3 ms·
Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (
by goodcanadian 13y ago
Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the crash.
- sokoloff 13y agoAgree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only jointly sufficient. I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills. Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert. More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000 foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)