10 ms·

Is there anyone with airline pilot experience who could come with some detailed analysis of this? To me, I would hazard a guess that whomever was controlling th

by marvin 13y ago

Is there anyone with airline pilot experience who could come with some detailed analysis of this? To me, I would hazard a guess that whomever was controlling the airplane was unaware on short final that the autothrottle had been deactivated. This is consistent with pulling back on the control column to maintain altitude, an action which will give in the desired result when the autothrottle is engaged, but must be accompanied by manually increasing throttle otherwise. This is an elementary piloting mistake, which I believe is impossible to do in the Airbus since the fly-by-wire system will prevent you from placing the aircraft in a stall condition. So this might be consistent with the information that the captain was transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing. However, I would be surprised if the investigation doesn't provide additional details about the human factors among the flight crew. I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. I was left with the same kind of question after the Air France disaster; this plane was stalled straight into the ocean from cruising altitude. It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Maybe this is just the kind of fluke accident that will happen sometimes when you have ten thousand airliners in the sky every day. But it seems like a good idea to investigate whether pilots rely too much on the computers and forget the basics. Regardless, let's not draw any conclusions until the investigation has had its say. It's okay to speculate, but I feel that it doesn't provide a lot of benefit to go into detailed scenarios when the complete picture is unknown.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
> I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. If you know you're prevented from making this mistake on an Airbus, depending on your attention and what you're thinking, you may not remember that the 777 doesn't have the same failsafes.
- imsofuture 13y ago
  There's literally no excuse for not watching your airspeed when you land an airplane, of any make. It's one of the two 'oh-hey-my-life-really-directly-depends-on-this-number' factors. I really don't like the tone that so many post-accident discussions take regarding automation, Boeing v. Airbus, etc. -- when the plain facts of the incidents (specifically this, and Air France 447) boil down to one small, really important bit willful negligence.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    > There's literally no excuse for not watching your airspeed when you land an airplane, of any make. Completely agree. Unfortunately, the vasty majority of aircraft incidents occur because of pilot error. People can and will make mistakes. We need to accept that or automate more. I'm in the automate more camp.
    - marvin 13y ago
      In the Airbus accident, the level of automation was a contributing factor to the accident. The fly-by-wire system prevents the pilot from placing the aircraft in an unsafe condition. However, this system was automatically deactivated (which is an extremely rare occurence) when the pitot/airspeed tubes were covered with ice and the computer hence couldn't make correctly informed decisions about the aircraft. In that case, however, you could point to a big UX problem: It was not announced in big, red letters that the fly-by-wire system had in fact been deactivated. If I remember correctly, this was hidden under some menu in the flight computer and simply abstracted away to a "master caution" light or something in that vein.
      - aerolite 13y ago
        right, but there was also a pilot who was pulling back on the stick the entire time.
        StavrosK 13y ago
plg 13y ago
I thought an absolute rule was that if you are two or more notches below the glideslope (or two notches left or right of the glidepath) on the approach, you must perform a go-around and try again. Maybe this is only for ILS approaches though (this was a visual approach) and maybe this is only a "rule" in quotes and not an actual rule. In any case the other posts are absolutely correct, monitoring your airspeed on the approach is arguably priority one for a pilot flying an approach. Even if the autopilot is selected and even if airspeed is being controlled by autothrottle, monitoring the airspeed is supposed to be one of the key things to check on the routine "scan" of the instruments as you come in on your approach. It's inconceivable to me that both the pilot AND the right-hand-seat instructor both missed the drop in airspeed. Also raising the nose is the wrong thing to do in response to being to low. In fact increasing power (engine thrust) is the thing one is supposed to do in order to increase altitude. Raising the nose is what you do in order to decrease airspeed. It's actually a rookie mistake that beginning private pilots flying single-engine cessnas make. They think throttle = airspeed and elevators (nose up/down) = altitude. The opposite is what you're supposed to do for stable flight.
- robryk 13y ago
  Why do the autopilots/autothrottles control speed by throttle and altitude by elevators, even in aircraft that have AP and AT?
  - JshWright 13y ago
    The automated mechanisms use both methods to control the aircraft, depending on the mode they're in. One of the links in the chain of errors that led to the crash of Asiana 214 was that the AP was in the wrong mode for a period of time (during a critical part of the approach).
ars_technician 13y ago
I agree; however, the Air France incident you are referring to is when the airspeed indicator was locked due to a frozen pitot tube, wasn't it? That seems like a much less blatant failure on the part of the pilots.
- mdavidn 13y ago
  Read the report. The pitot tubes thawed after about one minute. Everything after was pilot error. After the high-altitutde stall, the pilot-in-control kept the angle of attack above 30 degrees.
- md224 13y ago
  You may have already read this, but if not, this is an incredibly chilling reconstruction of the events leading up to that crash: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/... Key excerpt from halfway through: "Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error." Really tragic.
  - hatbert 13y ago
    Right, but how does the cockpit crew know that they airspeed indicators are working correctly now? They don't.
- wdr1 13y ago
  Popular Mechanics did a mesmerizing writeup of the Air France transcript. Worth a read: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
- maxcan 13y ago
  All pilots are trained to recognize issues like a frozen pitot tube and there is a very simple solution - activate pitot heat and maintain level flight using your attitude indicator until your airspeed indicator starts working again.
JshWright 13y ago
>So this might be consistent with the information that the captain was transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing. >It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Three pilots didn't overlook it. One did. Ironically, it was a different Boeing/Airbus distinction that prevented the guy in the left seat of Air France 447 from realizing the mistake the guy in the right seat was making. Airbus has separate (unlinked) controls for both pilots, so the guy in the left seat didn't realize the guy in the right seat was commanding the aircraft to pitch up. In a Boeing, the controls are linked, so it would have been immediately obvious what was happening. The other pilots were confused because it never occurred to them that someone would try to pitch a staling aircraft 'up'.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  They are linked in the Airbus (IIRC it gets the average of the controls if there are two inputs), but the sidestick doesn't provide feedback
  - JshWright 13y ago
    Yeah, by 'linked' I meant 'connected by some sort of linkage (ideally physical) that reflects the movements of one controller to the other'
  - riobard 13y ago
    I'm wondering why Airbus adopts this design? Seems very stupid from a cognition point of view. IIRC Air France Flight 447 stalled due to the same issue.
    - raverbashing 13y ago
      There's a comment down below that explains the reasoning But the Asiana crash is a Boeing 777
    - sneak 13y ago
      Force feedback joysticks are so 2008
kunai 13y ago
Essentially, the rules go like this: white over white: you're too high; red over white, you're just right; red over red, you're dead. This is drilled into every pilot. Besides, on a visual approach with clear weather, there is absolutely no excuse not to do a go-around if your glideslope is too shallow. Part of the problem is Airbus aircraft. Similar to how if you write a lot of Python, you slowly forget all of the baggage of C, if you fly with Airbus and the FDC on most of the time, you'll get more used to not having to do more manual work. The sidestick spoils you. Even though the triple-seven is fly-by-wire, there's still a lot less hand-holding in it than the Airbus craft. Same goes for the 787, even though it's a brand-new airplane.
lesserknowndan 13y ago
Would it be practical to institute a rule that once a pilot has flown an Airbus they can't commercially fly a Boeing?..
- lesserknowndan 13y ago
  As an aside to my question above. Do pilots transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing get put through an intensive simulator training to '(re)acclimatise' them to the Boeing. By intensive I mean going through a whole host of failure modes.
  - jamestnz 13y ago
    Yes. Each new airplane type that you're going to pilot requires you to first attain a Type Rating[1] in it. For instance, I picked a random link to a flight school that offers a B777 type rating course[2] - which takes 14 days of ground-work and 9 days of flight training (36 hours in the simulator in this case; often for big airliners it's going to be too expensive or impractical to perform a type-rating in a real aircraft). Additionally, having attained the type rating, you're required to maintain "currency" in that type by flying it frequently; if you let type currency lapse by going too long without flying it, you need to undergo a kind of mini "refresher" training/assessment to regain currency again. This is the case for Private/GA Pilots in NZ at least, I'm not so familiar with other jurisdictions or license categories. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating [2] http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-rating-courses-trto/boeing-777/ http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-r...
- nanidin 13y ago
  I could see the Airbus lobby pushing heavily for something like this :)
- gnaffle 13y ago
  That would not be practical or necessary. What is necessary (and is being worked on after AF447) is giving pilots more hands-on flying experience. This is a concern not only for Airbus pilots, but for Boeing pilots as well.
lsh123 13y ago
I don't hold ATP though I believe it is irrelevant here... Basically they lost situational awareness and got behind the plane: they didn't understand what is going on with the plane systems (autopilot) and failed to "fly the plane". While the NTSB report doesn't state this, I would not be surprised to learn that they actually didn't look outside of the window and instead they were head down punching buttons to reprogram the system. I'll speculate that the whole accident became possible due to the lack of VFR flying by Asiana pilots that a typical US pilot gets way before s/he gets into the airliner.
rodrigocoelho 13y ago
I think that a flight path vector (velocity vector) would be really useful in this case. I don't know whether B777's PFD has it, though.
- marvin 13y ago
  Honestly, the altitude and airspeed indicators provide a completly suitable situational awareness in cases like this.
omegant 13y ago
Airline pilot here with experience in B737, MD 80 and Airbus A320, so I know the flight controls philosophy of each one and the main differences. -First of all, it is what it seems, it´s an elementary piloting failure. Once you disconnect the Autopilot and/or auto-throttle you must be first of all flying the plane on it´s envelope then navigating and last combating an emergency (if there is one). -Second, I´ve heard first hand how the basic piloting skills like a visual approach or manual flying are very scarce in several Asian countries, one of them is Korean. This is due to the initial and airline training philosophy, for example Chinese copilots are not allowed to take the controls for landing or take off EVER (they have eternal training periods that are useless as they have no skills at all to learn ) I´dont know if this is true for all companies but at least several big ones work like this. Opposite to this in European and American companies, flight officers do half of the take off and landings due for the day, the only difference between a captain and copilot is that the captain is the one who decides the big questions, but the copilot is required to have the same piloting skills. In this case they were two captains one of them an instructor.. No words. -third, there is an American instructor who wrote at Pprune (a pilot forum) about how for Korean pilots (trained in Korea), the worst emergency they can suffer in a simulator is a visual approach. Even worst than losing both engines or total hydraulic failure. They are scared to death of visual flying. . He was fired from Asiana for failing to pass the annual exam to one of Asiana´s top pilots for failing a common visual approach. It seems that due to the problems with North K. it´s not possible to flight small airplanes and practice the basic skills. I can not find the article right now, I think it was erased shortly after being posted. -Fourth, it´s common to do mistakes with the flight modes while on final approach, both with airbus and Boeing, there are several descend and ascend modes, speed modes, and auto-throttle modes. But basically is that if you are high you want to descend faster, if you are low, you want to reduce your descend or even climb (in case of obstacles ahead), and you want to keep your speed inside the restricted limits needed to flight with the flaps for landing (too fast and they bend, too slow and you crash). When a mistake happens is normal to disconnect the autopilot and/or auto-throttle and take over on manual. But of course you are aware of what´s happening, is like going with the cruise control on the car, disconnecting it and failing to brake at the next light. -Fifth, there are differences between airbus and Boeing, an airbus would have done an automatic full throttle to recover the low speed. But this kind of automatic behavior has other costs, for example the Air France´s A330 that crashed in my opinion was due to an overconfidence in such automatic recover. The problem (and this is my opinion) is that the pilot flying thought that just pulling the stick the airplane would do the rest to recover whatever he thought was happening ( Once it was in to a deep stall, it was impossible for the computer to recognize what was happening). I think that crashing in crystal clear weather on a big airport just because you don´t know how to flight manually is a problem that some companies and countries have with the flight instruction philosophy, no amount of technology is going to solve that. Now Airbus is trying to increase the manual training of the pilots just because this same reason. They just went too far automatizing the flight, but airplanes and computers fail, and when they do it while flying you just can not stop everything to solve the problem, you have to land the plane safely no matter what.
berkut 13y ago
I read on pprune earlier this year that the instructor who had the most hours on the 777 was junior in rank to the pilot transitioning, and due to the way Korean society is regarding rank, might not have wanted to overrule a "senior" officer. Sounds unlikely in this day and age, but 20 years ago other air crashes from Korean airlines were apparently due to the same thing with junior pilots not wanting to overrule or speak up against a senior pilot who had made a mistake or overlooked something, so who knows...

by marvin 13y ago

toomuchtodo 13y ago

> I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. If you know you're prevented from making this mistake on an Airbus, depending on your attention and what you're thinking, you may not remember that the 777 doesn't have the same failsafes.

imsofuture 13y ago
There's literally no excuse for not watching your airspeed when you land an airplane, of any make. It's one of the two 'oh-hey-my-life-really-directly-depends-on-this-number' factors. I really don't like the tone that so many post-accident discussions take regarding automation, Boeing v. Airbus, etc. -- when the plain facts of the incidents (specifically this, and Air France 447) boil down to one small, really important bit willful negligence.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > There's literally no excuse for not watching your airspeed when you land an airplane, of any make. Completely agree. Unfortunately, the vasty majority of aircraft incidents occur because of pilot error. People can and will make mistakes. We need to accept that or automate more. I'm in the automate more camp.
  - marvin 13y ago
    In the Airbus accident, the level of automation was a contributing factor to the accident. The fly-by-wire system prevents the pilot from placing the aircraft in an unsafe condition. However, this system was automatically deactivated (which is an extremely rare occurence) when the pitot/airspeed tubes were covered with ice and the computer hence couldn't make correctly informed decisions about the aircraft. In that case, however, you could point to a big UX problem: It was not announced in big, red letters that the fly-by-wire system had in fact been deactivated. If I remember correctly, this was hidden under some menu in the flight computer and simply abstracted away to a "master caution" light or something in that vein.
    - aerolite 13y ago
      right, but there was also a pilot who was pulling back on the stick the entire time.
      - StavrosK 13y ago

plg 13y ago

I thought an absolute rule was that if you are two or more notches below the glideslope (or two notches left or right of the glidepath) on the approach, you must perform a go-around and try again. Maybe this is only for ILS approaches though (this was a visual approach) and maybe this is only a "rule" in quotes and not an actual rule. In any case the other posts are absolutely correct, monitoring your airspeed on the approach is arguably priority one for a pilot flying an approach. Even if the autopilot is selected and even if airspeed is being controlled by autothrottle, monitoring the airspeed is supposed to be one of the key things to check on the routine "scan" of the instruments as you come in on your approach. It's inconceivable to me that both the pilot AND the right-hand-seat instructor both missed the drop in airspeed. Also raising the nose is the wrong thing to do in response to being to low. In fact increasing power (engine thrust) is the thing one is supposed to do in order to increase altitude. Raising the nose is what you do in order to decrease airspeed. It's actually a rookie mistake that beginning private pilots flying single-engine cessnas make. They think throttle = airspeed and elevators (nose up/down) = altitude. The opposite is what you're supposed to do for stable flight.

robryk 13y ago
Why do the autopilots/autothrottles control speed by throttle and altitude by elevators, even in aircraft that have AP and AT?
- JshWright 13y ago
  The automated mechanisms use both methods to control the aircraft, depending on the mode they're in. One of the links in the chain of errors that led to the crash of Asiana 214 was that the AP was in the wrong mode for a period of time (during a critical part of the approach).

ars_technician 13y ago

I agree; however, the Air France incident you are referring to is when the airspeed indicator was locked due to a frozen pitot tube, wasn't it? That seems like a much less blatant failure on the part of the pilots.

mdavidn 13y ago
Read the report. The pitot tubes thawed after about one minute. Everything after was pilot error. After the high-altitutde stall, the pilot-in-control kept the angle of attack above 30 degrees.
md224 13y ago
You may have already read this, but if not, this is an incredibly chilling reconstruction of the events leading up to that crash: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/... Key excerpt from halfway through: "Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error." Really tragic.
- hatbert 13y ago
  Right, but how does the cockpit crew know that they airspeed indicators are working correctly now? They don't.
wdr1 13y ago
Popular Mechanics did a mesmerizing writeup of the Air France transcript. Worth a read: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
maxcan 13y ago
All pilots are trained to recognize issues like a frozen pitot tube and there is a very simple solution - activate pitot heat and maintain level flight using your attitude indicator until your airspeed indicator starts working again.

JshWright 13y ago

>So this might be consistent with the information that the captain was transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing. >It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Three pilots didn't overlook it. One did. Ironically, it was a different Boeing/Airbus distinction that prevented the guy in the left seat of Air France 447 from realizing the mistake the guy in the right seat was making. Airbus has separate (unlinked) controls for both pilots, so the guy in the left seat didn't realize the guy in the right seat was commanding the aircraft to pitch up. In a Boeing, the controls are linked, so it would have been immediately obvious what was happening. The other pilots were confused because it never occurred to them that someone would try to pitch a staling aircraft 'up'.

raverbashing 13y ago
They are linked in the Airbus (IIRC it gets the average of the controls if there are two inputs), but the sidestick doesn't provide feedback
- JshWright 13y ago
  Yeah, by 'linked' I meant 'connected by some sort of linkage (ideally physical) that reflects the movements of one controller to the other'
- riobard 13y ago
  I'm wondering why Airbus adopts this design? Seems very stupid from a cognition point of view. IIRC Air France Flight 447 stalled due to the same issue.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    There's a comment down below that explains the reasoning But the Asiana crash is a Boeing 777
  - sneak 13y ago
    Force feedback joysticks are so 2008

kunai 13y ago

Essentially, the rules go like this: white over white: you're too high; red over white, you're just right; red over red, you're dead. This is drilled into every pilot. Besides, on a visual approach with clear weather, there is absolutely no excuse not to do a go-around if your glideslope is too shallow. Part of the problem is Airbus aircraft. Similar to how if you write a lot of Python, you slowly forget all of the baggage of C, if you fly with Airbus and the FDC on most of the time, you'll get more used to not having to do more manual work. The sidestick spoils you. Even though the triple-seven is fly-by-wire, there's still a lot less hand-holding in it than the Airbus craft. Same goes for the 787, even though it's a brand-new airplane.

lesserknowndan 13y ago

Would it be practical to institute a rule that once a pilot has flown an Airbus they can't commercially fly a Boeing?..

lesserknowndan 13y ago
As an aside to my question above. Do pilots transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing get put through an intensive simulator training to '(re)acclimatise' them to the Boeing. By intensive I mean going through a whole host of failure modes.
- jamestnz 13y ago
  Yes. Each new airplane type that you're going to pilot requires you to first attain a Type Rating[1] in it. For instance, I picked a random link to a flight school that offers a B777 type rating course[2] - which takes 14 days of ground-work and 9 days of flight training (36 hours in the simulator in this case; often for big airliners it's going to be too expensive or impractical to perform a type-rating in a real aircraft). Additionally, having attained the type rating, you're required to maintain "currency" in that type by flying it frequently; if you let type currency lapse by going too long without flying it, you need to undergo a kind of mini "refresher" training/assessment to regain currency again. This is the case for Private/GA Pilots in NZ at least, I'm not so familiar with other jurisdictions or license categories. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating [2] http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-rating-courses-trto/boeing-777/ http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-r...
nanidin 13y ago
I could see the Airbus lobby pushing heavily for something like this :)
gnaffle 13y ago
That would not be practical or necessary. What is necessary (and is being worked on after AF447) is giving pilots more hands-on flying experience. This is a concern not only for Airbus pilots, but for Boeing pilots as well.

lsh123 13y ago

I don't hold ATP though I believe it is irrelevant here... Basically they lost situational awareness and got behind the plane: they didn't understand what is going on with the plane systems (autopilot) and failed to "fly the plane". While the NTSB report doesn't state this, I would not be surprised to learn that they actually didn't look outside of the window and instead they were head down punching buttons to reprogram the system. I'll speculate that the whole accident became possible due to the lack of VFR flying by Asiana pilots that a typical US pilot gets way before s/he gets into the airliner.

rodrigocoelho 13y ago

I think that a flight path vector (velocity vector) would be really useful in this case. I don't know whether B777's PFD has it, though.

marvin 13y ago
Honestly, the altitude and airspeed indicators provide a completly suitable situational awareness in cases like this.

omegant 13y ago

Airline pilot here with experience in B737, MD 80 and Airbus A320, so I know the flight controls philosophy of each one and the main differences. -First of all, it is what it seems, it´s an elementary piloting failure. Once you disconnect the Autopilot and/or auto-throttle you must be first of all flying the plane on it´s envelope then navigating and last combating an emergency (if there is one). -Second, I´ve heard first hand how the basic piloting skills like a visual approach or manual flying are very scarce in several Asian countries, one of them is Korean. This is due to the initial and airline training philosophy, for example Chinese copilots are not allowed to take the controls for landing or take off EVER (they have eternal training periods that are useless as they have no skills at all to learn ) I´dont know if this is true for all companies but at least several big ones work like this. Opposite to this in European and American companies, flight officers do half of the take off and landings due for the day, the only difference between a captain and copilot is that the captain is the one who decides the big questions, but the copilot is required to have the same piloting skills. In this case they were two captains one of them an instructor.. No words. -third, there is an American instructor who wrote at Pprune (a pilot forum) about how for Korean pilots (trained in Korea), the worst emergency they can suffer in a simulator is a visual approach. Even worst than losing both engines or total hydraulic failure. They are scared to death of visual flying. . He was fired from Asiana for failing to pass the annual exam to one of Asiana´s top pilots for failing a common visual approach. It seems that due to the problems with North K. it´s not possible to flight small airplanes and practice the basic skills. I can not find the article right now, I think it was erased shortly after being posted. -Fourth, it´s common to do mistakes with the flight modes while on final approach, both with airbus and Boeing, there are several descend and ascend modes, speed modes, and auto-throttle modes. But basically is that if you are high you want to descend faster, if you are low, you want to reduce your descend or even climb (in case of obstacles ahead), and you want to keep your speed inside the restricted limits needed to flight with the flaps for landing (too fast and they bend, too slow and you crash). When a mistake happens is normal to disconnect the autopilot and/or auto-throttle and take over on manual. But of course you are aware of what´s happening, is like going with the cruise control on the car, disconnecting it and failing to brake at the next light. -Fifth, there are differences between airbus and Boeing, an airbus would have done an automatic full throttle to recover the low speed. But this kind of automatic behavior has other costs, for example the Air France´s A330 that crashed in my opinion was due to an overconfidence in such automatic recover. The problem (and this is my opinion) is that the pilot flying thought that just pulling the stick the airplane would do the rest to recover whatever he thought was happening ( Once it was in to a deep stall, it was impossible for the computer to recognize what was happening). I think that crashing in crystal clear weather on a big airport just because you don´t know how to flight manually is a problem that some companies and countries have with the flight instruction philosophy, no amount of technology is going to solve that. Now Airbus is trying to increase the manual training of the pilots just because this same reason. They just went too far automatizing the flight, but airplanes and computers fail, and when they do it while flying you just can not stop everything to solve the problem, you have to land the plane safely no matter what.

berkut 13y ago

I read on pprune earlier this year that the instructor who had the most hours on the 777 was junior in rank to the pilot transitioning, and due to the way Korean society is regarding rank, might not have wanted to overrule a "senior" officer. Sounds unlikely in this day and age, but 20 years ago other air crashes from Korean airlines were apparently due to the same thing with junior pilots not wanting to overrule or speak up against a senior pilot who had made a mistake or overlooked something, so who knows...