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Southwest 1380: think about the flight attendants
- jacquesm 9y agoThe higher accident rate in general aviation is due to a lot of factors, but almost certainly not because flying a large jet is 'easier'. The big differences are: discipline, training, maintenance, process and a safety-first attitude.
- wtallis 9y ago> 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.
- jacquesm 9y agoI 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.
- wtallis 9y agoHow easily you can fly a plane without any training on that plane isn't really relevant here, is it?
- jacquesm 9y agoIt would seem to be a pretty good proxy for 'easier'.
- empath75 9y agoNot really. Riding a bike is probably easier than driving a car but if you never ridden a bike you’re not likely to just be able to pick one up and go with it.
- jacquesm 9y ago> but if you never ridden a bike you’re not likely to just be able to pick one up and go with it. All my kids disagree with you.
- tossaway1 9y agoSeems like a weird place to brag about how gifted your kids are.
- jacquesm 9y agoRiding a bike is nothing special here, if my kids are gifted so is the rest of the neighborhood.
- Twisol 9y agoWhile 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.
- ghaff 9y agoAnd I absolutely did not find it easy to learn to ride as an adult--and I'm still not good enough at it to ride on a road.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoNo balance bike or stabilisers or gyroscopic wheel hubs? They just got on a bike and rode without falling off or hitting anything? I'd say that's incredibly rare.
- darkerside 9y agoIt 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.
- chrisper 9y agoAlso single engine vs multi engine.
- jacquesm 9y agoGood point, yes, that makes a huge difference.
- sokoloff 9y agoSingle 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.
- joehosteny 9y agoAccelerate-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.
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- chx 9y agoOh, 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.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThat'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.
- PKop 9y ago> 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.
- ynniv 9y agoThis 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. Yeah, the pilot matters.
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- melling 9y agoOn an unrelated note, I wish there was an easy way to recommend typo fixes on blogs. I’ll often find them on my blogs too. He’s got one: “One any fire is extinguished, e.g., by cutting off the fuel or blowing the” Sometimes I’ll write a blog and not find my mistake for months. Linus’ Law applied to writing on the Internet.
- dorfsmay 9y agoFor 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.
- melling 9y agoHey, I was simply throwing out a suggestion that it would be nice to have a quick, quiet, and general way for everyone to deal with the problem. If you like the current solution, and don’t see a problem, carry on.
- coatmatter 9y agoI 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.
- swimfar 9y agoI'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.
- userbinator 9y agoThus 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.
- jballanc 9y agoHere's an amazing video of what happens in the cockpit during an engine failure in a commercial airliner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEf35NtlBLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEf35NtlBLg
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoI 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.
- blktiger 9y agoThat'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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
- jballanc 9y agoAnd yet, even that crash was the epitome of calm, efficient action on the part of the pilots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDZea4BcXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDZea4BcXE 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 https://youtu.be/tE_5eiYn0D0?t=83
- tgb 9y agoThe 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.)
- sangnoir 9y agoUnfortunately 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. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/18/us/southwest-flight-engine-fan-blade/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/18/us/southwest-flight-engine-fa...
- fokinsean 9y agoBoth 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. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFM_International_CFM56 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFM_International_CFM56 [1]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
- sangnoir 9y agoA 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.
- ben7799 9y agoEgotistical 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.
- contingencies 9y agoI think you are over-interpreting.
- zero_intp 9y agoRando from the internet thinks OP is right on target.
- vvanders 9y agoI 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).
- uhhhhhhh 9y agoCompletely agree with you. 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.
- SomeHacker44 9y agoAs 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.
- DrJokepu 9y agoCorrect 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?
- chmod775 9y agoI'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. You want all of that to add up to some total.
- thvu1k 9y agoI think it's heroic nonetheless
- peacetreefrog 9y agoWho 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.
- garduque 9y agoI just ordered it. I fly a ton (as a passenger) and am for some reason fascinated by plane crash stories.
- AceyMan 9y agoI've known about that book but not read it. 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."
- joering2 9y agoIn 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.
- coatmatter 9y ago> 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 class parachutes, helmets and bullet vets as PPE in the chart over here - resources and attention is always finite even before we get into the topic of freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_hazard_controls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_hazard_controls
- stordoff 9y agoI'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.
- justin66 9y agoThe 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.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoIndeed. The guy who, in a holed aircraft with someone actively being sucked out, undid his seatbelt and tried to help.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoIf 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.
- coatmatter 9y ago> "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." This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAsia_Airways_Flight_235#Investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAsia_Airways_Flight_235#I... (https://avherald.com/h?article=48145bb3 https://avherald.com/h?article=48145bb3)
- jrockway 9y agoI 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.
- gbacon 9y agoThat 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]. [0]: https://airfactsjournal.com/2014/03/double-tragedy-colgan-air-flight-3407/ https://airfactsjournal.com/2014/03/double-tragedy-colgan-ai...
- jrockway 9y agoAbsolutely. 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.
- chx 9y agoCheck https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-veteran-fighter-pilot-tammy-jo-shults-saved-crippled-southwest-flight-1380 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-veteran-fighter-pilot-tamm... instead of this garbage.