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It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were n

It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull back and get airborne, you're far past the point you are going to be able to stop. Where's the basic pilotage here? I'm a US CPL holder and there are numerous basic airmanship systems in place to prevent this. For one, you note your acceleration rate and how far down the runway you are. Then you have V1, V2 speeds where you rotate. How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. You ignore them and figure out what went wrong when safely in the air.

gambiting 5y ago
>>Where's the basic pilotage here I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was focused on managing the computers rather than actually flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
I thought all takeoffs were manual. Is auto-takeoff out of testing already?
- throwanem 5y ago
  The takeoff isn't directly automated, but there's a system called the "flight director" [1] that provides indicators on the pilot flying's display that correspond with a configured trajectory. In this case, it sounds like the flight director was badly misconfigured and the pilots not only omitted to reconfigure it, but followed the erroneous indication far past any point at which it was remotely reasonable (or remotely safe!) to do so. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics...
  - encoderer 5y ago
    So this is the airline equivalent of Michael Scott following his gps into the lake? Insane
    - lisper 5y ago
      Private pilot here. Yes, that is exactly right.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      I mean, you say that as if it were a joke, and yet I can't fathom any other explanation for this kind of event but that the pilot flying assumed the automation "knows where it's going". Unfortunately, without Rainn Wilson as the PNF...
    - MertsA 5y ago
      For context on the reference to following gps into a lake: https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=20 https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=20
    - _moof 5y ago
      It is precisely that, and it is inexcusable.
  - MertsA 5y ago
    Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure the configured flight path is not going unreasonably close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and altitude or does the flight director incorporate waypoints and topology?
    - aaronmdjones 5y ago
      It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're currently accelerating to a target speed and climbing to a target altitude, it won't command you to pitch up so much that you stop accelerating. The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  They are, but there's a system that almost shouts "VEE ONE!" and "VEE TWO!" over a loudspeaker in the cockpit, at least if the flight director is configured properly. I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in the tires to blow. At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn well like it or not, with the only exception being (I believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway. Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.) Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?" and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are completely boned if you lose both engines. The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere even remotely close to the end of the runway. Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the captain should have taken control a second or two after the first officer failed to rotate at V2. My guess is that the captain was flying and the first officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell, and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that. Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of his buddies. Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    Not quite. V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway. V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous. Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated). The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case). Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.
nsonha 5y ago
I think some countries have this problem of fake pilot degrees, is UAE one of those? Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  Pakistan is the only country I’ve ever heard about having that problem. I doubt an advanced economy like UAE would be having this issue.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    They hire a lot of international pilots.
  - nwallin 5y ago
    There are more Pakistani citizens living in the UAE than there are UAE citizens. So if Pakistan has a problem with fake pilot licenses, then so does the UAE.
    - jhugo 5y ago
      This logic makes no sense. First of all, the citizenship of Emirates pilots would not mirror the citizenship of the UAE itself. Most Pakistan citizens coming to the UAE are not coming to work for Emirates. Secondly, Emirates is able to do their own due diligance on pilot licenses, and since the problems with Pakistan licenses are well known throughout the industry, they would receive extra scrutiny. The problems that occurred here are neither unique to Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and complacency are global issues.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        > Over-reliance on automation and complacency this is a training issue, is it not? So related to qualification to some degree
dehrmann 5y ago
> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Plane size has zero relevance. The point is that you shouldn’t be flying any jet, even some tiny CRJ, with such basic mistakes.
  - manuko83 5y ago
    You shouldn't be flying a Cessna 152 if you can't follow a checklist. Although I would wait until the investigation is finished...it's hard to know what goes on in the cockpit until all the data is gathered and analysed.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies. What does that have to do with anything? The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 550 people. If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the smallest aircraft in their fleet. And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    It's the smallest airplane and a very long route which means it gets the least promoted pilots; it's the shittiest route. The article discusses this.
    - kewrkewm53 5y ago
      Even the least promoted pilot shouldn't be this incompetent in an airline like Emirates. I could perhaps understand it from some small airline in developing country where the pilots got their licences through bribery.
nickjj 5y ago
> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me. If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I would hope I would not drive into a lake or any other obvious hazard, but I have driven the wrong way onto a one-way portion of a street when I was following Google Maps.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was very still standing water in one of the canals with leaves on top. It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.
    - Markoff 5y ago
      that's just very bad design keeping water at same level with street, I was under impression channels in Netherlands are always below ground level for many obvious reasons
      - wcoenen 5y ago
        It wasn't designed that way. In other locations in the city, street level is at least 150 cm above the water. But because of natural subsidence, ground water extraction, construction and peat oxidation, some parts of city's peat soil have subsided in the last few decades to only 25 cm above the water. https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compartmentable-city-centre-canal-system/points/5 https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compart...
      - 5y ago
raverbashing 5y ago
> Where's the basic pilotage here? > How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the top levels. People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or because of fame rather than because they like it. People that have some other favourable attributes to flying Emirates. Lack of CRM on the cockpit. But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't disagree with this.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc. - because it generally has to be to cause a bad outcome or even get close to it. Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. It was a near miss that needs to be addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.
- captainredbeard 5y ago
  > nothing seriously bad actually happened here Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.
  - bumby 5y ago
    I think the OP was focusing on the consequence, not the probability. Since risk is often defined as consequence x probability, I think you are both talking about distinct but related things
    - captainredbeard 5y ago
      Negligence, even if it does not directly cause a negative outcome, is still a mistake and a consequence of bad aeronautical decision making.
      - bumby 5y ago
        I agree, that's covered by the probability part of the risk equation. Even if you got lucky and nothing bad happened, the negligence still increased the risk by increasing the probability that something may have happened.
jjav 5y ago
> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.
- dd36 5y ago
  This seems a lot like the young people in my family not knowing how computers work despite using them daily.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  There is a well known video among commercial pilots called "Children of the Magenta Line". The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer. The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.
  - phil21 5y ago
    And this video is exactly what happened here from my limited understanding. Due the the desired altitude being set at zero, the magenta line the pilot flying was aiming for was... well, set to 0ft. I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.
paganel 5y ago
> You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. This reminds me of the (in)famous "take a right" sketch from The Office [1]. Granted, that was a TV show and they were "piloting" a car, not a 777. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY
MarcoZavala 5y ago
_moof 5y ago
> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track 90° from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was look outside.

gambiting 5y ago

>>Where's the basic pilotage here I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was focused on managing the computers rather than actually flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

I thought all takeoffs were manual. Is auto-takeoff out of testing already?

throwanem 5y ago
The takeoff isn't directly automated, but there's a system called the "flight director" [1] that provides indicators on the pilot flying's display that correspond with a configured trajectory. In this case, it sounds like the flight director was badly misconfigured and the pilots not only omitted to reconfigure it, but followed the erroneous indication far past any point at which it was remotely reasonable (or remotely safe!) to do so. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics...
- encoderer 5y ago
  So this is the airline equivalent of Michael Scott following his gps into the lake? Insane
  - lisper 5y ago
    Private pilot here. Yes, that is exactly right.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    I mean, you say that as if it were a joke, and yet I can't fathom any other explanation for this kind of event but that the pilot flying assumed the automation "knows where it's going". Unfortunately, without Rainn Wilson as the PNF...
  - MertsA 5y ago
    For context on the reference to following gps into a lake: https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=20 https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=20
  - _moof 5y ago
    It is precisely that, and it is inexcusable.
- MertsA 5y ago
  Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure the configured flight path is not going unreasonably close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and altitude or does the flight director incorporate waypoints and topology?
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're currently accelerating to a target speed and climbing to a target altitude, it won't command you to pitch up so much that you stop accelerating. The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
They are, but there's a system that almost shouts "VEE ONE!" and "VEE TWO!" over a loudspeaker in the cockpit, at least if the flight director is configured properly. I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in the tires to blow. At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn well like it or not, with the only exception being (I believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway. Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.) Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?" and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are completely boned if you lose both engines. The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere even remotely close to the end of the runway. Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the captain should have taken control a second or two after the first officer failed to rotate at V2. My guess is that the captain was flying and the first officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell, and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that. Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of his buddies. Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  Not quite. V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway. V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous. Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated). The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case). Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.

nsonha 5y ago

I think some countries have this problem of fake pilot degrees, is UAE one of those? Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay

AmericanChopper 5y ago
Pakistan is the only country I’ve ever heard about having that problem. I doubt an advanced economy like UAE would be having this issue.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  They hire a lot of international pilots.
- nwallin 5y ago
  There are more Pakistani citizens living in the UAE than there are UAE citizens. So if Pakistan has a problem with fake pilot licenses, then so does the UAE.
  - jhugo 5y ago
    This logic makes no sense. First of all, the citizenship of Emirates pilots would not mirror the citizenship of the UAE itself. Most Pakistan citizens coming to the UAE are not coming to work for Emirates. Secondly, Emirates is able to do their own due diligance on pilot licenses, and since the problems with Pakistan licenses are well known throughout the industry, they would receive extra scrutiny. The problems that occurred here are neither unique to Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and complacency are global issues.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      > Over-reliance on automation and complacency this is a training issue, is it not? So related to qualification to some degree

dehrmann 5y ago

> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.

kortilla 5y ago
Plane size has zero relevance. The point is that you shouldn’t be flying any jet, even some tiny CRJ, with such basic mistakes.
- manuko83 5y ago
  You shouldn't be flying a Cessna 152 if you can't follow a checklist. Although I would wait until the investigation is finished...it's hard to know what goes on in the cockpit until all the data is gathered and analysed.
EMM_386 5y ago
> The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies. What does that have to do with anything? The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 550 people. If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the smallest aircraft in their fleet. And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  It's the smallest airplane and a very long route which means it gets the least promoted pilots; it's the shittiest route. The article discusses this.
  - kewrkewm53 5y ago
    Even the least promoted pilot shouldn't be this incompetent in an airline like Emirates. I could perhaps understand it from some small airline in developing country where the pilots got their licences through bribery.

nickjj 5y ago

> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me. If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I would hope I would not drive into a lake or any other obvious hazard, but I have driven the wrong way onto a one-way portion of a street when I was following Google Maps.
- carlmr 5y ago
  My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was very still standing water in one of the canals with leaves on top. It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.
  - Markoff 5y ago
    that's just very bad design keeping water at same level with street, I was under impression channels in Netherlands are always below ground level for many obvious reasons
    - wcoenen 5y ago
      It wasn't designed that way. In other locations in the city, street level is at least 150 cm above the water. But because of natural subsidence, ground water extraction, construction and peat oxidation, some parts of city's peat soil have subsided in the last few decades to only 25 cm above the water. https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compartmentable-city-centre-canal-system/points/5 https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compart...
    - 5y ago

raverbashing 5y ago

> Where's the basic pilotage here? > How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the top levels. People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or because of fame rather than because they like it. People that have some other favourable attributes to flying Emirates. Lack of CRM on the cockpit. But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't disagree with this.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc. - because it generally has to be to cause a bad outcome or even get close to it. Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. It was a near miss that needs to be addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.

captainredbeard 5y ago
> nothing seriously bad actually happened here Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.
- bumby 5y ago
  I think the OP was focusing on the consequence, not the probability. Since risk is often defined as consequence x probability, I think you are both talking about distinct but related things
  - captainredbeard 5y ago
    Negligence, even if it does not directly cause a negative outcome, is still a mistake and a consequence of bad aeronautical decision making.
    - bumby 5y ago
      I agree, that's covered by the probability part of the risk equation. Even if you got lucky and nothing bad happened, the negligence still increased the risk by increasing the probability that something may have happened.

jjav 5y ago

> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.

dd36 5y ago
This seems a lot like the young people in my family not knowing how computers work despite using them daily.
EMM_386 5y ago
There is a well known video among commercial pilots called "Children of the Magenta Line". The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer. The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.
- phil21 5y ago
  And this video is exactly what happened here from my limited understanding. Due the the desired altitude being set at zero, the magenta line the pilot flying was aiming for was... well, set to 0ft. I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.

paganel 5y ago

> You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. This reminds me of the (in)famous "take a right" sketch from The Office [1]. Granted, that was a TV show and they were "piloting" a car, not a 777. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY

MarcoZavala 5y ago

_moof 5y ago

> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track 90° from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was look outside.