15 ms·
B773 at Paris on Apr 5th, airplane did not respond to commands
- C4K3 5y agoWhy is it possible for a pilot to "fight" the autopilot? From my (layman's) point of view, it seems logical that either the pilot would be in control or the autopilot would be in control, but not both at the same time.
- sowbug 5y agoIt's not that one or the other is exclusively controlling the plane. Either (or both) can grab the controls. It's kind of a subtle distinction, but the idea is you don't want the pilot's yoke or stick to ever be physically disengaged from the plane, because that's a mechanism that could fail, leaving the plane uncontrollable by anything. Similar with cruise control on a car: the accelerator physically moves when the computer engages, because it's actually pushing the accelerator. That's what you want, rather than the human needing to suddenly speed up and finding the pedal does nothing when pressed. And once you accept that, then it's natural that there should be some play before one system disengages to favor the other. You don't want a sneeze to disable your autopilot.
- t0mas88 5y agoWhat brand of car do you drive? I've only driven ones where the pedals don't move when cruise control is controlling them.
- matt-attack 5y agoAre you really looking down at the accelerator when you engage cruise control?
- dz0ny 5y agoTower radio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzCNKhFOPqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzCNKhFOPqU
- nolok 5y agoDamn, the guy doesn't say the plane doesn't respond to commands but "l'avion fait n'importe quoi" which implies more like the responses to commands are not the one expected.
- saalaa 5y agoThe pilot said "[...] un problème de commandes de vol, l'avion a fait à peu près n'importe quoi [...]" and it translates as "[...] flight controls issue, the plane did just about whatever [...]". To add a bit more, it's interesting to note that at several points in the recording the pilots can be heard fighting the controls and apparently requiring force for that (https://youtu.be/VzCNKhFOPqU?t=25 https://youtu.be/VzCNKhFOPqU?t=25 for example). I know the two ariplanes are unrelated but this was also the case for 737 Max IIRC.
- rootusrootus 5y ago> apparently requiring force for that Yeah, when autopilot is engaged it requires a good bit of force to override it without just turning it off first.
- t0mas88 5y agoIt disengages when you fight it. With the associated and very recognizable autopilot disengage sound. I'm sure there is more to this story than "crew mistake" as some seem to imply here.
- rootusrootus 5y agoTo be fair, the "some seem to imply" is directly sourced from the analysis of a 777 pilot. Do you have a source for the "it disengages when you fight it" assertion? You're kinda calling the 777 pilot a liar ;-)
- saalaa 5y agoI'm absolutely not knowledgeable on this topic so double check everything I say. I think the issue on the 737 Max was that there's been a known and studied system (called the MCAS IIRC) on Boeing planes that overrides pilot controls under some specific pre-determined circumstances and that system had been buffed to compensate for design flaws that were discovered too late to be corrected. On top of being faulty, that buffed system was also way outside of its initial intent and purpose (or rather the parameters guiding its operation were changed so much that it should have been addressed as a separate system and mandated specific training while they were trying to portray the plane as a simple evolution requiring no pilot re-training from earlier versions of the 737). So, to me, it looks like yet another issue with a system overriding pilot controls for whatever reason. More generally, this falls into that weird pattern of relying on external sensors which starts a chain of bad decisions leading to accidents (this was also a sensor issue with the Air France 447, although the chain was largely human this time, the pilots realizing way too late their repeated mistake).
- ehaskins 5y agoWorth watching Juan Brown's reaction, he's a 777 pilot. https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc
- drcongo 5y agoThanks. It's wild seeing what the web looks like for people without ad blockers.
- jthrowsitaway 5y agoBasically like how Idiocracy depicts TV in the future.
- Animats 5y agoToo soon to say much. Comments so far are not very useful. Give it a few days until the flight data recorders are read.
- emerged 5y agoI stopped reading the comments when one was literally generated using AI and said as much.
- scoot 5y agoIt was generated using AI as a criticism of a comment that they didn't understand, and suggesting that AI would be more coherent, before giving an example. But the comment that they were criticizing was perfectly reasonable if the facts it was based on are correct (that the apparent packet loss was periodic, not random). There is another possible explanation (the interference itself was periodic), but their position and explanation is not at all unreasonable, never mind incoherent. All that said, the more interesting comment is the most recent (at time of writing), from a passenger on another flight landing at the same airport, on the same day, suggesting that their plane suffered from a similar issue. Your comment, however, is lazy and lacks substance. "I stopped reading because..." is a cancer on discourse. Read, then criticize, or STFU. (I confess I have been guilty of your approach in the past).
- emerged 5y agoTake a breath. Relax. I stopped reading after seeing the AI generated comment because the generated text made an equal amount of sense as the other comments. In other words I don’t know enough to verify anything I’m reading. This is a completely reasonable response.
- scoot 5y ago> This is a completely reasonable response. Lol, no, you specifically called out the response that referenced AI, but now you're saying you didn't understand any of them? Sounds like you need to take a breath, relax, and stop shit-posting. Even your excuses are incoherent.
- lizardactivist 5y agoThis is not normal, and they can't keep blaming it on having outsourced software work to low-paid Indian programmers like in the past. It would be interesting to tally up incidents like these, and see if there is some pattern to what type of plane, manufacturer, geographical location of incident etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- noahtallen 5y agohttp://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm No compelling difference between Airbus and Boeing here. The 777 and a330 are similar. 737 and a32x are very similar. Really the only outlier is the 737max, which isn’t enough to indicate some deeper problem with Boeing planes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JCM9 5y agoExpecting a lot of armchair NTSB investigators to rock up here, but honestly not much indication on what happened until the appropriate authorities can pull the data recorders out of the aircraft and see what was going on. Looking forward to reading what happened but until then… Interesting observation that the controllers and pilots were speaking French to each other. They’re really not supposed to do that (English is the standard for ATC, in part so other aircraft can maintain situational awareness) but that happens a lot in France.
- radicaldreamer 5y agoKorean Air had crash after crash until they forbid crew from speaking in Korean. Turns out cultural norms (highly hierarchical power structure) and honorifics were causing copilots to refrain from pointing out issues or pointing them out in an unclear way. A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control.
- tapatio 5y ago"we request priority to land" vs. "we request emergency landing" is what led to the Colombian airlines disaster.
- anonu 5y agoThe Colombian airline crash: they were speaking English though. NYC ATC is going to be brusque and quick... The new Yorker way. Not many cultures understand that...
- giraffe_lady 5y agoATC needs to be effective for all cultures that fly into that airport. If the new york one so deviates from the norm that it can cause crashes that is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed. That said I don't have any reason to think it actually does and you didn't supply one either. Are air traffic controllers even normally from the area where they work? Don't they get assigned?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TheMagicHorsey 5y agoIs it possible they did not disengage the auto-pilot?
- christkv 5y agoI thought the auto pilot disengages automatically when you move the controls?
- DocTomoe 5y agoIt does.
- FlyingAvatar 5y agoSource? In the Juan Brown (a 777 pilot YouTuber) video (https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc) referenced in another comment, he specifically states that you must physically fight the autopilot for control if it's engaged.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThe 777 pilot who analyzed and explained what was going on says otherwise. It will cause a master warning or something along those lines, but not cause AP to disengage. Which makes sense.
- hef19898 5y agoLet's leave the incident investigation to the professional investigators anf authorities, shall we?
- chociej 5y agoOn this aircraft you must move the column with something like 20-25 pounds of force before the autopilot decides that you are overriding it.
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoIf you listen to the ATC audio someone posted above, you hear the autopilot disconnect sound at 0:56 which is well after the incident began and all the other alarms were going off. This doesn't make sense. Did they not realize the plane was still on autopilot and were trying to hand-fly it and override the controls? I'm not jumping to any conclusions but it's very possible this was a normally functioning airplane.
- EMM_386 5y agoThere is a further discussion among pilots here: https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/646054-air-france-b777-control-issues-landing-cdg.html https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/646054-air-france-b777-c...
- stuff4ben 5y agoVery good discussion. Interesting comment: > Originally Posted by Capt Kremin: There was nothing wrong with the aircraft. The crew had the wrong runway/approach selected and tried to override the AP manually. The subsequent go-around was incorrectly handled in that they retracted the gear before the initial stage of flap, hence the config warning.
- t0mas88 5y agoNote that the rest of the posts after him disagree and point out that they were on a stable approach to the left most runway and the aircraft then turned a lot more to the left. That's not something that would happen if it was only a wrong runway selection.
- jimmySixDOF 5y agoIn the original article link's comment section there is a post claiming to be from a passenger on an Air France 777 landing around 6am also on 5th April 2022 (AF655 DXB-CDG) (F-GSQK) which they say also did a go around after veering left close to the ground. Assuming similar weather conditions it would also have been an instrument landing using ILS data. The topic of potential 5G interference with ILS comes up in the linked pprune rumors-news discussion and other early assessment like Juan Browne's Youtube linked elsewhere [1] Not that 5G is the only explanation for any ground problems, but these days I am just as likely to believe the alleged passenger comment is mud in the water from some motivated agent provocateur or troll as I am to believe the story is possibly true. But either way the truthieness of it is interesting -- although for completely different reasons. [1] https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc https://youtu.be/cslSQB5mgyc
- omnicognate 5y ago> about 4.17nm before the runway Nautical miles? Read it as nanometres initially....
- paulmd 5y agoyes, aviation generally uses nautical measures (nautical miles and knots of speed) when using the imperial system
- m2fkxy 5y agoNautical miles abbreviation should be NM.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI sincerely hope that it takes no more than a fraction of a second to discard "nm" as "nanometers" and conclude that it means nautical miles, or at least some unknown term (if you are unfamiliar with customary aviation units).
- anonu 5y agoHate to bring up the AF crash in the middle of the ocean from Brazil to France. This was, at the very root of it, a cultural issue. Pure speculation (because it's fun to speculate): this seems related to similar issues in the cockpit.
- smcl 5y agoI don't see how it's similar. > While climbing out and levelling off at 4000 feet the crew reported they had problems with the aircraft not following commands, the aircraft did not follow the commands While there is little culture shared between human and airplane, this doesn't seem to be a cultural issue at all :)
- touisteur 5y agoHow do you come to that conclusion? To the best of my understanding it was at least 3 things: - strange choice of going through complex weather (somehow foreseen) - failure (icing iirc) of the pitot airspeed sensors, raising multiple failures in the cockpit, and disengaging autopilot and putting the aircraft in a more hands-on (I'm not using the proper terms, there should be 'law' or 'envelope' somewhere) leading to a loss of trust of the crew in the cockpit. To me that was the linchpin, automation-exit failure. - combined (sum of) commands from the pilot and copilot. They should have tried gaining speed (repetitive stall warnings) but the copilot was (in panic) trying to gain altitude while the pilot was putting the nose down. They both thought the aircraft wasn't answering their command. - lack of crew communication. The 1st pilot was off in cabin, leaving his two cockpit crew without a clear chain of command, and the 2 remaining crew never talked about steps they were taking. How do you square it was a cultural issue? Genuinely curious, as I make a point of sending the transcript to all the happy 'autopilot the low hanging fruit and let the human handle the special cases' dreamers I meet :-)
- anonu 5y agoWell I think you said it: lack of crew communication. I would argue that communication is rooted in culture. Is there a safety culture? Is it the culture to go through a checklist of items, even if routine? If there was "automation-exit" failure as you describe, shouldn't there be a procedure and know-how on how to assume manual control. The devil would be in the details: not just outlining what a human being should do - but who that human being would be. Is it the pilot? The co-pilot? etc...
- geocrasher 5y agoJuan Brown has an excellent explanation of what is known so far, along with an analysis of the alarms heard in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cslSQB5mgyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cslSQB5mgyc Juan (an airline 777 pilot) also goes into why it is just fine that they were all speaking French in France.
- dboreham 5y agoLongtime fan of his channel. Nice to see it pop up here.
- 8b16380d 5y agoA true journalist
- schoen 5y ago> why it is just fine that they were all speaking French in France I've heard before that pilots are allowed to speak their native language with ATC in their own countries, but I'm still confused about the risk to foreign pilots in the same airspace, who will then potentially not understand some of the other conversations going on. I realize ATC would still give commands, answers, and clearances to foreign pilots in English, but wouldn't it occasionally be important for the foreign pilots to be able to understand the context of conversations that aren't directed to them? Is the benefit of that just rare enough that it's not considered worth it?
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y agoThey already know english for the job, so its not like its an extra requirement
- AlecSchueler 5y agoThe job? What about private pilots?
- t0mas88 5y ago
- buildsjets 5y agoI suspect that similar to the Asiana 777 at SFO, this will turn out to be autopilot mode confusion on the part of the pilot, coupled with a late charge of instruction from ATC, and failure to monitor the flight path while trying to make the transition.
- t0mas88 5y agoVery very unlikely. Every pilot knows exactly how to disconnect the autopilot, we train things like autopilot failure and recently trim runaway (which is closely related) in the sim. Nobody would be screaming "stop it, stop it" instead of doing something if the button was working fine.
- selectodude 5y ago
- tschesnok 5y agoPilot here (just private): Alarm seem to indicate that the autopilot was not disengaged till much later. The question is why? Left turn may just be because of interference of the localizer.. which the autopilot was following. With the autopilot on.. you have a fight on your hands until it disengages. (like in your Tesla :)
- rootusrootus 5y ago> like in your Tesla AP in the Tesla isn't too forceful, it disengages without much effort. The lane departure prevention, on the other hand, is much more insistent.
- belter 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30935269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30935269
- harpiaharpyja 5y agoThe title could have been translated better, as one of the comments on the source pages notes. It would be more accurate to say that the aircraft was not responding to controls/control inputs, scary stuff.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoIf it's Boeing I ain't going.
- tomcam 5y agoIf it’s AirBus I ain’t… NOTHING RHYMES
- KerrAvon 5y agoif it’s AirBus I’m taking the PrayerBus
- jackweirdy 5y agoSave your prayers for Embraers
- tomcam 5y agoDamn son you got it
- tomcam 5y agoYou complete me
- bombcar 5y agoAirbus is sus?
- tomcam 5y agoYou it, king
- ungamedplayer 5y agoThere boss
- tomcam 5y ago
- pedalpete 5y agoIf somebody knows how to get the GPS/IGC data from the flight, I'd love to see a replay on https:/ayvri.com
- jokoon 5y agoI wonder if the cause is somewhat similar to the airmax.
- gugagore 5y agoFYI: "commands" in title appears to refer to the pilot controls, not ATC instructions.
- 02020202 5y ago