing as to why they stalled it and why they didn't recover. I'm strongly suspecting the "startle factor" with a mish-mash of misunderstanding what the systems were telling them, weather/turbulence distractions, distractions with the rudder/yaw issue (whatever that actually was) and simple failure (like AF447) to actually recognise they were in a stall or failure to apply the correct recovery actions. And you don't ever reset more than one Airbus flight control computer in the air at a time. There's a big warning against it in the books. It seems to me that they must have done this for it to get into Alternate Law and lose the stall protection.

Must admit I don't understand how he got so far without apparently realising that the aux tank fuel wouldn't transfer. In every plane I've ever flown, aux or ferry tank fuel is used as early as possible for the very reason that you need to know if it's working before you get to your PNR (main fuel). If there's a CoG problem in doing this, that becomes a major system design issue.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/airasia-disaster-pilots-disabled-computers-moments-before-crash-20150129-131qq4.html Well it's becoming more interesting with the fact that the Indonesian accident investigation is leaking like a sieve. It seems the pilots attempted to reset both FACs (Flight Augmentation Computers) in flight possibly due to rudder or yaw damper problems they were having, then climbed rapidly and stalled. Although my experience is on the later A330, the systems have a very similar architecture. Disabling the FACs would also have put the flight control system into Alternate Law and removed the stall protection component of the flight envelope protection system (stall warning still works though). What possessed them to do this, and why they then stalled it, and why they failed to recover from the stall, is still a bit of a mystery. There are increasingly obvious parallels with AF447 (although icing may not have been involved) at least with the possible failure to recognise the transition to Alternate Law (and ramifications of it), the mishandling of the aircraft leading to a stall, then the failure to effect a recovery. Even in Alternate Law, an Airbus is still a plane, and the basic principles still work.

From the Illawarra Mercury today: http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/2847211/austinmer-crash-no-sign-pilot-was-on-fatal-course/?cs=300 "He flew through rain and heavy fog and became separated from the second pilot en route to Illawarra Regional Airport, about 50 kilometres south." "Nialla Clarke, of Foothills Road, said she heard ‘‘a zipping sound then a bang’’ at the time of the accident, but dismissed it as thunder." "The search was abandoned around midnight on Tuesday when heavy fog shrouded much of the escarpment, forcing police to call off a search chopper." ‘It would have been a very complex manoeuvre to have pilots flying in the conditions that they were flying in last night had they not been equipped appropriately to do so, and/or trained appropriately to do so.’’ (comment by Police Local Area Commander Kyle Stewart) Again, speechless.

Just as an indication, tonight I left Mascot Airport right on 8pm. The skies had cleared a lot from what they were last night, but it was still enough for most cars to have their headlights on. By 8.20pm I would've said it was unsafe (notwithstanding illegal anyway) to land a day VFR aircraft. With the overcast weather it would've been a fair bit darker yesterday at the same time. However I still think the weather itself would have been the main factor, rather than the amount of daylight left. It really wasn't good at all. The amount of daylight left was probably more an indication of their eagerness to get home, despite the weather, if anything.

When you're in a small VFR plane and the sky gets dark, grey, and wet, it is trying to tell you something.

Sunset in Sydney at the moment is 7:30pm, and end of civil twilight is 8pm. The weather has been hammering us for days, pretty much all day every day.