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TITANIC of the Skies! - The Untold Story of Air France 447
Air France Flight 447 was supposed to go from Rio to Paris. Flight was scheduled to last 12 hours and 45 minutes and because of that, the flight crew had been augmented with an extra pilot 3 pilots were going to fly. The captain was 58 years old and had a total experience of almost 11 000 flying hours, including over 1 700 hours for the A330. The first officer was 32 years old, with almost 3 000 hours of flight experience including over 800 hours on the A330. He has done his type rating on the Airbus 330 and 340 in 200, the year before the flight. The third pilot, the relief pilot, was a 37 year sold officer with a total time of 6 500 hours including over 4 400 hours on the A330 so he was the most experience on this type. He had flown very little during the previous 3 months because he was also working as a management pilot in Air France. Prior to operate the flight, pilots met up and reviewed planning documentation i ncluding weather, flight plan and NOTAMs. In Paris the weather route looked more complicated. Since flight crossed the equator it would also crossing an area known over the Atlantic as tne Intertropical convergence zone, or the ITCZ In this zone, easterly winds from the northern and southern emisphere willl converge and can force the humid air from the surface of the sea upwards. This can cause thunderstorms which can reach 60 000 feet, way higher than most aircrafts can fly. So aircraft might be subject to fly between or through parts of these storm clouds. These storms can also sometimes contain smaller water content, making them harder to see on the aircraft's weather radar. So pilots need to be careful while navigating around them. Pilots previously discussed this and carried a bit of extra fuel to give them the option to navigate around the storms when needed. The 9 cabin crew was also briefed about possible turbulence.
Most people are familiar with heavy rain and sometimes hail cooming from these storms. But if you look higher, things become more complicated. Because of the very strong currents inside of the cloud, water droplets can be forced upwards into very cold air and become super cooled. But as soon as they hit surface of some sort, the will instantly freeze and create clear ice. Sometimes these super cooled droplets can collide with snowflakes and when that happens, a type of soft ice crystals can be formed, which is not as hard as hail but big enough to be heard when it hits the aircraft if you fly through it. This type of precipitation doesn't create the type of heavy airframe icing that super cooled rain does but it had significant volume and can quickly clog up and overwhelm censors and probes on the aircraft, especially the pilots probes. More than 9 different occurrences of this type of clogging happening to Air France flights have been reported during 2008 and 2009. These reports, together with how to recognize and deal with these issues, had been published in safety bulletins, curculating to all Air France pilots the year before the incident flight. The aircraft here was a new Airbus A330 - 203. It had been delivered to Air France in 2005 and was almost perfect in working order on the evening of the departure.Pilots ordered 70,4 tons of fuel to be loaded prior to the flight. Pilots need a way to accuratly measure tha amount of air flowing over the wings because that's what determines the performance of the aircraft. To do this, they utilize a type of probe known as pilot tube or pilot probe. These probes are often situated along the front of the aircraft below the cockpit and they look a little bit like gun barrels. They have a hole in the front where the air enters and the total pressure is then measured inside of the tube. They are electrically heated and the heating is automatic on the Airbus A330.
But in order to accurately measure the air speed, the static pressure must also be measured so it can be deducted from the total pressure from the pilot probes. The static pressure is measured from a different device called a static port and taht static pressure is then used both for calculating the airspeed and crucially, also the altitude of the aircraft. These different pressures are then sent to the aircraft's computers, called Air Data Modules, or ADMs. The ADMs will calculate the correct true air speed but another thing important in the story is that the static pressure from the static port must be corrected depending on how fast the aircraft is flying. That's because the air flows over the aircraft surfaces surrounding the static port and will therefore create localized pressure difference depending on speed. These corrections are done automatically by the ADM computers and because air speed and altitude are critical values, these are 3 different independant sets of probes and computers fitted to the aircraft. Now because of the problems that Air France and other operators had reported of ice crystals clogging up the pilot's probes, Airbus had started to look into the problem. A newer type of pilot probe had been found to be more effective in preventing and a maintainance bulletin had been issued upgrading their first Airbus 1330 about 1 month prior the final departure of Flight 447. The aircraft was scheduled to have its probed changed to its arrival to Paris after the flight. But why wasn't these changes mandatory instead of just suggestion? Because the temporary loss of air speed due to this issue was both very rare, only lasting for a couple of minutes and there was a defined procedure which the pilots were supposed to follow in case this happened. for Air France the procedure was known as IAS douteuse but it can sometimes be referred to unreliable speed. Because problem was reported several times, it had been included in the recurrent training scenario.
And it was for all Air France crews during 2008 and 2009. Training included air speed unreliable exercices but only at low altitude. That's because when seen as more safety critical because of the closeness of the terrain but the performance of the aircraft was also better than it would be at high altitude to diagnose because the failure will look different depending on what caused it and how severe it is. During the exercices that Air France crew practised, the autopilot didn't disconnected and there were no warnings sounding in the cockpit when the failure occurred. Now the air speed unreliable procedure included the use of memory items meaning safety critical items that needed to be done straight away from memory of the pilots. But using them was optional depending on the situation and that had been interpreted as only needed if the aircraft was close to the ground. Also none of the pilots in Flight 447 received a recent training on how to deal with an approach to stall and recovery, especially at high altitude. The latest stall training they received was was done during their type rating on the Airbus A320 which they done years ealier. That initial training was done at low altitude in which heavy emphasis was put on the use of thrust to recover the aircrcaft and power it out of the stall, achieving it with minimum altitude loss. Decreasing the pitch was a secondary action to take. This idea that the engines will have enough power to pull the aircraft out of an extreme angle of attack is an important point for later.
216 boarded and the plane took off barely 10 minutes behind the schedule only. After climbing to 20 000 feet, the relief pilot left the cockpit to start his scheduled rest period for 3 hours. Crew compartment consisted of 2 bunk beds behind the cockpit. Pilots got clearance to go at level 350, so 35 000 feet of altitude. After Brasilia, they switched to Recife control and they were going to be the last ones to have radar contact with during the flight. Above the Atlantic they would soon be out of radar coverate, and followed by oceanic traffic separation procedures. Flights over oceanic areas require special training procedures and aircraft equipment. Since the curvature of the Earth makes VHF radio communication impossible aircraft are equipped with with something called HF radios. These radios use layers in the ionosphere to bounce the signals off from and can therefore reach much further distances. As the aircraft passed an RNAV point called INTOL pilots checked in with Atlantico control,, one of the 2 HF frequencies that they had been given. The pilots then tried to log into a new system that was being tested at the time in the area called ADS C. This system would use automatic reports sent by the aircraft itself via satellite to update the position of the aircraft to ATC thus showing where it was, een if they didn'thave radar coverage. This system also would send immediatly a report if an aircraft deviated from the course or altitude that it had assigned. Unfortunatly due to a formatting error in the flight plan that had been filed the pilots were unable to log in into the new system so this flight wouldn't be tracked anymore after leaving the radar coverage. Airbus A330 is a fly by wire aircraft meaning that the inputs that the pilots makes on their site stick and rudders willl be electronically interpreted by a computer and then sent to the hydraulic flight control flight actuators for execution.
TITANIC of the Skies! - The Untold Story of Air France 447
Air France Flight 447 was supposed to go from Rio to Paris. Flight was scheduled to last 12 hours and 45 minutes and because of that, the flight crew had been augmented with an extra pilot 3 pilots were going to fly. The captain was 58 years old and had a total experience of almost 11 000 flying hours, including over 1 700 hours for the A330. The first officer was 32 years old, with almost 3 000 hours of flight experience including over 800 hours on the A330. He has done his type rating on the Airbus 330 and 340 in 200, the year before the flight. The third pilot, the relief pilot, was a 37 year sold officer with a total time of 6 500 hours including over 4 400 hours on the A330 so he was the most experience on this type. He had flown very little during the previous 3 months because he was also working as a management pilot in Air France. Prior to operate the flight, pilots met up and reviewed planning documentation i ncluding weather, flight plan and NOTAMs. In Paris the weather route looked more complicated. Since flight crossed the equator it would also crossing an area known over the Atlantic as tne Intertropical convergence zone, or the ITCZ In this zone, easterly winds from the northern and southern emisphere willl converge and can force the humid air from the surface of the sea upwards. This can cause thunderstorms which can reach 60 000 feet, way higher than most aircrafts can fly. So aircraft might be subject to fly between or through parts of these storm clouds. These storms can also sometimes contain smaller water content, making them harder to see on the aircraft's weather radar. So pilots need to be careful while navigating around them. Pilots previously discussed this and carried a bit of extra fuel to give them the option to navigate around the storms when needed. The 9 cabin crew was also briefed about possible turbulence.
Most people are familiar with heavy rain and sometimes hail cooming from these storms. But if you look higher, things become more complicated. Because of the very strong currents inside of the cloud, water droplets can be forced upwards into very cold air and become super cooled. But as soon as they hit surface of some sort, the will instantly freeze and create clear ice. Sometimes these super cooled droplets can collide with snowflakes and when that happens, a type of soft ice crystals can be formed, which is not as hard as hail but big enough to be heard when it hits the aircraft if you fly through it. This type of precipitation doesn't create the type of heavy airframe icing that super cooled rain does but it had significant volume and can quickly clog up and overwhelm censors and probes on the aircraft, especially the pilots probes. More than 9 different occurrences of this type of clogging happening to Air France flights have been reported during 2008 and 2009. These reports, together with how to recognize and deal with these issues, had been published in safety bulletins, curculating to all Air France pilots the year before the incident flight. The aircraft here was a new Airbus A330 - 203. It had been delivered to Air France in 2005 and was almost perfect in working order on the evening of the departure.Pilots ordered 70,4 tons of fuel to be loaded prior to the flight. Pilots need a way to accuratly measure tha amount of air flowing over the wings because that's what determines the performance of the aircraft. To do this, they utilize a type of probe known as pilot tube or pilot probe. These probes are often situated along the front of the aircraft below the cockpit and they look a little bit like gun barrels. They have a hole in the front where the air enters and the total pressure is then measured inside of the tube. They are electrically heated and the heating is automatic on the Airbus A330.
But in order to accurately measure the air speed, the static pressure must also be measured so it can be deducted from the total pressure from the pilot probes. The static pressure is measured from a different device called a static port and taht static pressure is then used both for calculating the airspeed and crucially, also the altitude of the aircraft. These different pressures are then sent to the aircraft's computers, called Air Data Modules, or ADMs. The ADMs will calculate the correct true air speed but another thing important in the story is that the static pressure from the static port must be corrected depending on how fast the aircraft is flying. That's because the air flows over the aircraft surfaces surrounding the static port and will therefore create localized pressure difference depending on speed. These corrections are done automatically by the ADM computers and because air speed and altitude are critical values, these are 3 different independant sets of probes and computers fitted to the aircraft. Now because of the problems that Air France and other operators had reported of ice crystals clogging up the pilot's probes, Airbus had started to look into the problem. A newer type of pilot probe had been found to be more effective in preventing and a maintainance bulletin had been issued upgrading their first Airbus 1330 about 1 month prior the final departure of Flight 447. The aircraft was scheduled to have its probed changed to its arrival to Paris after the flight. But why wasn't these changes mandatory instead of just suggestion? Because the temporary loss of air speed due to this issue was both very rare, only lasting for a couple of minutes and there was a defined procedure which the pilots were supposed to follow in case this happened. for Air France the procedure was known as IAS douteuse but it can sometimes be referred to unreliable speed. Because problem was reported several times, it had been included in the recurrent training scenario.
And it was for all Air France crews during 2008 and 2009. Training included air speed unreliable exercices but only at low altitude. That's because when seen as more safety critical because of the closeness of the terrain but the performance of the aircraft was also better than it would be at high altitude to diagnose because the failure will look different depending on what caused it and how severe it is. During the exercices that Air France crew practised, the autopilot didn't disconnected and there were no warnings sounding in the cockpit when the failure occurred. Now the air speed unreliable procedure included the use of memory items meaning safety critical items that needed to be done straight away from memory of the pilots. But using them was optional depending on the situation and that had been interpreted as only needed if the aircraft was close to the ground. Also none of the pilots in Flight 447 received a recent training on how to deal with an approach to stall and recovery, especially at high altitude. The latest stall training they received was was done during their type rating on the Airbus A320 which they done years ealier. That initial training was done at low altitude in which heavy emphasis was put on the use of thrust to recover the aircrcaft and power it out of the stall, achieving it with minimum altitude loss. Decreasing the pitch was a secondary action to take. This idea that the engines will have enough power to pull the aircraft out of an extreme angle of attack is an important point for later.
216 boarded and the plane took off barely 10 minutes behind the schedule only. After climbing to 20 000 feet, the relief pilot left the cockpit to start his scheduled rest period for 3 hours. Crew compartment consisted of 2 bunk beds behind the cockpit. Pilots got clearance to go at level 350, so 35 000 feet of altitude. After Brasilia, they switched to Recife control and they were going to be the last ones to have radar contact with during the flight. Above the Atlantic they would soon be out of radar coverate, and followed by oceanic traffic separation procedures. Flights over oceanic areas require special training procedures and aircraft equipment. Since the curvature of the Earth makes VHF radio communication impossible aircraft are equipped with with something called HF radios. These radios use layers in the ionosphere to bounce the signals off from and can therefore reach much further distances. As the aircraft passed an RNAV point called INTOL pilots checked in with Atlantico control,, one of the 2 HF frequencies that they had been given. The pilots then tried to log into a new system that was being tested at the time in the area called ADS C. This system would use automatic reports sent by the aircraft itself via satellite to update the position of the aircraft to ATC thus showing where it was, een if they didn'thave radar coverage. This system also would send immediatly a report if an aircraft deviated from the course or altitude that it had assigned. Unfortunatly due to a formatting error in the flight plan that had been filed the pilots were unable to log in into the new system so this flight wouldn't be tracked anymore after leaving the radar coverage. Airbus A330 is a fly by wire aircraft meaning that the inputs that the pilots makes on their site stick and rudders willl be electronically interpreted by a computer and then sent to the hydraulic flight control flight actuators for execution.
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This type of control has benefits like making the aircraft lighter and it allows the aircraft to monitor certain safety parameters. and make sure that those parameters aren't excedeed. Parameters like excessive bank and pitch angles are monitored as well as safeguarding the maximum and minimum speeds and a whole load of others parameters as well. Only maneuvers really extreme and ultimatly dangerous are blocked by the system. Those operating these systems need to understand how they work and when those protections work and don't. It's true for all aircrafts but even more here. For these protections to properly work, the computers who monitor them needs to be absolutly sure that they are using correct parameters to start with. If that's not the case, computers will back off and take away those protections because the computers aren't sure what is going on. Thse computers receive their inputs from a lot of different sources like the pilot probes, the static probes, the inertial reference unit, angle of attack vanes and so on. They combine all of this data into 3 Air Data Reference Units They combined to form Air Data Inertial Reference System ( ADIRS ). As long as these 3 or at elast 2 of the 3 ADIRS agree with each other aircraft control computers are happy and it can operate on what is called normal law. Normal Laws means that all protection are available and that the aircraft is basically impossible to stall or to put in an upset situation. But of 2 of these or more start sending strange information, first of all these inconsistencies might affect the autoflight system like autopilot or autothrottle and the flight directors who show the pilots how to fly. Aircraft will not try to navigate or control the aircraft if unsure on what is going on. Its up to the pilots to figure o it out. Following on same logic, the aircraft computers will degrade from normal law to either alternate law 1 or alternate law 3 depending on the severty of the issues.
Difference between normal law and alternate law 2 is that all protections that the aircraft normally have regarding maximum angle of attack or stall protection will no longer be available. Thsi will be shown by the removal of warning indicators like the barber's pole on the primary flight display as well as yellow crosses where the limitations would normally be shown. Other difference is that the roll control of the aircraft changes. In normal law and alternate law 1, the roll would input on the side stick will command a specific roll rate from the aircraft. If pilot inputs a specific roll rate to be kept, aircraft will give that and gust disturbances will be compensated for. It will be stable and easy to handle. But in alternate law 2 the side stick give direct commands to the ailerons and spoilers rather than commending a specific roll rate. This means no bank protection or stability control. It will also make the aircraft more roll sensitive especially at higher altitude where there is less aerodynamic damping due to the thinner air. Another major difference between conventional aircraft and Airbus fly by wire aircraft is the pitch trim system. If you fly manually in conventional aircraft, the yoke controls the flight controls directly and the trim has to be done deliberatly by the pilots. In the Airbus, the side stick input will ask the control computers for a specific roll rate horizontally and a pitch or a g loading vertically. When the pilots sets a specific pitch, the elevators will initiate the pitch and the massive horizontal stabilizer will then move automatically to continue maintaining that pitch without any pilot input.This also means that there is no big tactile feedback from the stick if the aircraft enters into a strange trim position due to low speed for example. In normal law that's not an issue because the aircraft also guards the aircraft from getting close to an angle of attack high enough to stall but but it's not the case in alternate law.
Cover-Up!? The 2 Nightmare stories of Egyptair Flight 804
This type of control has benefits like making the aircraft lighter and it allows the aircraft to monitor certain safety parameters. and make sure that those parameters aren't excedeed. Parameters like excessive bank and pitch angles are monitored as well as safeguarding the maximum and minimum speeds and a whole load of others parameters as well. Only maneuvers really extreme and ultimatly dangerous are blocked by the system. Those operating these systems need to understand how they work and when those protections work and don't. It's true for all aircrafts but even more here. For these protections to properly work, the computers who monitor them needs to be absolutly sure that they are using correct parameters to start with. If that's not the case, computers will back off and take away those protections because the computers aren't sure what is going on. Thse computers receive their inputs from a lot of different sources like the pilot probes, the static probes, the inertial reference unit, angle of attack vanes and so on. They combine all of this data into 3 Air Data Reference Units They combined to form Air Data Inertial Reference System ( ADIRS ). As long as these 3 or at elast 2 of the 3 ADIRS agree with each other aircraft control computers are happy and it can operate on what is called normal law. Normal Laws means that all protection are available and that the aircraft is basically impossible to stall or to put in an upset situation. But of 2 of these or more start sending strange information, first of all these inconsistencies might affect the autoflight system like autopilot or autothrottle and the flight directors who show the pilots how to fly. Aircraft will not try to navigate or control the aircraft if unsure on what is going on. Its up to the pilots to figure o it out. Following on same logic, the aircraft computers will degrade from normal law to either alternate law 1 or alternate law 3 depending on the severty of the issues.
Difference between normal law and alternate law 2 is that all protections that the aircraft normally have regarding maximum angle of attack or stall protection will no longer be available. Thsi will be shown by the removal of warning indicators like the barber's pole on the primary flight display as well as yellow crosses where the limitations would normally be shown. Other difference is that the roll control of the aircraft changes. In normal law and alternate law 1, the roll would input on the side stick will command a specific roll rate from the aircraft. If pilot inputs a specific roll rate to be kept, aircraft will give that and gust disturbances will be compensated for. It will be stable and easy to handle. But in alternate law 2 the side stick give direct commands to the ailerons and spoilers rather than commending a specific roll rate. This means no bank protection or stability control. It will also make the aircraft more roll sensitive especially at higher altitude where there is less aerodynamic damping due to the thinner air. Another major difference between conventional aircraft and Airbus fly by wire aircraft is the pitch trim system. If you fly manually in conventional aircraft, the yoke controls the flight controls directly and the trim has to be done deliberatly by the pilots. In the Airbus, the side stick input will ask the control computers for a specific roll rate horizontally and a pitch or a g loading vertically. When the pilots sets a specific pitch, the elevators will initiate the pitch and the massive horizontal stabilizer will then move automatically to continue maintaining that pitch without any pilot input.This also means that there is no big tactile feedback from the stick if the aircraft enters into a strange trim position due to low speed for example. In normal law that's not an issue because the aircraft also guards the aircraft from getting close to an angle of attack high enough to stall but but it's not the case in alternate law.
Cover-Up!? The 2 Nightmare stories of Egyptair Flight 804
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DEATHTRAP! The Strange story of Air France flight 736
In December 31st 2020, Air France flight 737 had to go from Brazzaville in Congo, to to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. New Year's Eve was approaching. The plane left the Maya Maya Brazzazile airport. Flight was supposed to be quite long with 8 hours so the flight crew was augmented with an extra pilot. Once pre flight planning is completed, before leaving, the pilots decided a final fual of 45,5 tons and then headed over to their cabin crew colleagues to brief them about the flight. Only 136 passengers booked and there were 8 crew members. Among the passengers there were 2 Air France maintenance technicians traveling home for holidays. The captain was a 54 years old pilot with 12 400 horus of total time logged including over 1 000 as captain. He started his career in the military before joining Air France in 2002. He flew on Boeing 737 between 2002 and 2006 at Transavia before being transferred back to mainlad Air France again. He started flying on the A330 as a captain 8 months before the flight. Althought he had 3 800 of experience on that type, only 80 of those have been operated as captain. The 2 first officers had similar experience, similar age, and both of them having military experience. One of them was 53 year sold with 5 600 of flight hours including 550 on this type. The relief pilot was 54 years old with 4 800 flight hours in total including 803 hours on the Airbus A330. He also worked as a synthetic flight instructor or a simulator instructor on that same type for Airbus. But in any case, the senior purser was the most experienced on board, a 57 years old women who amassed 16 400 hours acrcoss several different types including this one. A330 - 203 was waiting for departure. The plane was 18 years old at the time of the flight and had gone through heavy maintenance over China where among other things, the engines had been removed and subsequently refitted again. This engine refitting is particular.
On the plane, 2 tanks on each wing plus a center fuel tank in the belly between the wings, and something known as the trim tank in the horizontal stabilizer. Inside of the inner tanks of each wing, there are so called collector cells from where the fuel is drawn down through the main fuel hoses in the pylon and then into the engines and that means that every time the engine has to be removed, those main fuel hoses also has to be disconnected. The problem though was that the components used to reconnect those boses were known to be fiddly, hard to work with and prone to misalignment. Specifically, a part known as the flange had a tendency to not be seated correctly together with the other connection parts and if this wasn't noticed when the fuel hose was then reconnected well, then the bolts used to make sure that the aprt sealed correctly could be fastened to the correct torque value only to later become a completely loose when this flange would vibrate back into position again. Airbus highlightened the issue in their aicraft maintenance manual back in 2015 already. In fact the original flanges had been replaced by an updated version which was smaller and easier to fit in place. But it wasn't yet mandatory to replace them. The old flanges could be used as long as they were still in stock. Since the aircraft is big and the tanks are located in different parts of the aircraft, there is a bit of tubing required and it's important to see where the fuel is at any given time, especially during takeoff and alnding since several tons of fuel for example in the stablizer in the back will have an impact on the aircraft's center of gravity. Because of that the Airbus A330 is also equipped with something known as a fuel control and monitoring computer or FCMC. This transfers automatically fuel between the different tanks depending on the phase of flight and how much fuel is being used.
For example the FCMC will start an automatic fuel transfer from the inner tanks to the trim tank in the tail whenever the aircraft climbs through flight level 255 and then it will do a similar but reverse transfer during the descent. It will also transfer fuel between the center and the wings on regular intervals, without pilot inputs under normal circumstances If the pilots for whether reason move the engines master switch to off for an engine at any point, this would close the fuel valves providing the fuel to that effective engine, removing fuel completly from it. Back into the plane, the first officer was flying while captain could be monitoring. Then the relief pilot would take the captain's place once the captain rests. Technical log showed no open technical defects All checklists were completed as per standard operating procedures Nothing was noticed during takeoff and climbing and clearance was given to go to flight level 380 or 38 000 feet. Then routine cruise checks were done at flight level 380. It includes filling in the flight plan, updating things like off block and takeoff times and also the first fuel check. This check is done by comparing the expected fuel used with the actual through verifying how much fuel is left in all of the various tanks. When these fuel checks are done whenever passing a certain waypoints but, at a minimum every 30 minutes throughout the flight. Reason to do these tasks is to make sure pilots catch any discrepancies early so they can start dealing with them. It's important to keep track of fuel usage to make sure it can reach destination with the required minimum margins available. It's also important because any significant deviation from the planned fuel use could be an indication of an empending engine issue or fuel leak.
During first check it seemed like 1,4 tons of fuel was missing. It was not good but it didn't bother the captain that much at this point. The top of climb fuel check can be notoriously unreliable since the location of the top of climb often differs due to unexpected level offs, reroutings and weather diversions. But in this cased they received a straight climb without any issue so that shouldn't really be the case. Instead, the captain thought that maybe the fuel quantity was a bit higher if the aircraft was doing one of those fuel transfers because when that happens, quite a big amount of fuel can be hidden inside of the fuel lines as it's being transferred and moved between the tanks. Captain asked his colleagues to monitor the fuel state closely and then went back to the crew bunk to start his scheduled rest period. A 1,4 discrepancy is quite big and even if it was problematic they could return to Brazzaville at any point. An Airbus A330 normally burns between between 4 to 5 tons of fuel per hour so that meant that they were now missing close to 15 minutes of fuel but given his reaction, the captain probably saw similar problems and numbers before. When first officers saw the fuel situation, they saw that for every minute they went by, the difference between how much fuel they should have and what they actually had increased. They also started looking at the weather for their different routes alternatives. After 12 minutes the relief pilot called the captain back in the cockpit. At this point they lost 2,1 tons of fuel, in 1 hour. On top of that fuel imbalance started to form with about 400 kg less in the left tanks compared to the right. There was a possible fuel leak on the left engine. An aircraft like this one will easily handle an imbalance of this size. The imbalance could get as high as 2 900 kilos without any detrimental handling characteristics. Even with 7 500 kilos of difference if one of the inner tanks would be full.
For fuel imbalance some procedures need to be followed, which includes pumping fuel from one side to the other but we wouldn't want to do that if a fuel leak is suspected They started to do the fuel leak non normal checklist from their Quick Reference Handbook or QRB. Some thing that's weird because they already have a ECAM system with electronic checklists to follow if a case like this happens. Thing is that certain problems can be identified quicker by humans than the aircraft systems themselves and the fuel leak is one of those. ECAM had such a procedure but it wouldn't be triggered until the situation had grown considerably worse. But the use of this old checklist would also come with a bit of bias from the crew which would make things more complicated. The first point of the checklist said LAND ASAP meaning that immediate diversion was now required. The captain initially didn't give to this instruction much attention. They waited so long with starting the checklist by leeting the captain sleep back in the crew bunk for 20 minutes. They were now quite close to Yaoundé airport in Cameroon. N'Djamena international airport in Chad was not far away either. Crew was more familiar with the second one. The checklist instructed them to shut down the engine on the side associated with the suspected leak.The reason the checklist started by telling the pilots to divert was because the aircraft could otherwise find itself running out of fuel especially if the leak was identified out over an ocean or a desert. Crucially a fuel leak can also represent a significant fire hazard depending on where the leak is located. An uncontrolled fire is one of the worst emergency. Secondly the list was created to bring the crew through several steps designed to find out where the leak was actually located. If an engine was shut down, using the engine master switch, this would isolate the fuel from that engine.
DEATHTRAP! The Strange story of Air France flight 736
In December 31st 2020, Air France flight 737 had to go from Brazzaville in Congo, to to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. New Year's Eve was approaching. The plane left the Maya Maya Brazzazile airport. Flight was supposed to be quite long with 8 hours so the flight crew was augmented with an extra pilot. Once pre flight planning is completed, before leaving, the pilots decided a final fual of 45,5 tons and then headed over to their cabin crew colleagues to brief them about the flight. Only 136 passengers booked and there were 8 crew members. Among the passengers there were 2 Air France maintenance technicians traveling home for holidays. The captain was a 54 years old pilot with 12 400 horus of total time logged including over 1 000 as captain. He started his career in the military before joining Air France in 2002. He flew on Boeing 737 between 2002 and 2006 at Transavia before being transferred back to mainlad Air France again. He started flying on the A330 as a captain 8 months before the flight. Althought he had 3 800 of experience on that type, only 80 of those have been operated as captain. The 2 first officers had similar experience, similar age, and both of them having military experience. One of them was 53 year sold with 5 600 of flight hours including 550 on this type. The relief pilot was 54 years old with 4 800 flight hours in total including 803 hours on the Airbus A330. He also worked as a synthetic flight instructor or a simulator instructor on that same type for Airbus. But in any case, the senior purser was the most experienced on board, a 57 years old women who amassed 16 400 hours acrcoss several different types including this one. A330 - 203 was waiting for departure. The plane was 18 years old at the time of the flight and had gone through heavy maintenance over China where among other things, the engines had been removed and subsequently refitted again. This engine refitting is particular.
On the plane, 2 tanks on each wing plus a center fuel tank in the belly between the wings, and something known as the trim tank in the horizontal stabilizer. Inside of the inner tanks of each wing, there are so called collector cells from where the fuel is drawn down through the main fuel hoses in the pylon and then into the engines and that means that every time the engine has to be removed, those main fuel hoses also has to be disconnected. The problem though was that the components used to reconnect those boses were known to be fiddly, hard to work with and prone to misalignment. Specifically, a part known as the flange had a tendency to not be seated correctly together with the other connection parts and if this wasn't noticed when the fuel hose was then reconnected well, then the bolts used to make sure that the aprt sealed correctly could be fastened to the correct torque value only to later become a completely loose when this flange would vibrate back into position again. Airbus highlightened the issue in their aicraft maintenance manual back in 2015 already. In fact the original flanges had been replaced by an updated version which was smaller and easier to fit in place. But it wasn't yet mandatory to replace them. The old flanges could be used as long as they were still in stock. Since the aircraft is big and the tanks are located in different parts of the aircraft, there is a bit of tubing required and it's important to see where the fuel is at any given time, especially during takeoff and alnding since several tons of fuel for example in the stablizer in the back will have an impact on the aircraft's center of gravity. Because of that the Airbus A330 is also equipped with something known as a fuel control and monitoring computer or FCMC. This transfers automatically fuel between the different tanks depending on the phase of flight and how much fuel is being used.
For example the FCMC will start an automatic fuel transfer from the inner tanks to the trim tank in the tail whenever the aircraft climbs through flight level 255 and then it will do a similar but reverse transfer during the descent. It will also transfer fuel between the center and the wings on regular intervals, without pilot inputs under normal circumstances If the pilots for whether reason move the engines master switch to off for an engine at any point, this would close the fuel valves providing the fuel to that effective engine, removing fuel completly from it. Back into the plane, the first officer was flying while captain could be monitoring. Then the relief pilot would take the captain's place once the captain rests. Technical log showed no open technical defects All checklists were completed as per standard operating procedures Nothing was noticed during takeoff and climbing and clearance was given to go to flight level 380 or 38 000 feet. Then routine cruise checks were done at flight level 380. It includes filling in the flight plan, updating things like off block and takeoff times and also the first fuel check. This check is done by comparing the expected fuel used with the actual through verifying how much fuel is left in all of the various tanks. When these fuel checks are done whenever passing a certain waypoints but, at a minimum every 30 minutes throughout the flight. Reason to do these tasks is to make sure pilots catch any discrepancies early so they can start dealing with them. It's important to keep track of fuel usage to make sure it can reach destination with the required minimum margins available. It's also important because any significant deviation from the planned fuel use could be an indication of an empending engine issue or fuel leak.
During first check it seemed like 1,4 tons of fuel was missing. It was not good but it didn't bother the captain that much at this point. The top of climb fuel check can be notoriously unreliable since the location of the top of climb often differs due to unexpected level offs, reroutings and weather diversions. But in this cased they received a straight climb without any issue so that shouldn't really be the case. Instead, the captain thought that maybe the fuel quantity was a bit higher if the aircraft was doing one of those fuel transfers because when that happens, quite a big amount of fuel can be hidden inside of the fuel lines as it's being transferred and moved between the tanks. Captain asked his colleagues to monitor the fuel state closely and then went back to the crew bunk to start his scheduled rest period. A 1,4 discrepancy is quite big and even if it was problematic they could return to Brazzaville at any point. An Airbus A330 normally burns between between 4 to 5 tons of fuel per hour so that meant that they were now missing close to 15 minutes of fuel but given his reaction, the captain probably saw similar problems and numbers before. When first officers saw the fuel situation, they saw that for every minute they went by, the difference between how much fuel they should have and what they actually had increased. They also started looking at the weather for their different routes alternatives. After 12 minutes the relief pilot called the captain back in the cockpit. At this point they lost 2,1 tons of fuel, in 1 hour. On top of that fuel imbalance started to form with about 400 kg less in the left tanks compared to the right. There was a possible fuel leak on the left engine. An aircraft like this one will easily handle an imbalance of this size. The imbalance could get as high as 2 900 kilos without any detrimental handling characteristics. Even with 7 500 kilos of difference if one of the inner tanks would be full.
For fuel imbalance some procedures need to be followed, which includes pumping fuel from one side to the other but we wouldn't want to do that if a fuel leak is suspected They started to do the fuel leak non normal checklist from their Quick Reference Handbook or QRB. Some thing that's weird because they already have a ECAM system with electronic checklists to follow if a case like this happens. Thing is that certain problems can be identified quicker by humans than the aircraft systems themselves and the fuel leak is one of those. ECAM had such a procedure but it wouldn't be triggered until the situation had grown considerably worse. But the use of this old checklist would also come with a bit of bias from the crew which would make things more complicated. The first point of the checklist said LAND ASAP meaning that immediate diversion was now required. The captain initially didn't give to this instruction much attention. They waited so long with starting the checklist by leeting the captain sleep back in the crew bunk for 20 minutes. They were now quite close to Yaoundé airport in Cameroon. N'Djamena international airport in Chad was not far away either. Crew was more familiar with the second one. The checklist instructed them to shut down the engine on the side associated with the suspected leak.The reason the checklist started by telling the pilots to divert was because the aircraft could otherwise find itself running out of fuel especially if the leak was identified out over an ocean or a desert. Crucially a fuel leak can also represent a significant fire hazard depending on where the leak is located. An uncontrolled fire is one of the worst emergency. Secondly the list was created to bring the crew through several steps designed to find out where the leak was actually located. If an engine was shut down, using the engine master switch, this would isolate the fuel from that engine.
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So if the leak stopped after the suspected engine was shut down, the fuel leak would be confirmed in that engine and it could be left alone. If the leak continued, that engine could be restarted again. The captain and his 2 colleagues felt that the QRH paper checklist was more of an indicative document, not as decisive as similar instructions coming from the ECAM checklist. The captain didn't want to shut down the engine. He felt ti was his prerogative to decide on that, not the checklists. His colleagues agreed and felt a strong hesitation about shutting down an engine. They all have gone through training scenarios in the simulator where they practised fuel leaks and in these scenarios, the leak always had been pre briefed in the classrooms and the actual exercise had been focused on fuel preservation and the correct use of the checklist, not at all on the complexities of a real life scenario. So the crew now looked at their situation and didn't see a problem with the fuel quantity. They had alternative airports nearby and plenty of fuel still available. When the captain reads the list, to make things worse, it wasn't written anywhere that these steps were also important in order to avoid a fire hazard. Single engine service ceiling at the current weight was at 26 000 feet so they would have to descend to that altitude before shutting down their engine, further limiting their options so the pilots actions can be understood from that point of view. Procedures and checklists given are written in a certain way for a reason. They are written by skilled people that the aircraft manufacturers have been able to muster coming from all disciplines including pilots, engineers, lawyers, human factors experts. These people are tasked with finding the safest way of dealing with the potential problem, taking in account everything imaginable including how their guidance will affect other systems, procedures and safety rules but also lessons learned from previous accidents.
Using these procedures should be able to free up mental capacities to take the most overarching decisions that have to be taken or use experience if procedures of guidance can't solve the problem. The main fuel hose hadn not been properly fitted after the aircraft's latest engine overhaul. But it still stayed relatively tight for the 6 preceding 6 flights before this one until this time, when the flange had likely dropped into position, causing the bolts that were holding it to become much more loose which then allowed the high pressurized fuel to start spraying out through the connection. Now there was a drain mounted around the connection which was supposed to divert small amouts of of leakage away from the engine below. and out through a drain mast. But it was not sized to deal with with the enormous amount of fuel that was now gushing out. It meant that this fuel started flowing out over several hundred degrees hot engine components below. Fuel and heat part of the fire triangle was complete. Only thing needed was the correct amount of fuel to make the fuel mixture perfect for combustion and potentially a catastrophic fire. The captain asked the 2 maintenance technicians to join them in the cockpit and with the relief pilot, they had gone back to over the wing in order to try and see if they could identify the leak. But it was pitch black outside so they coudln't see anything. When the relief pilot was back, they start to go through something known as the FORDEC decision making model to see what actions they should take. It stands for Factual information collect, Options available, Risk, Decision take, Execute the decision and Control / evaluate the progress. It's a very good way of dealing with these types of complex situations where there are many possible options to choose from. But this type of model assumes that all non applicable non normal checklists have been completed correctly before this model is started.
That was not the case so the factual information collect part couldn't be completed since not all facts are correct. For example if the fuel checklists had been completed, they should already be flying single engine at lower altitude with the fuel leak sorted out. Since the checklists stated LAND ASAP they should already be rechecking NOTAMs, and weather for Yaoundé airport which was the closest alternative and had a 3 400 meters long runway available. But here as the captain was going through FORDEC, he analyzed options and risks as he saw them. He concluded that there was a fuel leak but there were enough options to choose a diversion that they wanted. Biggest risk was for him not the leak itself but that they would have to shut down the 1 engine and divert single engine.Between Yaoundé and N'Djamena, all 3 pilots thought that N'Djamena had better facilities, including some military presence close to the airport which they felt could be good for their security. Keep in mind these were complicated time on the regions they were flying over. Yaoundé was closer and had good weather. The captain pointed out that they haven't finished FORDEC yet and therefore they could continue north whilst completing this to N'Djamena anyway. If they understood the fire hazard they were facing, they likely would have acted differently here. Air France Operations Control Center was contacted about the alternative they should use. They also indicated that N'Djamena was maybe more suitable from an operational perspective. If FORDEC was properly done here, they would notice that there was more to this decision than they had thought of so far. The captain also pointed out that they lost so much fuel that they wouldn't be able to reach Paris anymore. Lead purser was called into the cabin to explain the situation. Captain briefed here on the situation, telling that there was no need to prepare the passengers for emergency landing but she did it anyway, to prepare if fuel leak turned worse.
So if the leak stopped after the suspected engine was shut down, the fuel leak would be confirmed in that engine and it could be left alone. If the leak continued, that engine could be restarted again. The captain and his 2 colleagues felt that the QRH paper checklist was more of an indicative document, not as decisive as similar instructions coming from the ECAM checklist. The captain didn't want to shut down the engine. He felt ti was his prerogative to decide on that, not the checklists. His colleagues agreed and felt a strong hesitation about shutting down an engine. They all have gone through training scenarios in the simulator where they practised fuel leaks and in these scenarios, the leak always had been pre briefed in the classrooms and the actual exercise had been focused on fuel preservation and the correct use of the checklist, not at all on the complexities of a real life scenario. So the crew now looked at their situation and didn't see a problem with the fuel quantity. They had alternative airports nearby and plenty of fuel still available. When the captain reads the list, to make things worse, it wasn't written anywhere that these steps were also important in order to avoid a fire hazard. Single engine service ceiling at the current weight was at 26 000 feet so they would have to descend to that altitude before shutting down their engine, further limiting their options so the pilots actions can be understood from that point of view. Procedures and checklists given are written in a certain way for a reason. They are written by skilled people that the aircraft manufacturers have been able to muster coming from all disciplines including pilots, engineers, lawyers, human factors experts. These people are tasked with finding the safest way of dealing with the potential problem, taking in account everything imaginable including how their guidance will affect other systems, procedures and safety rules but also lessons learned from previous accidents.
Using these procedures should be able to free up mental capacities to take the most overarching decisions that have to be taken or use experience if procedures of guidance can't solve the problem. The main fuel hose hadn not been properly fitted after the aircraft's latest engine overhaul. But it still stayed relatively tight for the 6 preceding 6 flights before this one until this time, when the flange had likely dropped into position, causing the bolts that were holding it to become much more loose which then allowed the high pressurized fuel to start spraying out through the connection. Now there was a drain mounted around the connection which was supposed to divert small amouts of of leakage away from the engine below. and out through a drain mast. But it was not sized to deal with with the enormous amount of fuel that was now gushing out. It meant that this fuel started flowing out over several hundred degrees hot engine components below. Fuel and heat part of the fire triangle was complete. Only thing needed was the correct amount of fuel to make the fuel mixture perfect for combustion and potentially a catastrophic fire. The captain asked the 2 maintenance technicians to join them in the cockpit and with the relief pilot, they had gone back to over the wing in order to try and see if they could identify the leak. But it was pitch black outside so they coudln't see anything. When the relief pilot was back, they start to go through something known as the FORDEC decision making model to see what actions they should take. It stands for Factual information collect, Options available, Risk, Decision take, Execute the decision and Control / evaluate the progress. It's a very good way of dealing with these types of complex situations where there are many possible options to choose from. But this type of model assumes that all non applicable non normal checklists have been completed correctly before this model is started.
That was not the case so the factual information collect part couldn't be completed since not all facts are correct. For example if the fuel checklists had been completed, they should already be flying single engine at lower altitude with the fuel leak sorted out. Since the checklists stated LAND ASAP they should already be rechecking NOTAMs, and weather for Yaoundé airport which was the closest alternative and had a 3 400 meters long runway available. But here as the captain was going through FORDEC, he analyzed options and risks as he saw them. He concluded that there was a fuel leak but there were enough options to choose a diversion that they wanted. Biggest risk was for him not the leak itself but that they would have to shut down the 1 engine and divert single engine.Between Yaoundé and N'Djamena, all 3 pilots thought that N'Djamena had better facilities, including some military presence close to the airport which they felt could be good for their security. Keep in mind these were complicated time on the regions they were flying over. Yaoundé was closer and had good weather. The captain pointed out that they haven't finished FORDEC yet and therefore they could continue north whilst completing this to N'Djamena anyway. If they understood the fire hazard they were facing, they likely would have acted differently here. Air France Operations Control Center was contacted about the alternative they should use. They also indicated that N'Djamena was maybe more suitable from an operational perspective. If FORDEC was properly done here, they would notice that there was more to this decision than they had thought of so far. The captain also pointed out that they lost so much fuel that they wouldn't be able to reach Paris anymore. Lead purser was called into the cabin to explain the situation. Captain briefed here on the situation, telling that there was no need to prepare the passengers for emergency landing but she did it anyway, to prepare if fuel leak turned worse.
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Unforgivable!! The Tragic tale of Air Algérie Flight 6289
It happened on March 6th 2003. Air Algérie crew consisted of 2 pilots and 4 cabin crew. 2 leg domestic flight was prepared starting in Tamenghasset, Algéria. and then continuying via a short stop in Ghardaia, to their final destination, Angiers. Due to problem with system B hydraulic pump, the flight had been delayed for 3 hours. The Boeing 737 - 200 they were about to fly still seemed in a good technical shape. This plane has been delivered to the company back in December of 1983. But it was maintained according to the maintenance handbook and had no open defects on the day of the flight. It was equipped with 2 JT8D - 17A ducted low bypass turbofna engines. both in check but who had a lot of time on them with the left engine having clocked over 30 000 hours and the right one close to 23 000. Because of the delay the captain hadn't turn on for the briefing along the crew. Instead he would arrive later when the issue with the hydraulic pump had been solved. This meant that the first officer who had turned up on time was left to complete all the pre flight preparationsb y herself, including checking weather for the 2 flights which was fine but the temperature was getting steadily higher since Tamanrasset airport was situated quite up at an altitude of 4 500 feet. Density altitude was now becoming a factor. Density altitude is the altitude the aircraft performance is calculated on corrected for temperature and it can have major impact on the climb of takeoff performance for example, as well as the landing distance required. Since air with higher temperature has less density it means that effectively there is less air molecules moving around the wings as well as through the engines, causing less lift at a given speed as well as less thrust. It means that the aircraft in hot weather will need to accelerate to a higher speed using less available thrust before it can take off which will mean a longer takeoff distance or less ability to carry weight.
With a delay, the aircraft would now depart around 14 : 00, hottest time on the day with temperatures of 25 degrees Celcius. That might seem not that much but at this higher altitude it can make a big difference especially with a heavy aircraft If aircraft was too heavy there was possibility to just offload some bags or cargo so the first officer wasn't too worried about that. She looked through briefing material and there was nothing in the NOTAMs or flight plans that stood out to her. The first officer was 44 years old and amassed a total time of over 5 200 hours including 1 292 on the 737 - 200. The captain was 48 years old and had 10 760 hours but he had been only captain of the 737 - 200 for around 1 100 hours. So he had less experience on this type than the first officer did. He was also curiously operating as a first officer on the Boeing 767 within the same company, flying around 31 hours on that type during the 30 days before the flight. First officer asked the fuler to uplift 4,6 tons of fuel bringing the departure fuel up to close to 10 tons. This fuel + the 97 passengers would bring the aircraft up to a takeoff weight of 48 708 kilos which was only 800 kilos away from the aircraft's maximum takeoff weight. Captain allowed the first officer to fly the first leg. While she finished to prepare everything, instead of helping out, he talked to the male pursuer about some other unrelated stuff. The pursuer called home a bit earlier and told his 17 years old son that he would be home late due to technical issues. Later this would be misinterpreted by the local press. Eventually work was completed on the hydraulic pump. Inr eality instead of 97 there had been 100 passengers booked but 3 of them encountered some type of document issues during the checkin process and had therefore been denied to travel. Among the passengers allowed to board in, there was a 28 years old conscript who had been assigned a seat in the very last row in front of the art gallery.
With a delay, the aircraft would now depart around 14 : 00, hottest time on the day with temperatures of 25 degrees Celcius. That might seem not that much but at this higher altitude it can make a big difference especially with a heavy aircraft If aircraft was too heavy there was possibility to just offload some bags or cargo so the first officer wasn't too worried about that. She looked through briefing material and there was nothing in the NOTAMs or flight plans that stood out to her. The first officer was 44 years old and amassed a total time of over 5 200 hours including 1 292 on the 737 - 200. The captain was 48 years old and had 10 760 hours but he had been only captain of the 737 - 200 for around 1 100 hours. So he had less experience on this type than the first officer did. He was also curiously operating as a first officer on the Boeing 767 within the same company, flying around 31 hours on that type during the 30 days before the flight. First officer asked the fuler to uplift 4,6 tons of fuel bringing the departure fuel up to close to 10 tons. This fuel + the 97 passengers would bring the aircraft up to a takeoff weight of 48 708 kilos which was only 800 kilos away from the aircraft's maximum takeoff weight. Captain allowed the first officer to fly the first leg. While she finished to prepare everything, instead of helping out, he talked to the male pursuer about some other unrelated stuff. The pursuer called home a bit earlier and told his 17 years old son that he would be home late due to technical issues. Later this would be misinterpreted by the local press. Eventually work was completed on the hydraulic pump. Inr eality instead of 97 there had been 100 passengers booked but 3 of them encountered some type of document issues during the checkin process and had therefore been denied to travel. Among the passengers allowed to board in, there was a 28 years old conscript who had been assigned a seat in the very last row in front of the art gallery.
Chatting about unrelated things can be ok during the flight at cruise altitude but during briefing and the sterile phases of flight, it's not okay. During first light of the day, emergency brief tend to be conducted and touch drills of all items that need to be done in case something goes wrong.
Unforgivable!! The Tragic tale of Air Algérie Flight 6289
It happened on March 6th 2003. Air Algérie crew consisted of 2 pilots and 4 cabin crew. 2 leg domestic flight was prepared starting in Tamenghasset, Algéria. and then continuying via a short stop in Ghardaia, to their final destination, Angiers. Due to problem with system B hydraulic pump, the flight had been delayed for 3 hours. The Boeing 737 - 200 they were about to fly still seemed in a good technical shape. This plane has been delivered to the company back in December of 1983. But it was maintained according to the maintenance handbook and had no open defects on the day of the flight. It was equipped with 2 JT8D - 17A ducted low bypass turbofna engines. both in check but who had a lot of time on them with the left engine having clocked over 30 000 hours and the right one close to 23 000. Because of the delay the captain hadn't turn on for the briefing along the crew. Instead he would arrive later when the issue with the hydraulic pump had been solved. This meant that the first officer who had turned up on time was left to complete all the pre flight preparationsb y herself, including checking weather for the 2 flights which was fine but the temperature was getting steadily higher since Tamanrasset airport was situated quite up at an altitude of 4 500 feet. Density altitude was now becoming a factor. Density altitude is the altitude the aircraft performance is calculated on corrected for temperature and it can have major impact on the climb of takeoff performance for example, as well as the landing distance required. Since air with higher temperature has less density it means that effectively there is less air molecules moving around the wings as well as through the engines, causing less lift at a given speed as well as less thrust. It means that the aircraft in hot weather will need to accelerate to a higher speed using less available thrust before it can take off which will mean a longer takeoff distance or less ability to carry weight.
With a delay, the aircraft would now depart around 14 : 00, hottest time on the day with temperatures of 25 degrees Celcius. That might seem not that much but at this higher altitude it can make a big difference especially with a heavy aircraft If aircraft was too heavy there was possibility to just offload some bags or cargo so the first officer wasn't too worried about that. She looked through briefing material and there was nothing in the NOTAMs or flight plans that stood out to her. The first officer was 44 years old and amassed a total time of over 5 200 hours including 1 292 on the 737 - 200. The captain was 48 years old and had 10 760 hours but he had been only captain of the 737 - 200 for around 1 100 hours. So he had less experience on this type than the first officer did. He was also curiously operating as a first officer on the Boeing 767 within the same company, flying around 31 hours on that type during the 30 days before the flight. First officer asked the fuler to uplift 4,6 tons of fuel bringing the departure fuel up to close to 10 tons. This fuel + the 97 passengers would bring the aircraft up to a takeoff weight of 48 708 kilos which was only 800 kilos away from the aircraft's maximum takeoff weight. Captain allowed the first officer to fly the first leg. While she finished to prepare everything, instead of helping out, he talked to the male pursuer about some other unrelated stuff. The pursuer called home a bit earlier and told his 17 years old son that he would be home late due to technical issues. Later this would be misinterpreted by the local press. Eventually work was completed on the hydraulic pump. Inr eality instead of 97 there had been 100 passengers booked but 3 of them encountered some type of document issues during the checkin process and had therefore been denied to travel. Among the passengers allowed to board in, there was a 28 years old conscript who had been assigned a seat in the very last row in front of the art gallery.
With a delay, the aircraft would now depart around 14 : 00, hottest time on the day with temperatures of 25 degrees Celcius. That might seem not that much but at this higher altitude it can make a big difference especially with a heavy aircraft If aircraft was too heavy there was possibility to just offload some bags or cargo so the first officer wasn't too worried about that. She looked through briefing material and there was nothing in the NOTAMs or flight plans that stood out to her. The first officer was 44 years old and amassed a total time of over 5 200 hours including 1 292 on the 737 - 200. The captain was 48 years old and had 10 760 hours but he had been only captain of the 737 - 200 for around 1 100 hours. So he had less experience on this type than the first officer did. He was also curiously operating as a first officer on the Boeing 767 within the same company, flying around 31 hours on that type during the 30 days before the flight. First officer asked the fuler to uplift 4,6 tons of fuel bringing the departure fuel up to close to 10 tons. This fuel + the 97 passengers would bring the aircraft up to a takeoff weight of 48 708 kilos which was only 800 kilos away from the aircraft's maximum takeoff weight. Captain allowed the first officer to fly the first leg. While she finished to prepare everything, instead of helping out, he talked to the male pursuer about some other unrelated stuff. The pursuer called home a bit earlier and told his 17 years old son that he would be home late due to technical issues. Later this would be misinterpreted by the local press. Eventually work was completed on the hydraulic pump. Inr eality instead of 97 there had been 100 passengers booked but 3 of them encountered some type of document issues during the checkin process and had therefore been denied to travel. Among the passengers allowed to board in, there was a 28 years old conscript who had been assigned a seat in the very last row in front of the art gallery.
Chatting about unrelated things can be ok during the flight at cruise altitude but during briefing and the sterile phases of flight, it's not okay. During first light of the day, emergency brief tend to be conducted and touch drills of all items that need to be done in case something goes wrong.
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WHY did The Pilots CONTINUE?! Asiana flight 214 A
Boeing 777 is on approach to San Francisco airport. When getting closer to runway, it starts dropping down way below its normal descent path. Pilots tried to pull the nose up but that didn't help. Asiana Airlines is a Korean company. In March 2013 in a classroom a group of command upgrade candidates listen to technical systems lesson about the aircraft they are about to become captain on, the Boeing 777.One of the sudents will become pilot of Asiana flight 214. The classs is watching instructional video in one of the Asiana Airlines simulator about the speed protection systems on the Boeing 777. The 777 is an aircraft with advance autoflight system. It includes flight directors who give the pilots visual instructions on the screens. It also has a set of autopilots capable of maneuvering the aircraft during all phases of flight and an autothrottle system keeping the required speed of the aircraft and provides critical low speed protection even if the system is switched off. It was this autothrottle system that students were learning about on this day. Class watched a video on how the simulator pilots turned off the autopilot and the autothrottle, retarded the thrust levers to idle and then let the aircraft speed reduce until it became close to the indicated stall speed, the speed where the aircraft would no longer be able to fly. The then switched off autothrottle woke up, engaged itself in speed mode on the FMA in front of the pilots and increased the thrust to keep the aircraft from stalling.This feature made deep impression on the pilot of this story. telling how amazed he was by this safety feature. On the Airbus they had a similar system called Alpha Floor Protection. Problem with the presentation that the students received was that the autothrottle didn't always protect the aircraft from low speed event. When certain modes of the autothrottle was engaged, it would not move even if the speed became very low and there was no wake up feature available then.
This would happen when the autothrottle engaged in hold mode as it did sometimes when a pitch mode called level change was used and it could also happen when it engaged in TOGA mode and when the aircraft was below 400 feet after takeoff and 100 feet during approach. These exceptions were not highlighted during the presentation. They were generally poorly understood by pilots flying the 777 at the time. Asiana Airlines has an airline policy to maximize the use of automatic systems during all phases of flight. Use of automation played a major role in improving safety but the policy play a negative role here. After their training for this type rating on the Boeing 777, they started operational experience training or line training, in June 2013. During simulator part of the training he generally received good if not very good training remarks from instructors and he was looking forward to the line training. During the flight he was 45 years old with a total flying experience of 9 700 hours including 3 700 hours as a captain and 33 hours on the line training on the Boeing 777 previously to the accident making him inexperienced on the type but experienced overall. About remarks from instructors, there was still one who said he was not well organized or prepared before the flight. On the accident day the captain was accompanied with 49 years old instructor captain who had 12 300 horus of total flight time including more than 3 200 on the Boeing 777. It was his first flight with a real student after his training as instructor. Command training might soud easy to some since you instruct an experienced and prepared student but Good command training involves instructor doing 3 different roles successfully which are hard and tiring. On June 6th 2013, day of accident, the crew prepared for a flight from their home base, Incheon International in Seoul, South Korea to San Francisco international in the USA. The flight was supposed to last close to 10 hours and a half.
4 pilots were assigned. The captain of the training is the primary pilot flying for takeoff and landing together with the instructor pilot who was going to be pilot monitoring. on top of that, a relief crew consisting of 1 captain and 1 first officer Full relief crew was needed instead of just 1 because landing time was scheduled at around 11 : 30 Pacific Daylight Time in San Francisco making it around 3 : 30 in the morning in Seoul. Since it's the time humans typically want to sleep, decision making skills and cognitive abilities can be impared by acute fatigue. Even if you have a nap during these flights night still can have an effect Boeing 777 - 200ER was in full working order and the technical status of the aircraft didn't have any impact on the accident On board, 291 passengers, 12 cabin crew and 4 pilots. Most of the flight went as planned. They discussed the fact that the instrument landing system glide hope in San Francisco was turned ott due to construction work. They would expect to get radar vectors towards a visual approach into Runway 28 left. Visual approach can be done when weather is good and also when ILS is not working. However it's a type of approach that is prone to errors. Asiana Airlines stipulates that all approaches include visual approches should be flown using autopilot. Captain went through the approach briefing It was going to be his first ever visual approach.
WHY did The Pilots CONTINUE?! Asiana flight 214 A
Boeing 777 is on approach to San Francisco airport. When getting closer to runway, it starts dropping down way below its normal descent path. Pilots tried to pull the nose up but that didn't help. Asiana Airlines is a Korean company. In March 2013 in a classroom a group of command upgrade candidates listen to technical systems lesson about the aircraft they are about to become captain on, the Boeing 777.One of the sudents will become pilot of Asiana flight 214. The classs is watching instructional video in one of the Asiana Airlines simulator about the speed protection systems on the Boeing 777. The 777 is an aircraft with advance autoflight system. It includes flight directors who give the pilots visual instructions on the screens. It also has a set of autopilots capable of maneuvering the aircraft during all phases of flight and an autothrottle system keeping the required speed of the aircraft and provides critical low speed protection even if the system is switched off. It was this autothrottle system that students were learning about on this day. Class watched a video on how the simulator pilots turned off the autopilot and the autothrottle, retarded the thrust levers to idle and then let the aircraft speed reduce until it became close to the indicated stall speed, the speed where the aircraft would no longer be able to fly. The then switched off autothrottle woke up, engaged itself in speed mode on the FMA in front of the pilots and increased the thrust to keep the aircraft from stalling.This feature made deep impression on the pilot of this story. telling how amazed he was by this safety feature. On the Airbus they had a similar system called Alpha Floor Protection. Problem with the presentation that the students received was that the autothrottle didn't always protect the aircraft from low speed event. When certain modes of the autothrottle was engaged, it would not move even if the speed became very low and there was no wake up feature available then.
This would happen when the autothrottle engaged in hold mode as it did sometimes when a pitch mode called level change was used and it could also happen when it engaged in TOGA mode and when the aircraft was below 400 feet after takeoff and 100 feet during approach. These exceptions were not highlighted during the presentation. They were generally poorly understood by pilots flying the 777 at the time. Asiana Airlines has an airline policy to maximize the use of automatic systems during all phases of flight. Use of automation played a major role in improving safety but the policy play a negative role here. After their training for this type rating on the Boeing 777, they started operational experience training or line training, in June 2013. During simulator part of the training he generally received good if not very good training remarks from instructors and he was looking forward to the line training. During the flight he was 45 years old with a total flying experience of 9 700 hours including 3 700 hours as a captain and 33 hours on the line training on the Boeing 777 previously to the accident making him inexperienced on the type but experienced overall. About remarks from instructors, there was still one who said he was not well organized or prepared before the flight. On the accident day the captain was accompanied with 49 years old instructor captain who had 12 300 horus of total flight time including more than 3 200 on the Boeing 777. It was his first flight with a real student after his training as instructor. Command training might soud easy to some since you instruct an experienced and prepared student but Good command training involves instructor doing 3 different roles successfully which are hard and tiring. On June 6th 2013, day of accident, the crew prepared for a flight from their home base, Incheon International in Seoul, South Korea to San Francisco international in the USA. The flight was supposed to last close to 10 hours and a half.
4 pilots were assigned. The captain of the training is the primary pilot flying for takeoff and landing together with the instructor pilot who was going to be pilot monitoring. on top of that, a relief crew consisting of 1 captain and 1 first officer Full relief crew was needed instead of just 1 because landing time was scheduled at around 11 : 30 Pacific Daylight Time in San Francisco making it around 3 : 30 in the morning in Seoul. Since it's the time humans typically want to sleep, decision making skills and cognitive abilities can be impared by acute fatigue. Even if you have a nap during these flights night still can have an effect Boeing 777 - 200ER was in full working order and the technical status of the aircraft didn't have any impact on the accident On board, 291 passengers, 12 cabin crew and 4 pilots. Most of the flight went as planned. They discussed the fact that the instrument landing system glide hope in San Francisco was turned ott due to construction work. They would expect to get radar vectors towards a visual approach into Runway 28 left. Visual approach can be done when weather is good and also when ILS is not working. However it's a type of approach that is prone to errors. Asiana Airlines stipulates that all approaches include visual approches should be flown using autopilot. Captain went through the approach briefing It was going to be his first ever visual approach.
Post.
DEADLY Attitude! The Truly Shocking story of Pakistan Airlines 8303
2 of the worst emergencies combined in 1 flight. On the 22nd May of 2020, Pakistan Airlines crew was getting ready from a short domestic flight from Lahore in Pakistan over to Karachi Covid 19 context meant strict lockdowns in place like Pakistan. It was one of the only flights was still operated. It also took place during the Holy month of Ramadan. During the 72 hours before the flight, the captain had flown 10,5 hours. Checking thorugh NOTAMs and flight plans, nothing out of ordinary. The captained had turned 58 years old and worked on this company for 24 years He had over 17 000 hours of flight experience. Under 4 800 hours have been on the Airbus A320. He had been appointed as a standard inspector on the A320 fleet meaning he was seen as someone suitable to make sure other pilots were following the standards expected when operating on this aircrcaft He applied back in 1996 and was required to go through psychological evaluation like all pilots. He failed that assessment with a far from flattering evaluation. They said he was of a bossy nature, dominant and overbearing, that he had below average intelligence and had little regards to the authority. He also had low mechanical comprehension with low comprehension of spatial relations and his level of stress tolerance was also quite inadequate. He didn't give up and sasked for opinions of 5 other psychiatrists, 3 of them from the UK who all gave them a green light to continue as cadet. Problem was that Pakistan Airlines stopped allowing second options at this point So he complained to the Federal Omdudsman since the application that he filed had been before this change had taken place The Ombudsman sided with him and he was allowed to start his training.
First officer was 33 years old guy with less experience than the captain, having only 2 200 flight hours including 1 500 on this type. He was doing this for 10 years. He received some negative feedbacks during his initial training which held him back from upgrading from second officer to first officer. But after 2015 his training history was pretty clean. Pilots decided that first officer was going to be pilot flying for this flight. Captain was going to be in charge of doing the walkaround but before he started to look through the technical logbook. Aircraft they were flying was a 16 years old Airbus A320 - 200 equipped with 2 CFM56 high bypass turbofan engines. 91 passengers were on board. They would stay 45 minutes at 34 000 feet of altitude. From voice transcripts it looks like pilots were getting along quite well. First officer was preparing the aircraft for the approach and he also had to complete the approach briefing. But as descent got closer there was no sign of preparation being done. Pilot flying normally would hand over controls to the pilot monitoring meaning that the PM would be in charge oh both radio and control during this period, allowing the pilot flying to concentrate on preparing all the radios, courses, flight management computer and the minimas. Once done the pilot would do a comprehensive briefing to the pilot monitoring pointing out any potential threat during the descent and how to deal with them. After that, arrival procedure would be discussed on what approach to chose, how to fly properly that approach, followed by the landing distance calculations and the expected taxi routings. These briefings can be shorten a bit if the pilots are familiar with the airport. But here pilots just kept chatting about non operational stuff Now the routing, including the expected standard arrival route and approach would have been entered into the FMC already on the ground. Now they had that confirmed by the controller as well.
Without proper briefing and check of all proper parameters things can get missed. Also it should be noted that it should be the captain and not the first officer that request descent since the captain was the pilot monitoring. Also after altitude clearance is received the pilot flying should set the new cleared altitude in the FCU and then call out " set ". The pilot monitoring should then verify that the value entered was the same as he or she heard and if that was the case, he or she should respond " flight level 100 checked " By doing this, there is little chance of doing mistake because of someone mishearing clearance. Here FCU was just updated to level 100 and there was no call out from any of the pilots. Second part of clearance included in direct routing to a point called MAKLI. This point was situated on the extended centerline from Runway 25 Left. SABEN was the point where the aircraft was expected below 3 000 feet of altitude. These types of routing are common. Aircraft's flight management computer will calculate a top of descent based on the most economic idle descent profile. That profile will assume that the aircraft as exactly as many track miles to achieve this descent as the pilots have programmed into the FMC. So if a shortcut like this is received, this can cut a way quite a lot of these available track miles meaning that the aircraft would end up being high on profile. Normally that's not an issue. We can always use speed brakes or allow the aircraft to speed up to get rid of some of that extra energy. But it didn't happen here. When first officer descended, he activated the aircraft's managed descent mode which would follow the pre programmed profile. Even if they received substancial shortcut, the aircraft descended about 1 000 feet per minute meaning it was still calculating with a few more miles or level flight before starting to descend along the calculated path. It showed that the aircraft assumed it still had plenty of track miles to run.
That was not the case. It should have been seen as a red flag by the pilots. 2 reasons why the flight management computer would react this way. 1 : there is a waypoint with an at or above altitude restriction somewhere along the route, which would then force the aircraft to stay up high. That wasn't the case here. The other reason is that there is a procedural holding pattern programmed into the route at some point which was the case here but since they didn't do appraoch briefing they didn't notice that. You want to intercept the ILS as soon as possible and take advantage of that short cut that we just got to save on both time and fuel. Air traffic control will almost in all conditions except pilots to do that. It's why pilots try to keep manual checks on how many track miles left to go. If we take our altitude on thousands of feet then multiply it by 3, we get a rough estimate of how many miles we will need. If the available miles are less than that, pilots need to do something about it. No blindly trusting the FMC but instead making manual backup calculations. Aircraft intercepted its calculated path meaning that the thrust was reduced back to idle and that the descent rate is about 2 400 feet per minute to follow the path. Air traffic control come back in and clears the flight to descend at 5 000 feet but agian, no normal procedure followed when it came to set the new altitude in the FCU. Seconds after receiving descent clearance, a faint click could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder. It was familiar to one of the push buttons on the audio control panel being pressed down. After that the air traffic control tried to call the aircraft 7 times including 2 calls from a company aircraft but no answer back Once after controller called on emergency frequency twice, 121.5, the contact came back. Crew probably assumed a handover to the next frequency after that last altitude clearance and they mistuned the next frequency before they just switched over.
After that pilots just discussed about non revelant issues. It's probably why they didn't notice the frequency going quiet. Pilots almost never switch to a new frequency in the air unless they are clearly handed over by the previous air traffic controller. No noe removed the holding pattern from SABEN, the aircraft still assumed it would be executing that hold meaning that the track miles calculated by the FMC was 23 nautical miles longer than the actual distance they had available. This would have been shown in various ways including an initial white left turn arrow on the navigation display and the fact that SABEN appeared twice in the flight management computer with a white hold written in between. Expected initial FMC altitude at SABEN was set to 8 900 feet : too high for a straight up approach. Maximum possible would have been 5 000 feet. None of thees things were noticed by the crew. After clearance to descend to 3 000 feet, FCU altitude setting procedure was disregarded as well as all confirmations of the correct QNH setting. At least the first officer armed the autopilot approach mode meaning that the aircraft would capture the localizer and glideslope beams whether they became available. They were cleared for straight in approach but the aircraft continued in its managed descent mode without any effort by the crew to increase their descent rate. In that situation they could make a turn to come back and land properly. When the localizer is captured, it disengages any previously elected horizontal mode, meaning the aircraft would disregard the hold even if it was still left in the FMC. When controller saw on radar that the flight was too higih, he asked the pilots if it was comfortable to descend and the captain answered " Affirm. " Captain forgot to remove the holding at SABEN.
DEADLY Attitude! The Truly Shocking story of Pakistan Airlines 8303
2 of the worst emergencies combined in 1 flight. On the 22nd May of 2020, Pakistan Airlines crew was getting ready from a short domestic flight from Lahore in Pakistan over to Karachi Covid 19 context meant strict lockdowns in place like Pakistan. It was one of the only flights was still operated. It also took place during the Holy month of Ramadan. During the 72 hours before the flight, the captain had flown 10,5 hours. Checking thorugh NOTAMs and flight plans, nothing out of ordinary. The captained had turned 58 years old and worked on this company for 24 years He had over 17 000 hours of flight experience. Under 4 800 hours have been on the Airbus A320. He had been appointed as a standard inspector on the A320 fleet meaning he was seen as someone suitable to make sure other pilots were following the standards expected when operating on this aircrcaft He applied back in 1996 and was required to go through psychological evaluation like all pilots. He failed that assessment with a far from flattering evaluation. They said he was of a bossy nature, dominant and overbearing, that he had below average intelligence and had little regards to the authority. He also had low mechanical comprehension with low comprehension of spatial relations and his level of stress tolerance was also quite inadequate. He didn't give up and sasked for opinions of 5 other psychiatrists, 3 of them from the UK who all gave them a green light to continue as cadet. Problem was that Pakistan Airlines stopped allowing second options at this point So he complained to the Federal Omdudsman since the application that he filed had been before this change had taken place The Ombudsman sided with him and he was allowed to start his training.
First officer was 33 years old guy with less experience than the captain, having only 2 200 flight hours including 1 500 on this type. He was doing this for 10 years. He received some negative feedbacks during his initial training which held him back from upgrading from second officer to first officer. But after 2015 his training history was pretty clean. Pilots decided that first officer was going to be pilot flying for this flight. Captain was going to be in charge of doing the walkaround but before he started to look through the technical logbook. Aircraft they were flying was a 16 years old Airbus A320 - 200 equipped with 2 CFM56 high bypass turbofan engines. 91 passengers were on board. They would stay 45 minutes at 34 000 feet of altitude. From voice transcripts it looks like pilots were getting along quite well. First officer was preparing the aircraft for the approach and he also had to complete the approach briefing. But as descent got closer there was no sign of preparation being done. Pilot flying normally would hand over controls to the pilot monitoring meaning that the PM would be in charge oh both radio and control during this period, allowing the pilot flying to concentrate on preparing all the radios, courses, flight management computer and the minimas. Once done the pilot would do a comprehensive briefing to the pilot monitoring pointing out any potential threat during the descent and how to deal with them. After that, arrival procedure would be discussed on what approach to chose, how to fly properly that approach, followed by the landing distance calculations and the expected taxi routings. These briefings can be shorten a bit if the pilots are familiar with the airport. But here pilots just kept chatting about non operational stuff Now the routing, including the expected standard arrival route and approach would have been entered into the FMC already on the ground. Now they had that confirmed by the controller as well.
Without proper briefing and check of all proper parameters things can get missed. Also it should be noted that it should be the captain and not the first officer that request descent since the captain was the pilot monitoring. Also after altitude clearance is received the pilot flying should set the new cleared altitude in the FCU and then call out " set ". The pilot monitoring should then verify that the value entered was the same as he or she heard and if that was the case, he or she should respond " flight level 100 checked " By doing this, there is little chance of doing mistake because of someone mishearing clearance. Here FCU was just updated to level 100 and there was no call out from any of the pilots. Second part of clearance included in direct routing to a point called MAKLI. This point was situated on the extended centerline from Runway 25 Left. SABEN was the point where the aircraft was expected below 3 000 feet of altitude. These types of routing are common. Aircraft's flight management computer will calculate a top of descent based on the most economic idle descent profile. That profile will assume that the aircraft as exactly as many track miles to achieve this descent as the pilots have programmed into the FMC. So if a shortcut like this is received, this can cut a way quite a lot of these available track miles meaning that the aircraft would end up being high on profile. Normally that's not an issue. We can always use speed brakes or allow the aircraft to speed up to get rid of some of that extra energy. But it didn't happen here. When first officer descended, he activated the aircraft's managed descent mode which would follow the pre programmed profile. Even if they received substancial shortcut, the aircraft descended about 1 000 feet per minute meaning it was still calculating with a few more miles or level flight before starting to descend along the calculated path. It showed that the aircraft assumed it still had plenty of track miles to run.
That was not the case. It should have been seen as a red flag by the pilots. 2 reasons why the flight management computer would react this way. 1 : there is a waypoint with an at or above altitude restriction somewhere along the route, which would then force the aircraft to stay up high. That wasn't the case here. The other reason is that there is a procedural holding pattern programmed into the route at some point which was the case here but since they didn't do appraoch briefing they didn't notice that. You want to intercept the ILS as soon as possible and take advantage of that short cut that we just got to save on both time and fuel. Air traffic control will almost in all conditions except pilots to do that. It's why pilots try to keep manual checks on how many track miles left to go. If we take our altitude on thousands of feet then multiply it by 3, we get a rough estimate of how many miles we will need. If the available miles are less than that, pilots need to do something about it. No blindly trusting the FMC but instead making manual backup calculations. Aircraft intercepted its calculated path meaning that the thrust was reduced back to idle and that the descent rate is about 2 400 feet per minute to follow the path. Air traffic control come back in and clears the flight to descend at 5 000 feet but agian, no normal procedure followed when it came to set the new altitude in the FCU. Seconds after receiving descent clearance, a faint click could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder. It was familiar to one of the push buttons on the audio control panel being pressed down. After that the air traffic control tried to call the aircraft 7 times including 2 calls from a company aircraft but no answer back Once after controller called on emergency frequency twice, 121.5, the contact came back. Crew probably assumed a handover to the next frequency after that last altitude clearance and they mistuned the next frequency before they just switched over.
After that pilots just discussed about non revelant issues. It's probably why they didn't notice the frequency going quiet. Pilots almost never switch to a new frequency in the air unless they are clearly handed over by the previous air traffic controller. No noe removed the holding pattern from SABEN, the aircraft still assumed it would be executing that hold meaning that the track miles calculated by the FMC was 23 nautical miles longer than the actual distance they had available. This would have been shown in various ways including an initial white left turn arrow on the navigation display and the fact that SABEN appeared twice in the flight management computer with a white hold written in between. Expected initial FMC altitude at SABEN was set to 8 900 feet : too high for a straight up approach. Maximum possible would have been 5 000 feet. None of thees things were noticed by the crew. After clearance to descend to 3 000 feet, FCU altitude setting procedure was disregarded as well as all confirmations of the correct QNH setting. At least the first officer armed the autopilot approach mode meaning that the aircraft would capture the localizer and glideslope beams whether they became available. They were cleared for straight in approach but the aircraft continued in its managed descent mode without any effort by the crew to increase their descent rate. In that situation they could make a turn to come back and land properly. When the localizer is captured, it disengages any previously elected horizontal mode, meaning the aircraft would disregard the hold even if it was still left in the FMC. When controller saw on radar that the flight was too higih, he asked the pilots if it was comfortable to descend and the captain answered " Affirm. " Captain forgot to remove the holding at SABEN.
Post.
Instead of either ask to join the hold or ask for delaying vectors, captain said that this could be due to the hold. They changed the autopilot descent mode from maanged to open descent. Aircraft would so stop following the FMC path and instead of descending with idle thrust according to the selected speed,. Since airspeed was higher than the recommended 245 knots, the aircraft initially slwoed down its descent to achieve that requested speed. At the same time the first officer activated the speed brake They were close to a 6 degrees glideslope rather than the 3 normal degrees. Standard operating procedure says the pilots to use vertical speed with a maximum value of - 1 500 feet per minute. That was not going to be enough here. With speed brake and open descent mode activated the aircraft descended significantly faster and without any correct FMA callouts or crew coordination. At the same time, Karachi control tower realized it was too high. Even when alerted, the captain said there was no problem. In later investigations, report said that Pakistan Airlines only captured 5% of their flights up until that point which was very poor. Analyzing the captain's files, multiple approaches relating to high speed, high path, high rate of descent long flares and even GPWS warnings were uncovered meaning these types of approach was not new for him. Landing gear went down without any communication about it inside the cockpit. No cross check of speeds or anything else Extra drag procured by the gear required the aircraft to pitch its nose down in order to continue with the selected speed. This led to an increase of vertical speed to about 7 500 feet per minute. Crew could make an orbit, a 360 degrees turn to lose altitude. They didn't do this.
Instead of either ask to join the hold or ask for delaying vectors, captain said that this could be due to the hold. They changed the autopilot descent mode from maanged to open descent. Aircraft would so stop following the FMC path and instead of descending with idle thrust according to the selected speed,. Since airspeed was higher than the recommended 245 knots, the aircraft initially slwoed down its descent to achieve that requested speed. At the same time the first officer activated the speed brake They were close to a 6 degrees glideslope rather than the 3 normal degrees. Standard operating procedure says the pilots to use vertical speed with a maximum value of - 1 500 feet per minute. That was not going to be enough here. With speed brake and open descent mode activated the aircraft descended significantly faster and without any correct FMA callouts or crew coordination. At the same time, Karachi control tower realized it was too high. Even when alerted, the captain said there was no problem. In later investigations, report said that Pakistan Airlines only captured 5% of their flights up until that point which was very poor. Analyzing the captain's files, multiple approaches relating to high speed, high path, high rate of descent long flares and even GPWS warnings were uncovered meaning these types of approach was not new for him. Landing gear went down without any communication about it inside the cockpit. No cross check of speeds or anything else Extra drag procured by the gear required the aircraft to pitch its nose down in order to continue with the selected speed. This led to an increase of vertical speed to about 7 500 feet per minute. Crew could make an orbit, a 360 degrees turn to lose altitude. They didn't do this.
Post.
We Must Land NOW!! The Incredible Story of Singapore Airlines Flight 319
It happened in October 25th, 2022. They were suppoed to fly from Heathrow airport, London, towards Singapore Changi Airport, in a 13 hours flight. Pilots had a briefing from theid dispatcher containing weather. NOTAMs, flight plans and other revelant material Weather in Singapore suggested it could be affected by evening thunderstorms. But forecasts also said it would be temporary and that the visibility was expected to be above the landing minima. For their aternates Paya Lebar Air Base, Kuala Lumpur international airport and Senai international airport, it was also true. Now weather required an alternate to be a bit better than the planned weather to make sure the plan can land safely somewhere if the weather is worse then expected in the destination. But thunderstorms are hard to predict. It would follow this aircraft and act like it refused to let it land somewhere. Pilot had contingency fuel, normally either 3 to 5% on the trip fuel depending on historical data for unexpected deviations. On long flights like that this could amout to several tons of extra fuel. They also knew they got shortcuts over European airspace which would also save them a bit of fuel. Pilots accepted the flight plan fuel of 106 164 kg. without adding any extra and then proceeded to brief cabin crew. The captain was a 55 years old guy with almost 13 400 hours of flying time including over 1 000 hours on the 777.. He previously operated on the B747. First officer however was not as experienced. He was a 31 years old guy with 2 200 hours of total flying time but all of them flown on the 777. First officer would be the pilot flying with the captain monitoring. It was a Boeing 777 - 300ER which stands for extended range with 2 massive General Electric GE90-115B turbofan engines fitted to it. No technical malfunctions recorded at the time of the flight. Captain verified the tech log and technical status. First officer meanwhile prepared the plane for departure. 280 passengers boarded in.
Everything was normal and with shortcuts they thought they would land with 30 minutes in advance. When they entered into Kuala Lumpur IFR, pilots were informed that they could expect an ILS approach into Runway 20 7 tons of fuel still remaining. Their final reserve fuel was set to 3 024 kg. and they were well above that. Captain must make sure there is enough fuel to fly and land with mroe than the final reserve fuel. Final reserved should never touched under normal circumstances. It can only be used in case of emergency with no other option left. During pre flight, pilots must make sure these following fuels exist : taxi fuel, the one used prior to takeoff including pre start APU consumption, engine start and taxi fuel; trip fuel plane needs to fly to its destination then land; contingency fuel, which is the final reserve that should be untouched under normal circumstances which is either 3% or 5% of the trip fuel. Pilots can also choose to add any extra fuel they want to carry in case of some knowns delays for example with thunderstorms or fogs. Final reserve should be enough to keep the aircraft airborne over the alternate airport at al altitude of 1 500 feet for a minimum of 30 minutes. This is a legal minimum that any commercial flight must always carry. A lot of margin is built on these calculation. Taking more fuel than this would lead to higher fuel burn, costing money for the airline and more environmental impact. It an aircraft gets close to its destination and gets a sudden runway change or something unexpected happens, pilots are normally ordered into something known as a holding pattern, race track formed patterns normally constructed around an RNAV waypoint or a navigation aid and they exist to allow the air traffic controllers to slow down the traffic flow and create enough separation between arriving aircraft.
The aircraft would be assigned an altitude to maintain as they fly in the hold and if more aircrafts come after them, they will be assigned in higher altitudes. As everyone descends in the hold, the aircraft which is the lowest in the stack will eventually be vectored for the approach.
We Must Land NOW!! The Incredible Story of Singapore Airlines Flight 319
It happened in October 25th, 2022. They were suppoed to fly from Heathrow airport, London, towards Singapore Changi Airport, in a 13 hours flight. Pilots had a briefing from theid dispatcher containing weather. NOTAMs, flight plans and other revelant material Weather in Singapore suggested it could be affected by evening thunderstorms. But forecasts also said it would be temporary and that the visibility was expected to be above the landing minima. For their aternates Paya Lebar Air Base, Kuala Lumpur international airport and Senai international airport, it was also true. Now weather required an alternate to be a bit better than the planned weather to make sure the plan can land safely somewhere if the weather is worse then expected in the destination. But thunderstorms are hard to predict. It would follow this aircraft and act like it refused to let it land somewhere. Pilot had contingency fuel, normally either 3 to 5% on the trip fuel depending on historical data for unexpected deviations. On long flights like that this could amout to several tons of extra fuel. They also knew they got shortcuts over European airspace which would also save them a bit of fuel. Pilots accepted the flight plan fuel of 106 164 kg. without adding any extra and then proceeded to brief cabin crew. The captain was a 55 years old guy with almost 13 400 hours of flying time including over 1 000 hours on the 777.. He previously operated on the B747. First officer however was not as experienced. He was a 31 years old guy with 2 200 hours of total flying time but all of them flown on the 777. First officer would be the pilot flying with the captain monitoring. It was a Boeing 777 - 300ER which stands for extended range with 2 massive General Electric GE90-115B turbofan engines fitted to it. No technical malfunctions recorded at the time of the flight. Captain verified the tech log and technical status. First officer meanwhile prepared the plane for departure. 280 passengers boarded in.
Everything was normal and with shortcuts they thought they would land with 30 minutes in advance. When they entered into Kuala Lumpur IFR, pilots were informed that they could expect an ILS approach into Runway 20 7 tons of fuel still remaining. Their final reserve fuel was set to 3 024 kg. and they were well above that. Captain must make sure there is enough fuel to fly and land with mroe than the final reserve fuel. Final reserved should never touched under normal circumstances. It can only be used in case of emergency with no other option left. During pre flight, pilots must make sure these following fuels exist : taxi fuel, the one used prior to takeoff including pre start APU consumption, engine start and taxi fuel; trip fuel plane needs to fly to its destination then land; contingency fuel, which is the final reserve that should be untouched under normal circumstances which is either 3% or 5% of the trip fuel. Pilots can also choose to add any extra fuel they want to carry in case of some knowns delays for example with thunderstorms or fogs. Final reserve should be enough to keep the aircraft airborne over the alternate airport at al altitude of 1 500 feet for a minimum of 30 minutes. This is a legal minimum that any commercial flight must always carry. A lot of margin is built on these calculation. Taking more fuel than this would lead to higher fuel burn, costing money for the airline and more environmental impact. It an aircraft gets close to its destination and gets a sudden runway change or something unexpected happens, pilots are normally ordered into something known as a holding pattern, race track formed patterns normally constructed around an RNAV waypoint or a navigation aid and they exist to allow the air traffic controllers to slow down the traffic flow and create enough separation between arriving aircraft.
The aircraft would be assigned an altitude to maintain as they fly in the hold and if more aircrafts come after them, they will be assigned in higher altitudes. As everyone descends in the hold, the aircraft which is the lowest in the stack will eventually be vectored for the approach.
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The Most Disturbing Movies In History Iceberg
Human centipede - The human centipede is basically about a guy that dreams to fuse lives together and create a human centipede. Doc Heel kidnaps 3 individuals and connects them front fo bottom forcing them to crawl on all fours. There are 2 more human centipedes films being more extreme than the last. Centipede was so extreme that it was for a time banned from the UK and Australia, later released with certain scenes cut.
Censored 11 - It's a group of cartoons created by the Warner Brothers during what's known as the golde age of animation. Some of these cartoons however were so controversial that they were put out of circulation by Warner brothers in 1968, like the cartoons about stereotypes and caricatures of African Americans. " Coal black and the sebben dwarfes" is a famous example. Their characters are often shown as lazy foolish or subserviant playing into harmful tropes that are more comon common in the 1930s and 1940s. Some cartoons of these were inspired by monstral shows.
Threads - Threads follows the story of 2 families, the kemps and the becketts. Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemps are a young couple with a life changing decision ahead of them. Ruth is pregnant and both plan to marry. Meanwhile after Soviet invade Iran, USA and USSR are in the brink of WW3. But these people in Sheffield these events feel like a world away though that all changes when diplomacy fails. Sheffield becomes a target and when the attack comes, it's brutal and unrelenting. Fire spread uncontrollably, things disappear in the buclear blast. Chaos, fear, devastating loss, nothing is spared. But real horror lies in what comes next. The film dives deep into the aftermath. Government collapses, food supplies vanish and medical care is non existent as a nuclear winter plunges thee survivors into a fight for survival against starvation, disease and radiation. Ruth survived but she struggled in this unrecognizable world as she has to take care of her newborn child who is born with mental deficiencies due to being exposed to so much radiation. The film premiered on 23rd of September 1984. during a period where the fear of nuclear war as in an all time high. So it sparked some controversy. The movie portrayed the government as disorganized and ineffective leaving the average citizen to fend for themselves. The graphic nature of the film was also controversial. Audiences weren't prepared for that brutality, such as people being burned alive, dying from radiation sickness, biting over scraps of food. It felt so realistic that some viewers reported to feel physically ill.
Zero day - You feel like in a real home video, with no slick editing, no dramatic music and no indication that what you are washing is scripted. It's designed to make it look like it's a real footage with the story following 2 high school seniors, André and Cal, as they document their everyday lives. On surface they seem like average teenagers living average lives. But a darker side emerges when on April 1999, when 2 real life high schoolers being Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out a planned attack at their school, leaving 13 deads and dozens of injured. Eric and Dylan spent months documenting their plans, recording video diaries that came to be known as the basement tapes. These recordings offered a slight inside into their lives and motivation. A mix of anger, alienation and a disturbing desire to leave their mark on the world. Coming back to the movie, André and Cal feel disconnected from the world aroudn them, seeing themselves as outsiders, smarter than their peers and deeply frustrated with society. As the film progresses, they record their thoughts, feelings and preparations in strikingly similar ways of the real life Columbine shooters. Similarities don't just stop them at planning their attack, testing their weapons. André and Cal don't act like stereotyped villains. They act as normals. Just like Eric and Dylan, they go on to destroy their own high school. Zero Day was released in 2003, just 4 years after the real life shooting events. Many critics wondered if it was too soon to create a story so closely resembling to the real events as the film risked glamorizing the shooters by humanizing them.
The exorcist - When it debuted in theaters in 1973, it wasn't just a movie but an event based on the best story selling novel by William Peter Blatty. The film tells the story of a young girl named Regan who becomes possessed by a demon forcing her mother to seek help from 2 Catholic priests. But the horror didn't stopped when the camera stopped rolling. In fact, the most unsetting events happened off screen haunting the production and those who worked on it. The strengeness began almost immediatly. What should have been a normal shoot quickly spired into chaos with a serie of bizzare and unexplained accidents leaving the casting crew shaken. The most infamous was in early production when afire broke out on set overnight the entire sound stage for the McNeil family home where of most the film's indoor scenes were shot was destroyed. The fire forced the crew to hold production for 6 weeks. They rebuilt the set from scratch but strangely amidst the production, one room remained untouched : Regan's bedroom where the exorcism scenes were to take place. Even the crew hardened by years in the business found this detail deeply unsettling. William Friedklin, the director was unevered, reportedly brought a real priest, father Thomas Birmingham to bless the set after the fire. The priest walked through the rebuilt sound stage, sprinkling holy water and performing prayers of protection. However, accidents seemed to still follow the production wherever it went. Ellen Burston who played Regan's mother, Chris Mcneel, suffered a seriou back injury during a stunk gone wrong.
It was in a scene where Regan under demonic possession throws her mother across the room. Burston was rigged to harness and yanked backwards to make it more realistic. But things went wrong and the force of the pull caused Burston to accidentally fall, injuring her lower spine. Her real scream was captured on camera and was left in the final cut of the film. Linda Blair, the actor of Regan, wasn't spared either with the acress enduring 7 injuries that were quite severe by times. In one incident, the mechanical bed used to simulate Regan's violent trashing malfunctioned, causing Blair to suffer a permanent back injury. But the accidents weren't confined to the set. Strange and tragic events seemed to follow the cast and the crew into their personnal lives with one of the worst accidents involving Max Von Sadal, who played father Marin, the priest who leads the exorcism in the film. Shortly after he arrived in New York to film Max received the word that his brother died unepextadly. Other crew and their families suffer inexpected losses during the making of the movie. In total, 9 deaths were linked to people connected with the Exorcist while it was in production, from actors family members to set workers. All this set of tragedy added to thee growing belief that the film was actually cursed.
The Most Disturbing Movies In History Iceberg
Human centipede - The human centipede is basically about a guy that dreams to fuse lives together and create a human centipede. Doc Heel kidnaps 3 individuals and connects them front fo bottom forcing them to crawl on all fours. There are 2 more human centipedes films being more extreme than the last. Centipede was so extreme that it was for a time banned from the UK and Australia, later released with certain scenes cut.
Censored 11 - It's a group of cartoons created by the Warner Brothers during what's known as the golde age of animation. Some of these cartoons however were so controversial that they were put out of circulation by Warner brothers in 1968, like the cartoons about stereotypes and caricatures of African Americans. " Coal black and the sebben dwarfes" is a famous example. Their characters are often shown as lazy foolish or subserviant playing into harmful tropes that are more comon common in the 1930s and 1940s. Some cartoons of these were inspired by monstral shows.
Threads - Threads follows the story of 2 families, the kemps and the becketts. Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemps are a young couple with a life changing decision ahead of them. Ruth is pregnant and both plan to marry. Meanwhile after Soviet invade Iran, USA and USSR are in the brink of WW3. But these people in Sheffield these events feel like a world away though that all changes when diplomacy fails. Sheffield becomes a target and when the attack comes, it's brutal and unrelenting. Fire spread uncontrollably, things disappear in the buclear blast. Chaos, fear, devastating loss, nothing is spared. But real horror lies in what comes next. The film dives deep into the aftermath. Government collapses, food supplies vanish and medical care is non existent as a nuclear winter plunges thee survivors into a fight for survival against starvation, disease and radiation. Ruth survived but she struggled in this unrecognizable world as she has to take care of her newborn child who is born with mental deficiencies due to being exposed to so much radiation. The film premiered on 23rd of September 1984. during a period where the fear of nuclear war as in an all time high. So it sparked some controversy. The movie portrayed the government as disorganized and ineffective leaving the average citizen to fend for themselves. The graphic nature of the film was also controversial. Audiences weren't prepared for that brutality, such as people being burned alive, dying from radiation sickness, biting over scraps of food. It felt so realistic that some viewers reported to feel physically ill.
Zero day - You feel like in a real home video, with no slick editing, no dramatic music and no indication that what you are washing is scripted. It's designed to make it look like it's a real footage with the story following 2 high school seniors, André and Cal, as they document their everyday lives. On surface they seem like average teenagers living average lives. But a darker side emerges when on April 1999, when 2 real life high schoolers being Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out a planned attack at their school, leaving 13 deads and dozens of injured. Eric and Dylan spent months documenting their plans, recording video diaries that came to be known as the basement tapes. These recordings offered a slight inside into their lives and motivation. A mix of anger, alienation and a disturbing desire to leave their mark on the world. Coming back to the movie, André and Cal feel disconnected from the world aroudn them, seeing themselves as outsiders, smarter than their peers and deeply frustrated with society. As the film progresses, they record their thoughts, feelings and preparations in strikingly similar ways of the real life Columbine shooters. Similarities don't just stop them at planning their attack, testing their weapons. André and Cal don't act like stereotyped villains. They act as normals. Just like Eric and Dylan, they go on to destroy their own high school. Zero Day was released in 2003, just 4 years after the real life shooting events. Many critics wondered if it was too soon to create a story so closely resembling to the real events as the film risked glamorizing the shooters by humanizing them.
The exorcist - When it debuted in theaters in 1973, it wasn't just a movie but an event based on the best story selling novel by William Peter Blatty. The film tells the story of a young girl named Regan who becomes possessed by a demon forcing her mother to seek help from 2 Catholic priests. But the horror didn't stopped when the camera stopped rolling. In fact, the most unsetting events happened off screen haunting the production and those who worked on it. The strengeness began almost immediatly. What should have been a normal shoot quickly spired into chaos with a serie of bizzare and unexplained accidents leaving the casting crew shaken. The most infamous was in early production when afire broke out on set overnight the entire sound stage for the McNeil family home where of most the film's indoor scenes were shot was destroyed. The fire forced the crew to hold production for 6 weeks. They rebuilt the set from scratch but strangely amidst the production, one room remained untouched : Regan's bedroom where the exorcism scenes were to take place. Even the crew hardened by years in the business found this detail deeply unsettling. William Friedklin, the director was unevered, reportedly brought a real priest, father Thomas Birmingham to bless the set after the fire. The priest walked through the rebuilt sound stage, sprinkling holy water and performing prayers of protection. However, accidents seemed to still follow the production wherever it went. Ellen Burston who played Regan's mother, Chris Mcneel, suffered a seriou back injury during a stunk gone wrong.
It was in a scene where Regan under demonic possession throws her mother across the room. Burston was rigged to harness and yanked backwards to make it more realistic. But things went wrong and the force of the pull caused Burston to accidentally fall, injuring her lower spine. Her real scream was captured on camera and was left in the final cut of the film. Linda Blair, the actor of Regan, wasn't spared either with the acress enduring 7 injuries that were quite severe by times. In one incident, the mechanical bed used to simulate Regan's violent trashing malfunctioned, causing Blair to suffer a permanent back injury. But the accidents weren't confined to the set. Strange and tragic events seemed to follow the cast and the crew into their personnal lives with one of the worst accidents involving Max Von Sadal, who played father Marin, the priest who leads the exorcism in the film. Shortly after he arrived in New York to film Max received the word that his brother died unepextadly. Other crew and their families suffer inexpected losses during the making of the movie. In total, 9 deaths were linked to people connected with the Exorcist while it was in production, from actors family members to set workers. All this set of tragedy added to thee growing belief that the film was actually cursed.
Post.
On level 4 of the iceberg there are movies like Mai Chan's daily life. - It follows a young women's life, who secures a life and made position at a secluded mansion. At first everything appears normal with polish floors, pristine, french maid outfits and the promise of a stable life away from the chaos of the outside world. But as the character begings her work, she realizes there is nothing ordinary about this place. The other maids like Miao are here to server. But their roles extend far beyond cleaning when taking orders. They are subjected to their employers perverse and violent fantasies, forced into acts of submission and degradation. Among the 3 maids, one stands out, possessing an ability : healing from any injury no matter how severe it is. Immortality might be a gift, in her cuse this is her curse. Her employers exploit her regenerative powers to in the most grotesque ways imaginable. Day after day, Mai becomes the unwilling centerpiece of their desire, enduring acts of torture and violence that are all shown to the viewers in graphic details. At first, Miyako is horrified watching Mai endure these endless pain with no relief. It's a spectable that should repel anyone but this mansion has a way of warping those those who live within these walls. And slowly, Miyako's resistance fails under pressure. From her employers she is persuaded to take part in their cruelty inflicted on Mai. One of the most infamous sequences involves acts of cannibalism with her abusers literlaly talking pieces out of her, consuming them as though they were a disposable source of endless food. The film doesn't spare you any of the details.
Every shot and every scene become hard to get trough. The grotesque imagery is aired with a nonchalance. The characters around her don't treat her with pity and compassion. They see her as an object for their entertainment with the dehumanization of Mai being central to the film's chock factor. When the film was released, it was immediatly controversial. Even in a country like Japan, known for its tolerance of extreme entertainment, especially when it comes to video games, the film was met with outrage, discussed. Outside of Japan, the reaction was even more severe. The film was either banned either heavily censored in multiple countries, deemed too graphic and too disturbing for public consumption.
Birth of a nation. - It first the movie looks like an epic tale of the American civil war and it's aftermatch. But if you actually watch it, it's not just telling a story but rather spreading a message and a dangerous one at that. The film is divided into 2 parts. The first half shows the Civil War and its devastating impact on 2 white families. The stoneman from the north and the Camerons from the south.It betrays their struggles, their heartbreaks and their losses during the war. This part of the film is dramatic, emotionnal and carefully crafted to draw you though it's easy to forget what's coming next. The second half is where the true intentions of the film become clear. It focuses on reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when the South was being rebuilt. The director of the film, D. W. Griffith, doesn't show this as a time of progress. Instead, he portrays it as a nightmare. Black characters played by white actors in black paint are shown as corrupt, violent and incapable of governing. THey are depicted as predators out to destroy white Southern society. One of the most infamous parts of the film is its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. The director doesn't show the clan as the violent, racist group that we know today. Instead they are painted as noble heros, riding to save the south from the chaos caused by black people. In one dramatic scene, the clan charges to the rescue of a white family with dramatic music swelling in the background. This scene is designed to make the audience sheer for them, to see them as saviors, not villains. In another scene, a black character chases a white women trying to force her into marriage. She runs in terror and eventually throws herself off a cliff to escape. The birth of a nation also portrays reconstruction era black politicians as lazy, incompetent and immorals. In one scene, they are shown drinking alcohol, and putting their bare feet up on deskss.
During a government meeting, Grith claimed he didn't make the film to spread hate. He argued it was just a story. But the way he choses to tell taht story reveals the truth. When the birth of a nation was released in 1915, it was a phenomenon. Audiences flocked in theaters with some traveling miles just to see it. It quickly became the highest grossing film of its time, earning what would be equivalent of hundred of millions of dollars. But the film's success wasn't just about ticket sales. It had a ripple effect that would leave a stain on history. The most immediate and chilling fallout was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Before the film, the clan largely faded into obscurity. But birth of a nation made them heroic. Inspired by the film, William J Simmons founded a new clan in 1915 just a few months after the film's release. He reportedly used the movie as a recruitment tool showing to the clan's meetings to inspire new members. By the 1920s, the KKK has grown into a powerful nationwide organization with millions of members. They marched openly in cities, staged massive rallies and committed acts of violence and terror while waving the the banner of their so called heroic legacy as shown in the film. Even the president Woodrow Wilson was caught in the controvery. After a private screening at the White House he allegedly praised the film, calling it like writing history with lightning. Though historians debate whether he actually said, this wuote was widely reported at the time, giving the film even more legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters. Despite its controversial legacy, the birth of a nation literally revolutionnized film making settling the standard for cinematic storytelling at over 3 hours. It was a long, it was one of the first film to feature a complex narrative with emotional depth and multiple storylines proving that films could be more than just mindless entertainment, that it could be actual art.
Slaughtered vomit dolls - When you hear the name " Lucifer for Valentine ", it's hard to not picture someone who would make a film called " slaughtered vomit dolls ". Valentine calls herself the pionner of the vomitgore sub genre. A label as strange and grotesque as the films created. The film is a fragmented serie of graphic and surreal images loosely tied together by the main character Angela who is spiraling into madness. And Valentine doesn't shy away from showing extreme violence, often lingering scenes of bodily harm far longer than most viewers could stomach. The film also incorporates an unusual and highly controversial element : real vomiting. Multiple scenes show actors forcing themselves to vomit on cameras, sometimes repeatedly. It's not just a fleeting moment either. It's a central theme of the film appearing over and over. What makes these scenes even more unwatchable is the way they blurred the line between fiction and reality. While the violence is staged, the vomiting is real, creating a very grotesque mix of the truly authentic and the staged. You don't watch actors just pretending to suffer. You see them physically endure something unpleasant.
Guinea Pig - The story of Guinea Pig begins with Hideshi Hino, a manga artist known for his grotesque and shocking illustrations. He is specialized in creating disturbing and surreal comics that explored the darkest corners of human imagination. But drawing wasn't enough. He wanted to bring his twisted visions to life on screen. His idea was very simple : make films that looked so real that people would forget they were watching fiction. The Guinea Pig's serie launched with the devil's experiment in 1985. A short film that sets the tone for what was to come. There wasn't really a plot but rather a serie of increasingly brutal tortures inflicted in a young women. However, the second installment flowers of flash and blood is what cemented Guinea Pig as one of the most infamous serie of all time. Directed by Hideshi Hino himself, he was reportedly inspired by a letter he had received from a fan. The fan claimed to be a murderer and described ing raphic details how he had dismembered his victims. He turned this twisted inspiration into a film that would haunt audiences for years. Flowers of flash and blood depicts a samurai abducting a women, drugging her and destroying her piece by piece. All is shown in excruciating details, using prosthetics, animal parts and gallons to fake blood. The filmmakers made visuals so realistic that even fans accostumed to extreme gore were left shaken. It's like if somehow the filmakers captured the real violence on camera. And that was the point. The director wanted the audience to make them feel like they were witnessing something they shouldn't be watching. What happened in 1991 elevated their notoriety to a whole new level. This was the moment when a Hollywood actor convinced that flower of flesh and blood was a real snuff film, sparked a FBI an investigation that would forever cement this serie's legacy in horror history.
On level 4 of the iceberg there are movies like Mai Chan's daily life. - It follows a young women's life, who secures a life and made position at a secluded mansion. At first everything appears normal with polish floors, pristine, french maid outfits and the promise of a stable life away from the chaos of the outside world. But as the character begings her work, she realizes there is nothing ordinary about this place. The other maids like Miao are here to server. But their roles extend far beyond cleaning when taking orders. They are subjected to their employers perverse and violent fantasies, forced into acts of submission and degradation. Among the 3 maids, one stands out, possessing an ability : healing from any injury no matter how severe it is. Immortality might be a gift, in her cuse this is her curse. Her employers exploit her regenerative powers to in the most grotesque ways imaginable. Day after day, Mai becomes the unwilling centerpiece of their desire, enduring acts of torture and violence that are all shown to the viewers in graphic details. At first, Miyako is horrified watching Mai endure these endless pain with no relief. It's a spectable that should repel anyone but this mansion has a way of warping those those who live within these walls. And slowly, Miyako's resistance fails under pressure. From her employers she is persuaded to take part in their cruelty inflicted on Mai. One of the most infamous sequences involves acts of cannibalism with her abusers literlaly talking pieces out of her, consuming them as though they were a disposable source of endless food. The film doesn't spare you any of the details.
Every shot and every scene become hard to get trough. The grotesque imagery is aired with a nonchalance. The characters around her don't treat her with pity and compassion. They see her as an object for their entertainment with the dehumanization of Mai being central to the film's chock factor. When the film was released, it was immediatly controversial. Even in a country like Japan, known for its tolerance of extreme entertainment, especially when it comes to video games, the film was met with outrage, discussed. Outside of Japan, the reaction was even more severe. The film was either banned either heavily censored in multiple countries, deemed too graphic and too disturbing for public consumption.
Birth of a nation. - It first the movie looks like an epic tale of the American civil war and it's aftermatch. But if you actually watch it, it's not just telling a story but rather spreading a message and a dangerous one at that. The film is divided into 2 parts. The first half shows the Civil War and its devastating impact on 2 white families. The stoneman from the north and the Camerons from the south.It betrays their struggles, their heartbreaks and their losses during the war. This part of the film is dramatic, emotionnal and carefully crafted to draw you though it's easy to forget what's coming next. The second half is where the true intentions of the film become clear. It focuses on reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when the South was being rebuilt. The director of the film, D. W. Griffith, doesn't show this as a time of progress. Instead, he portrays it as a nightmare. Black characters played by white actors in black paint are shown as corrupt, violent and incapable of governing. THey are depicted as predators out to destroy white Southern society. One of the most infamous parts of the film is its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. The director doesn't show the clan as the violent, racist group that we know today. Instead they are painted as noble heros, riding to save the south from the chaos caused by black people. In one dramatic scene, the clan charges to the rescue of a white family with dramatic music swelling in the background. This scene is designed to make the audience sheer for them, to see them as saviors, not villains. In another scene, a black character chases a white women trying to force her into marriage. She runs in terror and eventually throws herself off a cliff to escape. The birth of a nation also portrays reconstruction era black politicians as lazy, incompetent and immorals. In one scene, they are shown drinking alcohol, and putting their bare feet up on deskss.
During a government meeting, Grith claimed he didn't make the film to spread hate. He argued it was just a story. But the way he choses to tell taht story reveals the truth. When the birth of a nation was released in 1915, it was a phenomenon. Audiences flocked in theaters with some traveling miles just to see it. It quickly became the highest grossing film of its time, earning what would be equivalent of hundred of millions of dollars. But the film's success wasn't just about ticket sales. It had a ripple effect that would leave a stain on history. The most immediate and chilling fallout was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Before the film, the clan largely faded into obscurity. But birth of a nation made them heroic. Inspired by the film, William J Simmons founded a new clan in 1915 just a few months after the film's release. He reportedly used the movie as a recruitment tool showing to the clan's meetings to inspire new members. By the 1920s, the KKK has grown into a powerful nationwide organization with millions of members. They marched openly in cities, staged massive rallies and committed acts of violence and terror while waving the the banner of their so called heroic legacy as shown in the film. Even the president Woodrow Wilson was caught in the controvery. After a private screening at the White House he allegedly praised the film, calling it like writing history with lightning. Though historians debate whether he actually said, this wuote was widely reported at the time, giving the film even more legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters. Despite its controversial legacy, the birth of a nation literally revolutionnized film making settling the standard for cinematic storytelling at over 3 hours. It was a long, it was one of the first film to feature a complex narrative with emotional depth and multiple storylines proving that films could be more than just mindless entertainment, that it could be actual art.
Slaughtered vomit dolls - When you hear the name " Lucifer for Valentine ", it's hard to not picture someone who would make a film called " slaughtered vomit dolls ". Valentine calls herself the pionner of the vomitgore sub genre. A label as strange and grotesque as the films created. The film is a fragmented serie of graphic and surreal images loosely tied together by the main character Angela who is spiraling into madness. And Valentine doesn't shy away from showing extreme violence, often lingering scenes of bodily harm far longer than most viewers could stomach. The film also incorporates an unusual and highly controversial element : real vomiting. Multiple scenes show actors forcing themselves to vomit on cameras, sometimes repeatedly. It's not just a fleeting moment either. It's a central theme of the film appearing over and over. What makes these scenes even more unwatchable is the way they blurred the line between fiction and reality. While the violence is staged, the vomiting is real, creating a very grotesque mix of the truly authentic and the staged. You don't watch actors just pretending to suffer. You see them physically endure something unpleasant.
Guinea Pig - The story of Guinea Pig begins with Hideshi Hino, a manga artist known for his grotesque and shocking illustrations. He is specialized in creating disturbing and surreal comics that explored the darkest corners of human imagination. But drawing wasn't enough. He wanted to bring his twisted visions to life on screen. His idea was very simple : make films that looked so real that people would forget they were watching fiction. The Guinea Pig's serie launched with the devil's experiment in 1985. A short film that sets the tone for what was to come. There wasn't really a plot but rather a serie of increasingly brutal tortures inflicted in a young women. However, the second installment flowers of flash and blood is what cemented Guinea Pig as one of the most infamous serie of all time. Directed by Hideshi Hino himself, he was reportedly inspired by a letter he had received from a fan. The fan claimed to be a murderer and described ing raphic details how he had dismembered his victims. He turned this twisted inspiration into a film that would haunt audiences for years. Flowers of flash and blood depicts a samurai abducting a women, drugging her and destroying her piece by piece. All is shown in excruciating details, using prosthetics, animal parts and gallons to fake blood. The filmmakers made visuals so realistic that even fans accostumed to extreme gore were left shaken. It's like if somehow the filmakers captured the real violence on camera. And that was the point. The director wanted the audience to make them feel like they were witnessing something they shouldn't be watching. What happened in 1991 elevated their notoriety to a whole new level. This was the moment when a Hollywood actor convinced that flower of flesh and blood was a real snuff film, sparked a FBI an investigation that would forever cement this serie's legacy in horror history.
Post.
The story goes this way : Charlie Sheen, known at his time for his roles in huge films like platoon and wall street attended a party where someone handed him a copy of flowers and flesh and blood. Curious about the tape, Sheen sat down to watch it. What happened in front of his eyes was one of the most gruesome yet realistic depiction of violence ever put to film. The film's graphic content his Sheen hard, as he saw the samurai systematically destroy the women, he was convinced that it wasn't staged. It looked like a real snuff film. Unlike most horror movies, this didn't have the hallmarks of fiction. No over the top acting, no cheesy effects, no escape for the victim. Sheen couldn't shake the feeling that what he had seen was genuine. So he contacted the FBI, reporting the film as a potential evidence of real murder. This sets a chain of events that would brought Guinea Pig into a spot light they never seen before. The FBI taking this complaint seriously launched an investigation into the film, its creators. And whether or not it depicted an actual crime. As the investigation unfolded, the authorities, Hino and his team were forced to demonstrate how they create the film disturbingly realistic effects. They showed behind the scenes footage and explain the techniques they used to simulate the dismemberments. The animal parts used in some scenes were revealed and prosphetics were displayed as a proof that everything was staged. Eventually the FBI concluded that the film was indeed fake and unsettling convincing piece of art but art nonetheless. However the investigation made the serie far more famous that it should have been.
Level 5 of the iceberg, you find films like Snuff 102 - It's about a horrifying world of snuff films. The movie follows a journalist investigating the underground world of these snuff videos that show real murder and torture. Her search for the truth leads her to a deranged killer who forces her to witness and even become part of the atrocities he commits. However, the film interwined her story with footage of 3 nameless victims, showing their brutal treatment and ultimate demise all on film. This isn't just a story about a journalist uncovering a history. It's a film designed to make you feel uncomfortable, confused and even guilty for watching it, as the director Mariano Peralta really blurs the lines between fiction and reality.Unlike most horror films that make it clear that what you are seeing is fake, snuff 102 doesn't give you that comfort. It uses a mix of stage violence and real life footage including scenes of real autopsies and real animal cruelty. To make everything feel disturbingly feel real, this deliberate choice forces viewers to constantly question it what they're watching is actually real or fake. The film doesn't offer much in the way of traditional storytelling either as it's basically built off the back ofextremely shocking and gory footage.
There is no clear resolution, no satisfying character arcs and no relief from the horrors it shows. Even the editing feels unhinged with jarring cuts and overlapping sounds. In a 2013 interview, the director said that the film was never meant to be simple shock value. Instead, it was designed as a harsh critique of ociety's growing desensitization to violence. He belived that by confronting audiences with deeply uncomfortable imagery, he could provoke critical thought and forcer viewers to reflect on why there would even ever watch the film Snuff 102. When discussing on how he made the film, he acknowledged he had to walk between realistic portrayals and maintaining ethical film making practices. He clarified that while the film does incorporate real footage, specifically animal cruelty he saw from the internet, he soured from the internet; every human torture and murder scene was carefully staged using special effects in actors. Probably for the first time in film history, the goal was to craft a deeply disturbing experience that left viewers questioning what was real and what was not, and more importantly, why they were even watching the film.
Tumbling Doll of Flesh - It's in Japan, 1998, a time when the country's film industry is thriving with creativity but also experimenting with its dreams. The premise of tumbling do of flesh seems straightforward. It begins as a low bduget adult movie focusing on a man and a women participating in what appears to be a consensual adult film shoot. The tone is mundane which seems that are slow, quiet and uneventful. But as the minutes tick by, a subtle unease begins to creep in. Something feels off, not just in the performances but in the very atmosphere of the film. Almost without warning, the story takes a jarry turn with the male acotr beginning to unleash horrifying violence on the women. What starts as a consensual act devolves into an extended scene of torment. While the camera continues to roll, the violence is disturbingly realistic. No stilized, exagerrated bur rather slow, methodical and deeply unsettling. The camera lingers on the women suffering, refusing to look away, forcing the audience to confront every second of her pain. Unlike other extreme films, Tubling Doll of Flash doesn't offer any clear context or explanation for the violence. There is no character development, zero backstory, no justification, just pure shock value, leaving you physically sick. The director Tamakichi Anaru wasn't interested in creating a typical movie. He wanted to explore what happens when you strip away all safety nets, leaving only raw, unfiltered human emotion and suffering. His vision for Tumbling Doll of Flash was a film that would feel as real as possible. So real that he was questionned by viewers whether or not they were watching fiction or something far darker. Just the title of the movie is hauntingly appropriate. It reflects the women's dehumanization throughout the film as she is reduced to little more than an object for the man's cruelty.
Faces of Death - The story begins with John Allan Schwarz, a young filmmaker with a simple but daring idea. He wanted a film that explored humanity's darkest fear : death. So he made a film that looked like a documentary, filled with real life horrors and unsettling footages. At the time of the film there was a growing curiosity about taboo subjects in media with people becoming fascinated by things that were considered too shoking and forbidden. John Alan Schwartz saw this as an opportunity. He developed a concept for his movie, as a mockumentary, a film that looked like a real documentary but blends truth with fiction. His vision was to create something that felt authentic, something making the viwers question what they have just seen. So the director and his team gathered a mix of content, using a combination of staged scenes, authentic news footage and even graphic real life clips of death to create a film that feels disturbingly real. At a point you might watch someone perform an autopsy and next scene you would see a staged execution that would look just as believable. The combination of the real and the fake made it almost impossible to tell what was real and what was not. But Swhcarz added a layer that would make the film even more unsettling.
A narrator, a fictional pathologist named Dr Francis B Gross was create to guide the viewers through he movie. His calm, clinical tone made the horrifying images on screen feel even more shockign. One of the most infamous scene involves a dining room of people and a live monkey. In the scene, diners gather around a table with a hole in the center. A monkey is placed inside. the hole with only its head visible. The diners then take turn striking the monkey with small mallets before eating what becomes exposed. The twist was that it was completly staged. The monkey was a prop and the brains were actually made from a mixture of gelatin and food coloring. We later have a shot of a women leaning out the window of an apartment building. The entire thing is on fire and she has no escape. She stares at the ground, knowing the fall is too high to survive. But she has no choice. We then see her jump. The fall and death of the women is this time in fact entirely real. However the aftermath with the close ups of her lifeless body on the ground was completly fabricated by the filmmakers. About 60% of the film uses real graphic and horrible footage while 40% of it is completly staged though you are not told during the film which are and which are not.
The story goes this way : Charlie Sheen, known at his time for his roles in huge films like platoon and wall street attended a party where someone handed him a copy of flowers and flesh and blood. Curious about the tape, Sheen sat down to watch it. What happened in front of his eyes was one of the most gruesome yet realistic depiction of violence ever put to film. The film's graphic content his Sheen hard, as he saw the samurai systematically destroy the women, he was convinced that it wasn't staged. It looked like a real snuff film. Unlike most horror movies, this didn't have the hallmarks of fiction. No over the top acting, no cheesy effects, no escape for the victim. Sheen couldn't shake the feeling that what he had seen was genuine. So he contacted the FBI, reporting the film as a potential evidence of real murder. This sets a chain of events that would brought Guinea Pig into a spot light they never seen before. The FBI taking this complaint seriously launched an investigation into the film, its creators. And whether or not it depicted an actual crime. As the investigation unfolded, the authorities, Hino and his team were forced to demonstrate how they create the film disturbingly realistic effects. They showed behind the scenes footage and explain the techniques they used to simulate the dismemberments. The animal parts used in some scenes were revealed and prosphetics were displayed as a proof that everything was staged. Eventually the FBI concluded that the film was indeed fake and unsettling convincing piece of art but art nonetheless. However the investigation made the serie far more famous that it should have been.
Level 5 of the iceberg, you find films like Snuff 102 - It's about a horrifying world of snuff films. The movie follows a journalist investigating the underground world of these snuff videos that show real murder and torture. Her search for the truth leads her to a deranged killer who forces her to witness and even become part of the atrocities he commits. However, the film interwined her story with footage of 3 nameless victims, showing their brutal treatment and ultimate demise all on film. This isn't just a story about a journalist uncovering a history. It's a film designed to make you feel uncomfortable, confused and even guilty for watching it, as the director Mariano Peralta really blurs the lines between fiction and reality.Unlike most horror films that make it clear that what you are seeing is fake, snuff 102 doesn't give you that comfort. It uses a mix of stage violence and real life footage including scenes of real autopsies and real animal cruelty. To make everything feel disturbingly feel real, this deliberate choice forces viewers to constantly question it what they're watching is actually real or fake. The film doesn't offer much in the way of traditional storytelling either as it's basically built off the back ofextremely shocking and gory footage.
There is no clear resolution, no satisfying character arcs and no relief from the horrors it shows. Even the editing feels unhinged with jarring cuts and overlapping sounds. In a 2013 interview, the director said that the film was never meant to be simple shock value. Instead, it was designed as a harsh critique of ociety's growing desensitization to violence. He belived that by confronting audiences with deeply uncomfortable imagery, he could provoke critical thought and forcer viewers to reflect on why there would even ever watch the film Snuff 102. When discussing on how he made the film, he acknowledged he had to walk between realistic portrayals and maintaining ethical film making practices. He clarified that while the film does incorporate real footage, specifically animal cruelty he saw from the internet, he soured from the internet; every human torture and murder scene was carefully staged using special effects in actors. Probably for the first time in film history, the goal was to craft a deeply disturbing experience that left viewers questioning what was real and what was not, and more importantly, why they were even watching the film.
Tumbling Doll of Flesh - It's in Japan, 1998, a time when the country's film industry is thriving with creativity but also experimenting with its dreams. The premise of tumbling do of flesh seems straightforward. It begins as a low bduget adult movie focusing on a man and a women participating in what appears to be a consensual adult film shoot. The tone is mundane which seems that are slow, quiet and uneventful. But as the minutes tick by, a subtle unease begins to creep in. Something feels off, not just in the performances but in the very atmosphere of the film. Almost without warning, the story takes a jarry turn with the male acotr beginning to unleash horrifying violence on the women. What starts as a consensual act devolves into an extended scene of torment. While the camera continues to roll, the violence is disturbingly realistic. No stilized, exagerrated bur rather slow, methodical and deeply unsettling. The camera lingers on the women suffering, refusing to look away, forcing the audience to confront every second of her pain. Unlike other extreme films, Tubling Doll of Flash doesn't offer any clear context or explanation for the violence. There is no character development, zero backstory, no justification, just pure shock value, leaving you physically sick. The director Tamakichi Anaru wasn't interested in creating a typical movie. He wanted to explore what happens when you strip away all safety nets, leaving only raw, unfiltered human emotion and suffering. His vision for Tumbling Doll of Flash was a film that would feel as real as possible. So real that he was questionned by viewers whether or not they were watching fiction or something far darker. Just the title of the movie is hauntingly appropriate. It reflects the women's dehumanization throughout the film as she is reduced to little more than an object for the man's cruelty.
Faces of Death - The story begins with John Allan Schwarz, a young filmmaker with a simple but daring idea. He wanted a film that explored humanity's darkest fear : death. So he made a film that looked like a documentary, filled with real life horrors and unsettling footages. At the time of the film there was a growing curiosity about taboo subjects in media with people becoming fascinated by things that were considered too shoking and forbidden. John Alan Schwartz saw this as an opportunity. He developed a concept for his movie, as a mockumentary, a film that looked like a real documentary but blends truth with fiction. His vision was to create something that felt authentic, something making the viwers question what they have just seen. So the director and his team gathered a mix of content, using a combination of staged scenes, authentic news footage and even graphic real life clips of death to create a film that feels disturbingly real. At a point you might watch someone perform an autopsy and next scene you would see a staged execution that would look just as believable. The combination of the real and the fake made it almost impossible to tell what was real and what was not. But Swhcarz added a layer that would make the film even more unsettling.
A narrator, a fictional pathologist named Dr Francis B Gross was create to guide the viewers through he movie. His calm, clinical tone made the horrifying images on screen feel even more shockign. One of the most infamous scene involves a dining room of people and a live monkey. In the scene, diners gather around a table with a hole in the center. A monkey is placed inside. the hole with only its head visible. The diners then take turn striking the monkey with small mallets before eating what becomes exposed. The twist was that it was completly staged. The monkey was a prop and the brains were actually made from a mixture of gelatin and food coloring. We later have a shot of a women leaning out the window of an apartment building. The entire thing is on fire and she has no escape. She stares at the ground, knowing the fall is too high to survive. But she has no choice. We then see her jump. The fall and death of the women is this time in fact entirely real. However the aftermath with the close ups of her lifeless body on the ground was completly fabricated by the filmmakers. About 60% of the film uses real graphic and horrible footage while 40% of it is completly staged though you are not told during the film which are and which are not.
Post.
The Viking - In the 1930s, Hollwyood was in the middle of a revolution. Silent films were being replaced by talkies which are films with synchronized sounds like you can see in almost any film nowadays. Possibilities felt endless. Audiences were no longer limited in imagining voices or sounds effects and the screen was able to come alive as never before. While many filmmakers were playing it safe from the studios, " The Viking " dared to do something that no one else has attempted. It was one of the first films to be shot entirely on location. And not just any location because the filmmakers chose the freezing Arctic Waters of the coast of New Foundland. They wanted the film to feel as real as possible, capturing the harsh icy conditions that seal hunters faced. For the time it was an especially bold move, especially since technology for recording sound outside of a studio was still in its infancy. The story was inspired by the dangerous lives of sealers, the man who braved the Arctic Waters to haunt seals for their fur and oil. But the filmmakers weren't content with just telling a story. They wanted to immerse the audiences in the reality of this. To do this, they brought their entire cast and crew to the harsh unpredictable Arctic and it wasn't an easy task. The equipment they used to record sound was heavy and fragile. Not a tool designed for the Sub Zero temperatures and the shifting ice flows of the North Atlantic still the team pushed forward determined to create something unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their ambition paid off in many ways, as the Viking was widely praised for its authenticity and gripping visuals.
The filmmakers obsession with realism has brought them face to face with danger at every turn. This relentless pursuit of authenticities would lead to some of the deadliest tragedies in film history.One of the boldest and most dangerous choice was to show many of the scenes abroad a real ceiling ship, the SS Viking. At the time, ceiling ships were rugged vessels designed to whistand brutal conditions of Atlantic. These ships not only carried the crew but also dynamite to break through thick ice. While this was standard practice for sealers, it added a massive layer of risk for the film's crew, unfamiliar with such hazards. The ship's cap and crew were real sealers and it added to the film's authenticity but also exposed the cast and crew to the same dangers these men face daily. On March 15th 1931 with SS Vikings sets sail from Saint John's new Foundland, carrying not only the crew but dangerous cargo of dynamite and other explosive. They were meant to break the ice and create a dramatic visual effect for the film. The filmmakers did similar techniques earlier in the film. But this time the stakes were higher : the winter ice was thicker, the conditions harsher and the crew more desperate to finish the job and just get out of the Arctic. Hours spired into days and the ship navigated the treacherous ice fields, battling freezing, freezings and towering waves. Still the crew was determined to capture the footage and mid afternoon, a fire broke out on board, spreading rapidly through its wooden structure. Its believed that the sparks from a storve or lantern ignited the flammable cargo leading to a catastrophic explosion. The dynamite stored in the hold detonated with such a force that it tore through the SS Viking, instantly killing dozens of people on board and throwing others into the freezing Arctic waters.
Survivors described the scene as pure chaos. The explosion was deafening on its own and the ship was engulfed with flames within moments. Those who weren't killed by the blast scrambled to abandon the ship, jumping into icy waters or clinging into pieces of debris. Hypothermia claimed even more lives. Rescue efforts were hampered by the remote location and harsh conditions. Nearby ships and locals rushed to help. Out of 140 people on board, almost 30 lost their lives including Baric Frisell and the director of the Viking.
Among the abyss of the icerberg, films like Snurff R73. It's not a typical film with director cast and a production team you can look to. This one seems to have come from the very depth of the internet. No one knows exactly who made it, where it was created or why it even exists. First film surfaced in horror forums in the mid 2010s. A place where extreme films are shared by people looking for content that more than pushes the boundaries. The film itself is essentially a collection of real life footage stitched together into something far more horrifying than any fiction. Many believe the film was created as a statement or as a sort of challenged as it could be designed test how much a viewer could handle. The most infamous parts of the film involve childrens. On the tamer side it features real medical footage, surgeries and procedures of infants and todlers. While medical procedures can be uncomfortables, the way the film presents them make them feels even more exploitative. There is no educational value. It's obviously here for shock value. Another notorious segment involves war footage injured civilians, children being caught in the horrors of war. Worst part of the wilm is a footage of an adult man severly harming a child. It's a real footage stitched together to create one of the hardest viewing experiences on the planet.
MDPOPE - It stands for most disturbed person on planet earth. It might be just a claim to grab attention. The series is the brainchild of a mysterious creator known as thomas extreme cinemagore. It's not really a filmmaker in the traditionnal sense. He is a compiler. Rather than shooting original footages he scours the darkest corners of the internet to create a collection of clips that push the boundaries. It was created to challenge even the most hardened viewers. It's labelled as a shockumentary, designed only not to disturb but to test the limits o human curiosity. It includes real footages of accidents and executions and other moments of extreme violence. Soe of the most controversial clips involve graphic and severe abuses of animals which many viewers find even harder to watch than footage of real human deaths. The first film was released quietly online, gaining notoriety through word of mouth and internet forums dedicated Its sequel MDPOPE 2 followed the same formula but with even more extreme content. The creator Thomas still remained anonymous, adding another layer of mystery.
Protect and survive - Cold war was a period of uncertainty and fear. Both USA and USSR were capable of launching nuclear weapons, each one being able to wipe out an entire city. UK could be a potential target. In the 1970s the UK government wanted to prepare its citizens but they didn't want to panic public. So instead of public meetings or creating dramatic TV campaigns, they decided to produce a series of short films called protect and survive, these films were meant to educate people on how to protect themselves and their families during a nuclear emergency. They were destined to stay hidden until the government believed the nuclear attack was imminent. Then days and hours before the disaster stuck the film would be broadcast on televisions and radio to give people practical instructions on how to survive. But protect and survive didn't stay hidden for long as the serie got leaked to the public in the late 1970s. Instead of feeling reassured many were horrified because of the cold matter and the tone of the films who made the instructions feel more like a death sentence rather than a survival guide. For example one film calmy explained how to make a makeshift fallout shelter using everyday items like doors, blankets and furnitures. The tone wasn't just unsettling, it was terrifying. Imagine enjoying a good day at home and this suddently comes on your television and this might be the last film you will ever see in some cases.
The Viking - In the 1930s, Hollwyood was in the middle of a revolution. Silent films were being replaced by talkies which are films with synchronized sounds like you can see in almost any film nowadays. Possibilities felt endless. Audiences were no longer limited in imagining voices or sounds effects and the screen was able to come alive as never before. While many filmmakers were playing it safe from the studios, " The Viking " dared to do something that no one else has attempted. It was one of the first films to be shot entirely on location. And not just any location because the filmmakers chose the freezing Arctic Waters of the coast of New Foundland. They wanted the film to feel as real as possible, capturing the harsh icy conditions that seal hunters faced. For the time it was an especially bold move, especially since technology for recording sound outside of a studio was still in its infancy. The story was inspired by the dangerous lives of sealers, the man who braved the Arctic Waters to haunt seals for their fur and oil. But the filmmakers weren't content with just telling a story. They wanted to immerse the audiences in the reality of this. To do this, they brought their entire cast and crew to the harsh unpredictable Arctic and it wasn't an easy task. The equipment they used to record sound was heavy and fragile. Not a tool designed for the Sub Zero temperatures and the shifting ice flows of the North Atlantic still the team pushed forward determined to create something unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their ambition paid off in many ways, as the Viking was widely praised for its authenticity and gripping visuals.
The filmmakers obsession with realism has brought them face to face with danger at every turn. This relentless pursuit of authenticities would lead to some of the deadliest tragedies in film history.One of the boldest and most dangerous choice was to show many of the scenes abroad a real ceiling ship, the SS Viking. At the time, ceiling ships were rugged vessels designed to whistand brutal conditions of Atlantic. These ships not only carried the crew but also dynamite to break through thick ice. While this was standard practice for sealers, it added a massive layer of risk for the film's crew, unfamiliar with such hazards. The ship's cap and crew were real sealers and it added to the film's authenticity but also exposed the cast and crew to the same dangers these men face daily. On March 15th 1931 with SS Vikings sets sail from Saint John's new Foundland, carrying not only the crew but dangerous cargo of dynamite and other explosive. They were meant to break the ice and create a dramatic visual effect for the film. The filmmakers did similar techniques earlier in the film. But this time the stakes were higher : the winter ice was thicker, the conditions harsher and the crew more desperate to finish the job and just get out of the Arctic. Hours spired into days and the ship navigated the treacherous ice fields, battling freezing, freezings and towering waves. Still the crew was determined to capture the footage and mid afternoon, a fire broke out on board, spreading rapidly through its wooden structure. Its believed that the sparks from a storve or lantern ignited the flammable cargo leading to a catastrophic explosion. The dynamite stored in the hold detonated with such a force that it tore through the SS Viking, instantly killing dozens of people on board and throwing others into the freezing Arctic waters.
Survivors described the scene as pure chaos. The explosion was deafening on its own and the ship was engulfed with flames within moments. Those who weren't killed by the blast scrambled to abandon the ship, jumping into icy waters or clinging into pieces of debris. Hypothermia claimed even more lives. Rescue efforts were hampered by the remote location and harsh conditions. Nearby ships and locals rushed to help. Out of 140 people on board, almost 30 lost their lives including Baric Frisell and the director of the Viking.
Among the abyss of the icerberg, films like Snurff R73. It's not a typical film with director cast and a production team you can look to. This one seems to have come from the very depth of the internet. No one knows exactly who made it, where it was created or why it even exists. First film surfaced in horror forums in the mid 2010s. A place where extreme films are shared by people looking for content that more than pushes the boundaries. The film itself is essentially a collection of real life footage stitched together into something far more horrifying than any fiction. Many believe the film was created as a statement or as a sort of challenged as it could be designed test how much a viewer could handle. The most infamous parts of the film involve childrens. On the tamer side it features real medical footage, surgeries and procedures of infants and todlers. While medical procedures can be uncomfortables, the way the film presents them make them feels even more exploitative. There is no educational value. It's obviously here for shock value. Another notorious segment involves war footage injured civilians, children being caught in the horrors of war. Worst part of the wilm is a footage of an adult man severly harming a child. It's a real footage stitched together to create one of the hardest viewing experiences on the planet.
MDPOPE - It stands for most disturbed person on planet earth. It might be just a claim to grab attention. The series is the brainchild of a mysterious creator known as thomas extreme cinemagore. It's not really a filmmaker in the traditionnal sense. He is a compiler. Rather than shooting original footages he scours the darkest corners of the internet to create a collection of clips that push the boundaries. It was created to challenge even the most hardened viewers. It's labelled as a shockumentary, designed only not to disturb but to test the limits o human curiosity. It includes real footages of accidents and executions and other moments of extreme violence. Soe of the most controversial clips involve graphic and severe abuses of animals which many viewers find even harder to watch than footage of real human deaths. The first film was released quietly online, gaining notoriety through word of mouth and internet forums dedicated Its sequel MDPOPE 2 followed the same formula but with even more extreme content. The creator Thomas still remained anonymous, adding another layer of mystery.
Protect and survive - Cold war was a period of uncertainty and fear. Both USA and USSR were capable of launching nuclear weapons, each one being able to wipe out an entire city. UK could be a potential target. In the 1970s the UK government wanted to prepare its citizens but they didn't want to panic public. So instead of public meetings or creating dramatic TV campaigns, they decided to produce a series of short films called protect and survive, these films were meant to educate people on how to protect themselves and their families during a nuclear emergency. They were destined to stay hidden until the government believed the nuclear attack was imminent. Then days and hours before the disaster stuck the film would be broadcast on televisions and radio to give people practical instructions on how to survive. But protect and survive didn't stay hidden for long as the serie got leaked to the public in the late 1970s. Instead of feeling reassured many were horrified because of the cold matter and the tone of the films who made the instructions feel more like a death sentence rather than a survival guide. For example one film calmy explained how to make a makeshift fallout shelter using everyday items like doors, blankets and furnitures. The tone wasn't just unsettling, it was terrifying. Imagine enjoying a good day at home and this suddently comes on your television and this might be the last film you will ever see in some cases.
Post.
https://ytscribe.com/fr/v/WsYU7tjOvm0
A Boing 767 is climbing out over the dense jungles of Northern Thailand the pilots are settling into their seats for the long flight ahead when suddenly a warning related to the aircraft thrust reverser system appears this is a start of a terrifying chain of events that the aircraft manufacturer didn't even think was possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauda_Air_Flight_004 On the 26th of May 1991, cerw from Lauda Air was ready to bring their plane from Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong towards Bangkok in Thailand to their home base in Vienna, Austria. This was part of a three times weekly service. that the company was doing between Bangkok and Vienna. The aircraf was a Boeing 767 - 300. It was a longe range version of the Boeing 767, equipped with 2 Pratt and Whitney PW4060 high bypass turbofan engines
The engines were efficient but the way they were constructed had a major impact on the accident. A high bypass turbo fan engine is basically an engine where the majority of the thrust that is pushing the aircraft forward is produced by the big fan in front of the engine rather than the air that passes through the core and the burn chambers. In the case of these engines, the bypass radio was about 5 to1 meaning that there was five times as much volume of air that passed the bypass duct of the engine than what passed through the core of the engine. This high bypass ratio meant a lot better fuel economy and also much lower noise on these new engines because it turns out that using the fan to move a larger volume of air at a slower speed is much more efficient than trying to accelerate a smaller volume of air into higher speed. This is by the way why all modern engine seems to be getting bigger and bigger but that's a slightly different story. Another consequence of this shift in design was that the engine trust reverses could now be constructed differently. On older type of jet engines, the reverse trust was constructed by two buckets being extended and then deployed into the core airf flow basically redirecting the whole core air flow into a forward angle. But with these new high bypass engines it was found that it was much more efficient to use two translating sleeves that would move back and they would then extend blocker doors into the bypass duct. That would redirect the bypass flow forward through some fixed through some fixed cascade vanes and that would create the reverse thrust. However another consequence of this was that the reverse trust was now being created in a slightly different place. While in the old engines the reverse thrust was being created at the very back of the engines now the reverse, thrust was being created much further ahead. And that would have an impact here.
A Boing 767 is climbing out over the dense jungles of Northern Thailand the pilots are settling into their seats for the long flight ahead when suddenly a warning related to the aircraft thrust reverser system appears this is a start of a terrifying chain of events that the aircraft manufacturer didn't even think was possible.
The engines were efficient but the way they were constructed had a major impact on the accident. A high bypass turbo fan engine is basically an engine where the majority of the thrust that is pushing the aircraft forward is produced by the big fan in front of the engine rather than the air that passes through the core and the burn chambers. In the case of these engines, the bypass radio was about 5 to1 meaning that there was five times as much volume of air that passed the bypass duct of the engine than what passed through the core of the engine. This high bypass ratio meant a lot better fuel economy and also much lower noise on these new engines because it turns out that using the fan to move a larger volume of air at a slower speed is much more efficient than trying to accelerate a smaller volume of air into higher speed. This is by the way why all modern engine seems to be getting bigger and bigger but that's a slightly different story. Another consequence of this shift in design was that the engine trust reverses could now be constructed differently. On older type of jet engines, the reverse trust was constructed by two buckets being extended and then deployed into the core airf flow basically redirecting the whole core air flow into a forward angle. But with these new high bypass engines it was found that it was much more efficient to use two translating sleeves that would move back and they would then extend blocker doors into the bypass duct. That would redirect the bypass flow forward through some fixed through some fixed cascade vanes and that would create the reverse thrust. However another consequence of this was that the reverse trust was now being created in a slightly different place. While in the old engines the reverse thrust was being created at the very back of the engines now the reverse, thrust was being created much further ahead. And that would have an impact here.
Post.
Runaway AIRCRAFT! This Aircraft Flew TWO HOURS Without CONTROLS!
Imagine being stuck on an aircraft which is clearly out of control. Now imagine that for almost 2 whole hours. This is what happened to the pilots and passengers of Air Astana flight 1388. Story started 1 month before the accident where the operator Air Astana flown the Embraer 190 - 100 LR into a maintenance base in Portugal called Alverca de Ribatejo. Here they contacted Portuguese maintenance firm called OGMA to do the maintenance check. When airlines don't have their own maintenance organizations, they contact external organizations. Maintenance included a normal C2 check ( a reoccuring check the aircraft has to go through at a certain number of cycles or hours but also included a couple of service bulletins. Service bulletins is when the aircraft manufacturer sends out instruction to the airlines to upgrade their aircraft. Here they needed to upgrade part of the routing of the cables that led to the ailerons and also they needed to change the aileron cables completly from stainless steel carbon to carbon steel cables. Maintenance personnel would completly remove the old cables and replace with new ones. The maintenance was supposed to take half a month to complete. But workers ran into some complications. When they started trying to replace their aileron cables, they foud instructions hard to read. They found it confusing and there was a lack of graphic material to show exactly how the cables are supposed to be connected. So the work took long and once they were done they tested it However when pwoering up the aircraft, they received an ACAS message that said flight controls no dispatch. So they did several system tests both on the flight control module which is the part of the computer system of the Embraer and also te actual physical connections. Even if they did these tests, no one seemed to have actually check what the ailerons were doing when the yoke was moved in the cockpit.
When it comes to roll axis, 2 different systems can control this. You have ailerons which are the rudders situated on the most outermost part of the wing. They tend to move upwards on the part of the wing that is going down and downwards on the other. That forces the aircraft to roll. There is another system : flight spoilers. When pilots tell the aircraft to turn one wing down then these spoilers will come up on that wing will actually as the name suggests spoil the lift on that wing which will make the aircraft roll. The 2 systems work together to achieve the same thing here one will work a bit more in lower speed and another one will work a bit more in higher speed regime. Embraer 190 is like a hybrid aircraft in that some of the light controls are fly by wire meaning that pilts do something into the cockpit and then it's changed into an electronic signal that goes out to an activation unit by that rudder. The flight spoilers are fly by wire. It's also conventional kind of wires connected to the flight controls in the case of the ailerons. Pressure on maintenance organization to get the job done becomes bigger as maintenance gets dragged on. So they reached out to Embraer to get hel on this flight control no dispatch issue. Eventually by switching out some flight control modules in the guidance computer, they managed to clear the message. Aircraft was now ready to be given back to customer. On 11th of October 2018, the flight was expected to go from Portugal to Minsk, Belarus for a proceeding stop then go towards Almaty, Kazakhstan. After heavy maintenance, companies have a tendency to commit pilots specifically trained to do acceptance flights. Here it was a normal crew. The captain was 40 years old with 6 000 hours of flying time experience. The first officer was 32 years old with over 2 600 hours. The third pilot was actually a slightly more experienced first officer. He was 26 years old and had 3 500 hours.
Among passengers, 3 of them were working for Air Astana mainly in maintenance roles. Weather was quite bad with visibility being between 2 000 and 3 000 meters with heavy rain and low clouds. After heavy maintenance especially on flight controls you prefer to have a good weather. In case something goes wrong, stay in visual meteorological conditions so you can easily do a visual return back. It was not the case that day. They recognized there was a problem with the ventilation to one of the avionics bays and one of the hydraulic systems was also at low quality level. So they called the engineering team back to say that they couldn't accept an aircraft like this. Maintenance team sorted these things out and 2 hours later the aircraft was ready for departure. When the crew came back for the second time they started again to set the aircraft up. On this plane the way you move flight controls is that as you are moving the yoke around, you are also supposed to verify that the rudder surfaces are moving correctly on a screen. After takeof, the pilots noticed they had very little control on their aircraft. When he turned the aircraft to the left he would have the aircraft turn to the right using the ailerons and the left using the flight spoilers. This rendered rthe aircraft unflyable. Into Alverca tower they called a mayday within 1 minute. The aircraft goes from + 20 000 feet per minute to minus - 16 000 feet per minute with g loads of + 4.5 gs to - 0.5 g. Immense forces are put into the airframe. The aircraft is turning over completly inverted. The flight controls were doing opposite and sometimes completly inexplicable things. They don't get any fault indication. No warning except the groud proximity one and the bank angle warnings and everything else screaming at them. But nothing from their instrumentation explains why it's happening. Every time air traffic control gave them a vector, you can see on the radar screen how the aircraft turns the wrong way.
This period where aircraft went through these cycles of extreme climbs and descents and rolls and g loading continued for more than 1 hour. The pilots never ceased troubleshooting and never gave up. They actually leveled the aircraft off which means they could try to figure out what to do to keep the aircraft at level. The third pilot kept giving advices, technical advices and showed good knowledge of the aircraft to the captain. He worked as a relay between the cockpit and the passengers in the cabin. After a while they realized that the ailerons were the problem. The crew switches from normal law to direct law. In normal mode the input from the pilot goes through a flight control computer, a flight control module and it feels the configuration of the aircraft, the speed of the aircraft and it modulates the outputs to the actual flight control surfaces. If you go by direct law, the input from the control is directly translated through the flight control surfaces. In direct law when the pilots put the aileron input in there seem to have a bit of a deadband where only the ailerons are activated, not the flight spoilers. Even though the ailerons were now moving the opposite way, it was still far better than only the ailerons were moving than having opposite activation of ailerons and flight spoilers because with that, the aircraft cannot be controlled. They figured out that if they do teeny tiny inputs on aileronthen if you turn right it's going to bank to the left but at least it does that continuously. So they figured all of this hour after 1 hour and 15 minutes. When they figured this out they were intercepted by 2 F16 fighters from Portuguese air forces and that added other problems. The crew also realized that if they kept the flaps by 1, that gives about 7 degrees of trailing edge flaps and 15 degrees of slats. It gives them a bit more maneuver margin. It's a bit risky to have the flaps extended but it was better than the g loadings where they had no control.
They now tried to follow air traffic control's radar vectors vectoring south because the weather was significantly better here. Coming back to the 2 F16, when they approached the aircraft, they forgot to turn off their TCAS which means that the crew is now sitting there with full on TCAS warnings as well. Initially the pilots think about diverting towards Faro airport in south of Portugal where weather is better but air traffic control then suggests to go to a air defense base called Beja. That's closeer so the crew starts to descend with the help of the fighter jets down towards Beja and they decide to fly a visual approach. They never really stabilized, constantly moving left to right on the centerline and it's becoming apparent that they will not stabilize the approach. After the first go around the first officer is so exhausted from this ordeal that he cannot continue. So the third pilot now jumps in. They try a second visual approach. They destabilize at the late part of the approach and they have to go aroud for a second time. On the third approach the cew is still not able to get the aircraft in on the centerline of the runway. But this time when the aircraft starts to drift towards the left the captain realized that they had Runway 19 left which is slightly narrower compared to Runway 19 right but he can get it down here. And the aircraft finally lands safely. As soon as the aircraft stops, the fault message flight control no dispatch comes up on their EICAS display. Through the use of skills, grit and great communication, the crew managed to save the plane. Only one injury when a passenger sprained his ankle slightly. When maintenance team looks at the aircraft, they realize that all flight control surfaces and flaps and even the wings have been subjected to forces well outside of their design limits. There are signs of wrinkling on the skin, on the main body as well. Only the first third of ahr aircraft doesn't have damage.
Runaway AIRCRAFT! This Aircraft Flew TWO HOURS Without CONTROLS!
Imagine being stuck on an aircraft which is clearly out of control. Now imagine that for almost 2 whole hours. This is what happened to the pilots and passengers of Air Astana flight 1388. Story started 1 month before the accident where the operator Air Astana flown the Embraer 190 - 100 LR into a maintenance base in Portugal called Alverca de Ribatejo. Here they contacted Portuguese maintenance firm called OGMA to do the maintenance check. When airlines don't have their own maintenance organizations, they contact external organizations. Maintenance included a normal C2 check ( a reoccuring check the aircraft has to go through at a certain number of cycles or hours but also included a couple of service bulletins. Service bulletins is when the aircraft manufacturer sends out instruction to the airlines to upgrade their aircraft. Here they needed to upgrade part of the routing of the cables that led to the ailerons and also they needed to change the aileron cables completly from stainless steel carbon to carbon steel cables. Maintenance personnel would completly remove the old cables and replace with new ones. The maintenance was supposed to take half a month to complete. But workers ran into some complications. When they started trying to replace their aileron cables, they foud instructions hard to read. They found it confusing and there was a lack of graphic material to show exactly how the cables are supposed to be connected. So the work took long and once they were done they tested it However when pwoering up the aircraft, they received an ACAS message that said flight controls no dispatch. So they did several system tests both on the flight control module which is the part of the computer system of the Embraer and also te actual physical connections. Even if they did these tests, no one seemed to have actually check what the ailerons were doing when the yoke was moved in the cockpit.
When it comes to roll axis, 2 different systems can control this. You have ailerons which are the rudders situated on the most outermost part of the wing. They tend to move upwards on the part of the wing that is going down and downwards on the other. That forces the aircraft to roll. There is another system : flight spoilers. When pilots tell the aircraft to turn one wing down then these spoilers will come up on that wing will actually as the name suggests spoil the lift on that wing which will make the aircraft roll. The 2 systems work together to achieve the same thing here one will work a bit more in lower speed and another one will work a bit more in higher speed regime. Embraer 190 is like a hybrid aircraft in that some of the light controls are fly by wire meaning that pilts do something into the cockpit and then it's changed into an electronic signal that goes out to an activation unit by that rudder. The flight spoilers are fly by wire. It's also conventional kind of wires connected to the flight controls in the case of the ailerons. Pressure on maintenance organization to get the job done becomes bigger as maintenance gets dragged on. So they reached out to Embraer to get hel on this flight control no dispatch issue. Eventually by switching out some flight control modules in the guidance computer, they managed to clear the message. Aircraft was now ready to be given back to customer. On 11th of October 2018, the flight was expected to go from Portugal to Minsk, Belarus for a proceeding stop then go towards Almaty, Kazakhstan. After heavy maintenance, companies have a tendency to commit pilots specifically trained to do acceptance flights. Here it was a normal crew. The captain was 40 years old with 6 000 hours of flying time experience. The first officer was 32 years old with over 2 600 hours. The third pilot was actually a slightly more experienced first officer. He was 26 years old and had 3 500 hours.
Among passengers, 3 of them were working for Air Astana mainly in maintenance roles. Weather was quite bad with visibility being between 2 000 and 3 000 meters with heavy rain and low clouds. After heavy maintenance especially on flight controls you prefer to have a good weather. In case something goes wrong, stay in visual meteorological conditions so you can easily do a visual return back. It was not the case that day. They recognized there was a problem with the ventilation to one of the avionics bays and one of the hydraulic systems was also at low quality level. So they called the engineering team back to say that they couldn't accept an aircraft like this. Maintenance team sorted these things out and 2 hours later the aircraft was ready for departure. When the crew came back for the second time they started again to set the aircraft up. On this plane the way you move flight controls is that as you are moving the yoke around, you are also supposed to verify that the rudder surfaces are moving correctly on a screen. After takeof, the pilots noticed they had very little control on their aircraft. When he turned the aircraft to the left he would have the aircraft turn to the right using the ailerons and the left using the flight spoilers. This rendered rthe aircraft unflyable. Into Alverca tower they called a mayday within 1 minute. The aircraft goes from + 20 000 feet per minute to minus - 16 000 feet per minute with g loads of + 4.5 gs to - 0.5 g. Immense forces are put into the airframe. The aircraft is turning over completly inverted. The flight controls were doing opposite and sometimes completly inexplicable things. They don't get any fault indication. No warning except the groud proximity one and the bank angle warnings and everything else screaming at them. But nothing from their instrumentation explains why it's happening. Every time air traffic control gave them a vector, you can see on the radar screen how the aircraft turns the wrong way.
This period where aircraft went through these cycles of extreme climbs and descents and rolls and g loading continued for more than 1 hour. The pilots never ceased troubleshooting and never gave up. They actually leveled the aircraft off which means they could try to figure out what to do to keep the aircraft at level. The third pilot kept giving advices, technical advices and showed good knowledge of the aircraft to the captain. He worked as a relay between the cockpit and the passengers in the cabin. After a while they realized that the ailerons were the problem. The crew switches from normal law to direct law. In normal mode the input from the pilot goes through a flight control computer, a flight control module and it feels the configuration of the aircraft, the speed of the aircraft and it modulates the outputs to the actual flight control surfaces. If you go by direct law, the input from the control is directly translated through the flight control surfaces. In direct law when the pilots put the aileron input in there seem to have a bit of a deadband where only the ailerons are activated, not the flight spoilers. Even though the ailerons were now moving the opposite way, it was still far better than only the ailerons were moving than having opposite activation of ailerons and flight spoilers because with that, the aircraft cannot be controlled. They figured out that if they do teeny tiny inputs on aileronthen if you turn right it's going to bank to the left but at least it does that continuously. So they figured all of this hour after 1 hour and 15 minutes. When they figured this out they were intercepted by 2 F16 fighters from Portuguese air forces and that added other problems. The crew also realized that if they kept the flaps by 1, that gives about 7 degrees of trailing edge flaps and 15 degrees of slats. It gives them a bit more maneuver margin. It's a bit risky to have the flaps extended but it was better than the g loadings where they had no control.
They now tried to follow air traffic control's radar vectors vectoring south because the weather was significantly better here. Coming back to the 2 F16, when they approached the aircraft, they forgot to turn off their TCAS which means that the crew is now sitting there with full on TCAS warnings as well. Initially the pilots think about diverting towards Faro airport in south of Portugal where weather is better but air traffic control then suggests to go to a air defense base called Beja. That's closeer so the crew starts to descend with the help of the fighter jets down towards Beja and they decide to fly a visual approach. They never really stabilized, constantly moving left to right on the centerline and it's becoming apparent that they will not stabilize the approach. After the first go around the first officer is so exhausted from this ordeal that he cannot continue. So the third pilot now jumps in. They try a second visual approach. They destabilize at the late part of the approach and they have to go aroud for a second time. On the third approach the cew is still not able to get the aircraft in on the centerline of the runway. But this time when the aircraft starts to drift towards the left the captain realized that they had Runway 19 left which is slightly narrower compared to Runway 19 right but he can get it down here. And the aircraft finally lands safely. As soon as the aircraft stops, the fault message flight control no dispatch comes up on their EICAS display. Through the use of skills, grit and great communication, the crew managed to save the plane. Only one injury when a passenger sprained his ankle slightly. When maintenance team looks at the aircraft, they realize that all flight control surfaces and flaps and even the wings have been subjected to forces well outside of their design limits. There are signs of wrinkling on the skin, on the main body as well. Only the first third of ahr aircraft doesn't have damage.
Post.
The air accident investigation team foud serious deficiencies on the aircraft maintenance, in how the maintenance had been working. Some deficiences on an organizational scale have been found. There wasn't enough just culture where people didn't really feel the security to report problems upstairs and there have been general deficiencies overall on how the work had been done, how the work orders have been signed off. They also foud that the Embraer needed to rewrite some of their maintenance manuals to make it more obvious how to actually connect the aileron cable so that they weren't crossed, which was what happened here. Air Astana needed to work out some kind of acceptance program where pilots who were supposed to accept the aircraft after heavy maintenance had special training and that there were weather limits in force. Also pilots could have been check the flight controls a bit better before the takeoff. But the final report also noted the fantastic job the pilots have done at saving the plane and the passengers.
https://ytscribe.com/fr/v/l-wIIUkvdpg In rubbish out well this refers to when you enter something faulty into a computer which then causes you to get something equally faulty back and in the world of aviation with its ever more complicated computer systems. This holds a special significance back in 1995 one of the deadliest disasters involving a US carrier took place when the crew of American Airlines flight 965 failed. to spot that they had program the wrong waypoint into their flight management computer. This was a single innocuous error but one that led the aircraft onto a track toward High terrain without the pilots even noticing it until it was to late. It happened on November 10th, 2016. On the 9th of November the whair operations controller had called them up and informed them that they would need to operate four flights on the following day the first of those flights was going to be a positioning or Ferry flight from Budapest in Hungary over to NIS in Serbia and these kinds of Ferry flights are occasionally required when an aircraft needs to be brought from one airport to another for technical or operational reasons.Basically the pilots will position the aircraft themselves and sometimes their cabin crew without any passengers and this can often lead to a more relaxed atmosphere on board so when the pilots eventually turned up to their crew room in Budapest on the 13th of November they likely looked forward to this first flight. The aircraft was an A320. The captain first checked the technical status of the air craft which was perfectly fine there was no technical issues open so he quickly then went outside to start a walk around while the first officer started setting up the cockpit. As he was doing so one of the flight attendants asked if she could stay in the cockpit for the flight and the pilot agreed or maybe it was the other way around and it was the pilot who asked.
The captain was 62 years old and very experienced he had flown over 22,000 hours in total with nearly 5,500 on those on the Airbus A320 family. He had not gotten much quality sleep during the previous night so he also felt a little bit tired. His co-pilot was 49 years old and also relatively experienced with nearly 5,000 hours of Total time and just over 2,000 hours on the Airbus A320 and 321. He had just returned back from some annual leave and had therefore not flown at all during the preceding 10 days but he was feeling great and mainly that fact the fact that he was feeling rested was another reason for him to fly the first leg.
When pilots use the FMC program the rivals and approaches the compact display unit or CDU also shows any relevant speeds and altitude constraint coded into those procedure. In this case the requirement was to be at or above 4,300 ft until it passing RIBAR, LAMOV and a NAVAID called Juliet Sierra Tango. The pilots also spent some time discussing potential threats for the approach including the fact that the VOR Glide path was steeper than usual which might require them to configure early to get the speed down and also the fact that. This was a non-precision approach which always requires higher concentration diligence and adherence to adhere to procedures.
The air accident investigation team foud serious deficiencies on the aircraft maintenance, in how the maintenance had been working. Some deficiences on an organizational scale have been found. There wasn't enough just culture where people didn't really feel the security to report problems upstairs and there have been general deficiencies overall on how the work had been done, how the work orders have been signed off. They also foud that the Embraer needed to rewrite some of their maintenance manuals to make it more obvious how to actually connect the aileron cable so that they weren't crossed, which was what happened here. Air Astana needed to work out some kind of acceptance program where pilots who were supposed to accept the aircraft after heavy maintenance had special training and that there were weather limits in force. Also pilots could have been check the flight controls a bit better before the takeoff. But the final report also noted the fantastic job the pilots have done at saving the plane and the passengers.
The captain was 62 years old and very experienced he had flown over 22,000 hours in total with nearly 5,500 on those on the Airbus A320 family. He had not gotten much quality sleep during the previous night so he also felt a little bit tired. His co-pilot was 49 years old and also relatively experienced with nearly 5,000 hours of Total time and just over 2,000 hours on the Airbus A320 and 321. He had just returned back from some annual leave and had therefore not flown at all during the preceding 10 days but he was feeling great and mainly that fact the fact that he was feeling rested was another reason for him to fly the first leg.
When pilots use the FMC program the rivals and approaches the compact display unit or CDU also shows any relevant speeds and altitude constraint coded into those procedure. In this case the requirement was to be at or above 4,300 ft until it passing RIBAR, LAMOV and a NAVAID called Juliet Sierra Tango. The pilots also spent some time discussing potential threats for the approach including the fact that the VOR Glide path was steeper than usual which might require them to configure early to get the speed down and also the fact that. This was a non-precision approach which always requires higher concentration diligence and adherence to adhere to procedures.
Post.
SIX FEET from Disaster, the PILOTS didn’t NOTICE!!
The incident took place on 23rh of May 2022. on a flight between Stockholm Arland, Sweden, and Charles de Gaulle international airport, Paris, France. The aircraft was a 23 years old Airbus A320 operated by a Maltese Airlines called Airhub Airlines. It was operating on something called ACMI. wet leasing agreement. It's the company leasing out the aircraft. In this case Airhub Airlines provides both the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance. So tickets that passengers bought would have been with Norwegian Air Shuttle but Airhub Airlines was the company that was actually doing everything. The captain was going to fly the first leg with the first officer monitoring. Then they would switch. 2 pilots, 4 cabin crew and 172 passengers on board. On runway 8, they took off.. When close to Amsterdam, captain handed control to his first officer to prepare, set up and brief for arrival and approach into Charles de Gaulle airport. First thing he did was switching his second radio box onto the ATIS frequency for Charles de Gaulle to listen to the latest arrival and weather information. Only threat was comuloninbus or storm clouds at 5 000 feet. Pilots need to enter into barometric altimeters something in order to show the correct altitude as pilots arrive to the airport. QNH. At flight level, same pressure reference is let, which is 1013.25 HectoPascals. In high altitude pilots are not interested to know how high exactly they are above the sea level. More important is to know if other aircrafts around use the same pressure reference so they can maintain the same altitude separation between each aircraft. Because air pressure is egographically different over the globe, it's impossible for traffic control to know which setting each aircraft individual has. So pilots set the same. When the plane descends, it becomes much more important to know the exact distance above the ground, sea or the landing airport.
That's when pilots need to be given the local pressure setting which was 1 001 HectoPascals in this case. But pilots typically preset the expected value that they got from ATIS information so it will be easier to switch over once clearance is given. RNP approach stands for Required Navigational Performance. These approaches are also referred as Baro RNAV approaches. The've flown using the aircraft's GPS system together with an internal navigational performance monitoring system that can notify the crew in case something is going wrong with it. RNP approach can be done without any airport based navigational aids and these approaches are becoming more popular now. because they enable smaller airports that might not be able to afford big and expensive ILS system to be installed to have a very accurate instrument approach system anyway. On bigger airports, RNP approaches are typically used as backups whenever the ILS systems are either now working or u nder maintenance. That's what happened during this day. Because RNP approaches are flown using internal systems rather than external beams, it's important for those internal systems to be properly set up prior to the approach being flown. The area navigation or the RNAV part of this type of approach has monitor system monitoring the navigational accuracy of the GPS system. On the approach segment it has a tolerance of about 0,3 nautical miles. If the GPS cannot maintain that, it will be shown to the pilots. So pilots stop the approach is that happens. That's horizontal part of the approach. Vertical part is built up on given altitudes that are set at given RNAV points following about a 3 degrees slide slope. Here the minimum descent altitude was 752 feet, 250 feet above the ground but the airline policy was to add 50 feet on top of that. So the value that they actually put into their minima selectors was 802 feet.
The reason the airline had a policy to add 50 feet is because of a technicality we pilots have to follow when flying non precision approaches. When flying a precision approach like on ILS, pilots fly down to minima that is referred to as a decision height. If the decision height is reached and pilots have no visual references, pilots execute the go aroud but as part of the go around, pilots are allowed to momentarily sing through the decision height. It happens everytime because the aircraft has a lot of inertia. For non precision approach, because of the less exact nature of the navigation involved with flying non precision approaches, pilots are not allowed to transgress the minimum descent altitude. Because airlines want the pilots to exeucute the go around using the asme procedure, they add 40 or 50 feet on into the MDA. That way, when pilots hear the minimums call on a non precision approach they can execute the go around in the same way as they did on the ILS. Even though the aircraft continues to descend a little bit, they will not transgress the MDA. Pressure they got from ATIS earlier was but the pressure they have now gotten from the controller was 1011 which is the wrong pressure. Correct pressure setting is crucial to know what their correct altitude is. One HectoPascal represents about 28 feet An error of 10 HectoPascals represent an error of 280 feet. And the minimum altitude they were about to fly was only 360 feet above the ground. On an easyjet flying behind, approach controller also gave them 1011 but they read back 1001, the correct QNH. 1 minute later an Air France crew was cleared to descend at 5 000 feet this time using the correct QNH of 1001. But that was read back in french so the pilots on the Red Nose 4311 couldn't pick that up. When the crew approached, a large rain cloud moved in over the extended centerline. So they had no visual reference neither with the runway nor the groud below them.
Because of this the first officer was reading out distances versus altitude checks as they were descending down the approach. Checks showed they were where they were supposed to be. Because the crew had the incorrect QNH reference pressure set, the altitude and the altimeter was indicating the correct altitude for each of these distance checks they were doing. In reality they were 300 feet lower than they thought they were. If the same error happened on an ILS approach, the physical location of the ILS glidescope beam would have stayed the same. So no matter what pressure setting the pilots would have set on their altimeters, they would have still locked on that glidescope beam which would have brought them down towards the runway. In that case they would have done distance vs altitude checks and the error would have been shown clearly. Tower control forgot to switch on to the approach light syste, further reducing the chances of the crew establishing visual contact as they get closer.Aircraft's radio altimeter sent a height over the ground of 2 500 feet This should happen around 6 miles and a half final. If that happens earlier than that then iit's a clue to the pilots that they might be lower than they should be. It's a prompt to verify if they have the correct QNH set. But the pilots here didn't pick that up. So othe height was displayed on both pilots primary flight displays. When they went at under 1 000 feet over the ground. they had full of flaps out, they had checklists done, a speed of 139 knots. Only thing out of ordinary was that they were lower than normal radal at the distance they were from the runway. But it wasn't noticed so so the plane kept descending towards its pro programmed descent path down towards its minima. Air control towers at the Charles de Gaulle airport have warning system called MSAW ( Minimum Safe Altitude Warning ).
It clears a 64 nautical miles square around the airport. Inside the square it has modelled all of the different obstacles and then it has applied a 300 feet safety margin on top of these obstacles. If system feels that any aircraft within the square is on a trajectory to get into that safety zone and potentially hit an obstacle, it will issue warning in the tower. Both visual and oral warning, calling a beep beep, terrain alert. When it beeped the aircraft was at an indicated altitude of 891 feet which with the altitude of error they were flying with was actually 601 feet. And that's over sea level because in reality that was a radar height of 200 feet at a distance of 153 nautical miles., that's 2,8 km of distance away from the landing threshold. Aircraft had a vertical speed of 700 feet per minute. In case of MSAW warning, procedure is to have the control tower to alert the pilots, ask them to verify their position and altitude and give them the correct QNH setting. That didn't happen. Since they didn't get visual contact with runway, the captain decided to do a go around with the aircraft now 102 feet above the ground. at 1,2 nautical miles away from the landing runway. When aircrafts execute a go around, they descend for a bit longer. So even when they disconnect the autopilot to pitch up the aircraft, it continued to descend. At this point the tower control finally contacts the aircraft. The pilots didn't respond to the message or maybe heared it. They were too focused on what they decided to execute. 3 seconds later, as the captain has finished to move the thrust lever into the TOGA position, the aircraft arrives at his lowest height, 6 feet above the ground. That's 183 centimeters. Pilots later stated that they didn't get any type of GPWS warning nor any radio altimeter call outs which they normally get.
The fact that it happened 0,8 nautical mile away from the runway could be why it didn't activate. It thoguht that the plane was about to land. As for lack of radio altimeters call out, that's strange.
SIX FEET from Disaster, the PILOTS didn’t NOTICE!!
The incident took place on 23rh of May 2022. on a flight between Stockholm Arland, Sweden, and Charles de Gaulle international airport, Paris, France. The aircraft was a 23 years old Airbus A320 operated by a Maltese Airlines called Airhub Airlines. It was operating on something called ACMI. wet leasing agreement. It's the company leasing out the aircraft. In this case Airhub Airlines provides both the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance. So tickets that passengers bought would have been with Norwegian Air Shuttle but Airhub Airlines was the company that was actually doing everything. The captain was going to fly the first leg with the first officer monitoring. Then they would switch. 2 pilots, 4 cabin crew and 172 passengers on board. On runway 8, they took off.. When close to Amsterdam, captain handed control to his first officer to prepare, set up and brief for arrival and approach into Charles de Gaulle airport. First thing he did was switching his second radio box onto the ATIS frequency for Charles de Gaulle to listen to the latest arrival and weather information. Only threat was comuloninbus or storm clouds at 5 000 feet. Pilots need to enter into barometric altimeters something in order to show the correct altitude as pilots arrive to the airport. QNH. At flight level, same pressure reference is let, which is 1013.25 HectoPascals. In high altitude pilots are not interested to know how high exactly they are above the sea level. More important is to know if other aircrafts around use the same pressure reference so they can maintain the same altitude separation between each aircraft. Because air pressure is egographically different over the globe, it's impossible for traffic control to know which setting each aircraft individual has. So pilots set the same. When the plane descends, it becomes much more important to know the exact distance above the ground, sea or the landing airport.
That's when pilots need to be given the local pressure setting which was 1 001 HectoPascals in this case. But pilots typically preset the expected value that they got from ATIS information so it will be easier to switch over once clearance is given. RNP approach stands for Required Navigational Performance. These approaches are also referred as Baro RNAV approaches. The've flown using the aircraft's GPS system together with an internal navigational performance monitoring system that can notify the crew in case something is going wrong with it. RNP approach can be done without any airport based navigational aids and these approaches are becoming more popular now. because they enable smaller airports that might not be able to afford big and expensive ILS system to be installed to have a very accurate instrument approach system anyway. On bigger airports, RNP approaches are typically used as backups whenever the ILS systems are either now working or u nder maintenance. That's what happened during this day. Because RNP approaches are flown using internal systems rather than external beams, it's important for those internal systems to be properly set up prior to the approach being flown. The area navigation or the RNAV part of this type of approach has monitor system monitoring the navigational accuracy of the GPS system. On the approach segment it has a tolerance of about 0,3 nautical miles. If the GPS cannot maintain that, it will be shown to the pilots. So pilots stop the approach is that happens. That's horizontal part of the approach. Vertical part is built up on given altitudes that are set at given RNAV points following about a 3 degrees slide slope. Here the minimum descent altitude was 752 feet, 250 feet above the ground but the airline policy was to add 50 feet on top of that. So the value that they actually put into their minima selectors was 802 feet.
The reason the airline had a policy to add 50 feet is because of a technicality we pilots have to follow when flying non precision approaches. When flying a precision approach like on ILS, pilots fly down to minima that is referred to as a decision height. If the decision height is reached and pilots have no visual references, pilots execute the go aroud but as part of the go around, pilots are allowed to momentarily sing through the decision height. It happens everytime because the aircraft has a lot of inertia. For non precision approach, because of the less exact nature of the navigation involved with flying non precision approaches, pilots are not allowed to transgress the minimum descent altitude. Because airlines want the pilots to exeucute the go around using the asme procedure, they add 40 or 50 feet on into the MDA. That way, when pilots hear the minimums call on a non precision approach they can execute the go around in the same way as they did on the ILS. Even though the aircraft continues to descend a little bit, they will not transgress the MDA. Pressure they got from ATIS earlier was but the pressure they have now gotten from the controller was 1011 which is the wrong pressure. Correct pressure setting is crucial to know what their correct altitude is. One HectoPascal represents about 28 feet An error of 10 HectoPascals represent an error of 280 feet. And the minimum altitude they were about to fly was only 360 feet above the ground. On an easyjet flying behind, approach controller also gave them 1011 but they read back 1001, the correct QNH. 1 minute later an Air France crew was cleared to descend at 5 000 feet this time using the correct QNH of 1001. But that was read back in french so the pilots on the Red Nose 4311 couldn't pick that up. When the crew approached, a large rain cloud moved in over the extended centerline. So they had no visual reference neither with the runway nor the groud below them.
Because of this the first officer was reading out distances versus altitude checks as they were descending down the approach. Checks showed they were where they were supposed to be. Because the crew had the incorrect QNH reference pressure set, the altitude and the altimeter was indicating the correct altitude for each of these distance checks they were doing. In reality they were 300 feet lower than they thought they were. If the same error happened on an ILS approach, the physical location of the ILS glidescope beam would have stayed the same. So no matter what pressure setting the pilots would have set on their altimeters, they would have still locked on that glidescope beam which would have brought them down towards the runway. In that case they would have done distance vs altitude checks and the error would have been shown clearly. Tower control forgot to switch on to the approach light syste, further reducing the chances of the crew establishing visual contact as they get closer.Aircraft's radio altimeter sent a height over the ground of 2 500 feet This should happen around 6 miles and a half final. If that happens earlier than that then iit's a clue to the pilots that they might be lower than they should be. It's a prompt to verify if they have the correct QNH set. But the pilots here didn't pick that up. So othe height was displayed on both pilots primary flight displays. When they went at under 1 000 feet over the ground. they had full of flaps out, they had checklists done, a speed of 139 knots. Only thing out of ordinary was that they were lower than normal radal at the distance they were from the runway. But it wasn't noticed so so the plane kept descending towards its pro programmed descent path down towards its minima. Air control towers at the Charles de Gaulle airport have warning system called MSAW ( Minimum Safe Altitude Warning ).
It clears a 64 nautical miles square around the airport. Inside the square it has modelled all of the different obstacles and then it has applied a 300 feet safety margin on top of these obstacles. If system feels that any aircraft within the square is on a trajectory to get into that safety zone and potentially hit an obstacle, it will issue warning in the tower. Both visual and oral warning, calling a beep beep, terrain alert. When it beeped the aircraft was at an indicated altitude of 891 feet which with the altitude of error they were flying with was actually 601 feet. And that's over sea level because in reality that was a radar height of 200 feet at a distance of 153 nautical miles., that's 2,8 km of distance away from the landing threshold. Aircraft had a vertical speed of 700 feet per minute. In case of MSAW warning, procedure is to have the control tower to alert the pilots, ask them to verify their position and altitude and give them the correct QNH setting. That didn't happen. Since they didn't get visual contact with runway, the captain decided to do a go around with the aircraft now 102 feet above the ground. at 1,2 nautical miles away from the landing runway. When aircrafts execute a go around, they descend for a bit longer. So even when they disconnect the autopilot to pitch up the aircraft, it continued to descend. At this point the tower control finally contacts the aircraft. The pilots didn't respond to the message or maybe heared it. They were too focused on what they decided to execute. 3 seconds later, as the captain has finished to move the thrust lever into the TOGA position, the aircraft arrives at his lowest height, 6 feet above the ground. That's 183 centimeters. Pilots later stated that they didn't get any type of GPWS warning nor any radio altimeter call outs which they normally get.
The fact that it happened 0,8 nautical mile away from the runway could be why it didn't activate. It thoguht that the plane was about to land. As for lack of radio altimeters call out, that's strange.
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Airbus A320 takes off the WRONG way! Air Arabia flight 111
The plane is ready to takeoff at Sharjah. They planned for an intersection takeoff but as they enter the runway they turn the wrong way and accelerate for takeoff It happened on the 18th of September 2018 when Air Arabia Airbus 320 is scheduled to fly from Sharjah international airport in United Arab Emirates towards Salalah international airport in Oman. On board there were 42 passengers, 4 cabin crew and 2 pilots. Flight consisted of a 51 years old captain with over 22 000 hours of total flying time and he was working as a line training captain. Total hours on A320 was about 15 000 hours. He was accompanied by a 34 years old first officer, a 34 years old women who was doing her last stage of the MPL program. She had only 159 hours, all of them on the type. MPL means multiple pilot license program. As part of that she had to operate at least 100 sector with a commercial operator in this case Air Arabia. Her training had been progressing very well and at the beginning of her training she had been operating with a safety pilot, that's a third pilot that sits together with the pilots in the cockpit until the first officer has proven that in case of a pilot's incapacitation, she could safely operate the aircraft Safety pilot had been released and now she was flying by herself with the captain. The 2 of them had oeprated for 3 days previously. This was the fourth dsy of their roaster together. They had been operating out of Sharjah as their home base which mean they had flown a lot in and out of here. Runway 12 had been used during the previous 3 days. On this fourth day the wing was slightly turned towards a north westery direction. o Runway 30 was going to be used for departure that day.Weather in Sharjah was almost perfect. So it was decided at an early stage that the first officer was going to be the pilot flying for the first leg. First officer prepared for runway 30 departure, checked the standard instrument departure was loaded into the FMC.
They did the performance calculations and they did that from an intersection takeoff position, Bravo 14. Trying to take the performance from the closest available intersection is common among pilots. That's so that if the cabin crew is ready and pilots are finished with checklist or something, they can minimize taxi time and take off. If pilots can't use that intersection, they can continue taxi at full lenght and the performance will be valid. Takeoff speed was a V1 decision speed for 122 knots, a rotation speed VR of 127 and a safe climb out speed, V2, of 129. Those are fairly low speed because of the relatively low takeoff weight. This is a way to reduce the takeoff thrustdown to minimum needed for that takeoff distance. On Boeing it's called the assumed temperature and on Airbus it's the flex temperature. Some companies sometimes start 1 engine only during pushback and taxi out. If you do that, always give the engine 2 minutes of warm up at least prior to setting takeoff thrust. First officer tixied the aircraft out while the captain started the engine 2. Rolling takeoff is where the aircraft as it's lined up on the runway initiates the takeoff roll without stopping on the runway.It can be beneficial to do this during crosswinds because it can stop engine surges from happening for example. It's also a good thing when there is high traffic density. Air traffic tower was on maintenance so they used a standby near tower, lower than the original and there were some light posts that were obscuring the view of the takeoff positions especially for Bravo 14. It was recognized so there were CCTV cameras installed on both runway ends pointing towards the runway but the cameras weren't showing all the areas around the intersections. In a holding position of Bravo 14, the captain switches from the groudn ATC controller to othe tower agency controller and he calls up, telling the tower they were ready for departure.
First officer releases the parking brake, adds a little bit of thrust. The aircraft starts moving past the holding position at Bravo 14 towards the runway. As she does this she asks for the captain to execute the before takeoff checklist below the line. This is the part of the checklist pilots do when entering the runway. It includes items like putting the strobe lights on, selecting the auto brake selector to max in the case of the A320. After the aircraft starts moving, flight data recorder indicates that the auto brake selector is moved to max, showing the checklist is on his way to be completed.There are signs on the side of the taxiway indicating which runway is going in which direction. There are also markings and lead on lights but the lights are turned off at this stage because it's daylight. As they come out onto the runway, the first officer instead of turning left, turned right, now lining up in the direction of Runway 12 instead of Runway 30. Since they take off from that intersection thay only have 1 000 meters until the end of the runway. This is not noticed by the captain. They are several ways to see they are in the wrong position from takeoff, including markings on the runway. Since they are taking off from an intersection she wasn't expecting to see thr Runway 30 markings that would be further down thr Runway. The touchdown zone marking for Runway 30 is another indicator. The captain seems concerned about what happens inside the cockpit because he is not looking out at this point. There is a system called RAAS, standing for Runway Awareness and Advisory System. That system works together with the GPS and the internal nav database to tell the pilots where they are in reference to runways or taxiways. RAAS was not installed on this aircraft. Other applications from RAAS can tell you if you are about to take off from a taxiway. It can tell you when you come in for a landing that you have an unstable approach or that you ahve a too long landing.
There is also an internal airbus system called Takeoff Surveillance System that works together with the ECAM messaging. to tell the pilots they are not in the correct runway if the system feels takeoff thrust is being set but not in the position. This system was not installed eithr on this aircraft. On the flight mode annunciations when it comes to the point the runway should be enunciated, the box is blank an indication that the aircraft is not on the good takeoff runway.
The first officer calls it out to the captain who realize what is about to happen. The plane was now accelerating through around 50 knots. As they pass 57 knots the captain takes a curious decision. At this point, he reaches over, takes control of the aircraft and adds maximum thrust At this point there is 730 meters left in the runway, at 57 knots. He had the time to reject the takeoff. Runway 30 had something called the dispatched threshold meaning that the landing distance available was shorter than the takeoff distance possible. So the threshold markings for Runway 30 will come about 300 meters into the runway. So he sees the threshold markings coming and that's much closer than the 730 meters actually available. At 109 knots that's 9 decisions after he took the decision to continue the takeoff. He selects flaps 2 instead of flaps 1 probably because he realizes that the runway is just too short and he wants to get more lift enabling him to rotate the aircraft earlier and get it airbone. The aircraft finally takes off about 30 meter into the stopway, 30 meters after the end of the runway. When they take off, the speed if about 132 knots. When they do, the right gear slams into one of the approach lights for Runway 30. It makes a couple of deep cuts into the number 3 main wheel but the traffic control doesn't realize this until later.
Simulations of that incident showed that if the captain rejected the takeoff, closed the thrust levers and selected maximum reverse thrust, that would have given him maximum auto brake at that point. and the aircraft would have come to a stop before the end of the runway. Even if he rejecetd the takeoff at about 100 knots, 7 seconds after he made the decision to continue the takeoff, the aircraft still would have stopped within thr end of the runway. Standard operating procedure for takeoff in Airbus is that the pilot flying should apply nose down pressure on the control stick on his or her side. They should keep that from about 60 knots to 80 knots where they should lightly let go of the forward pressure. In this situation, she was sitting with that same amount of forward pressure. Because the captain didn't formally had taken control, He has not said " my controls " or " go ". First officer kept the forward pressure on her control stick all the way until rotation. The captain had the ability to press his priority button. If he kept that pressed for 40 seconds, that would have given controls to him. That didn't happen either. So in those type of situations the flight control computer try to average out the input from the right and the left side stick. As they started rotating, the first officer let go her side stick It seems that there was no discussion between pilots and air traffic contrl until they arrived at Oman ( except just after the takeoff ). When the plane landed at Oman, the cew had been contacted by Arabia Operation Control who was aware of the incident. But the captain said there was nothing wrong with the aicraft and didn't see the cuts as they were probably on the downside of the third main wheels.
Airbus A320 takes off the WRONG way! Air Arabia flight 111
The plane is ready to takeoff at Sharjah. They planned for an intersection takeoff but as they enter the runway they turn the wrong way and accelerate for takeoff It happened on the 18th of September 2018 when Air Arabia Airbus 320 is scheduled to fly from Sharjah international airport in United Arab Emirates towards Salalah international airport in Oman. On board there were 42 passengers, 4 cabin crew and 2 pilots. Flight consisted of a 51 years old captain with over 22 000 hours of total flying time and he was working as a line training captain. Total hours on A320 was about 15 000 hours. He was accompanied by a 34 years old first officer, a 34 years old women who was doing her last stage of the MPL program. She had only 159 hours, all of them on the type. MPL means multiple pilot license program. As part of that she had to operate at least 100 sector with a commercial operator in this case Air Arabia. Her training had been progressing very well and at the beginning of her training she had been operating with a safety pilot, that's a third pilot that sits together with the pilots in the cockpit until the first officer has proven that in case of a pilot's incapacitation, she could safely operate the aircraft Safety pilot had been released and now she was flying by herself with the captain. The 2 of them had oeprated for 3 days previously. This was the fourth dsy of their roaster together. They had been operating out of Sharjah as their home base which mean they had flown a lot in and out of here. Runway 12 had been used during the previous 3 days. On this fourth day the wing was slightly turned towards a north westery direction. o Runway 30 was going to be used for departure that day.Weather in Sharjah was almost perfect. So it was decided at an early stage that the first officer was going to be the pilot flying for the first leg. First officer prepared for runway 30 departure, checked the standard instrument departure was loaded into the FMC.
They did the performance calculations and they did that from an intersection takeoff position, Bravo 14. Trying to take the performance from the closest available intersection is common among pilots. That's so that if the cabin crew is ready and pilots are finished with checklist or something, they can minimize taxi time and take off. If pilots can't use that intersection, they can continue taxi at full lenght and the performance will be valid. Takeoff speed was a V1 decision speed for 122 knots, a rotation speed VR of 127 and a safe climb out speed, V2, of 129. Those are fairly low speed because of the relatively low takeoff weight. This is a way to reduce the takeoff thrustdown to minimum needed for that takeoff distance. On Boeing it's called the assumed temperature and on Airbus it's the flex temperature. Some companies sometimes start 1 engine only during pushback and taxi out. If you do that, always give the engine 2 minutes of warm up at least prior to setting takeoff thrust. First officer tixied the aircraft out while the captain started the engine 2. Rolling takeoff is where the aircraft as it's lined up on the runway initiates the takeoff roll without stopping on the runway.It can be beneficial to do this during crosswinds because it can stop engine surges from happening for example. It's also a good thing when there is high traffic density. Air traffic tower was on maintenance so they used a standby near tower, lower than the original and there were some light posts that were obscuring the view of the takeoff positions especially for Bravo 14. It was recognized so there were CCTV cameras installed on both runway ends pointing towards the runway but the cameras weren't showing all the areas around the intersections. In a holding position of Bravo 14, the captain switches from the groudn ATC controller to othe tower agency controller and he calls up, telling the tower they were ready for departure.
First officer releases the parking brake, adds a little bit of thrust. The aircraft starts moving past the holding position at Bravo 14 towards the runway. As she does this she asks for the captain to execute the before takeoff checklist below the line. This is the part of the checklist pilots do when entering the runway. It includes items like putting the strobe lights on, selecting the auto brake selector to max in the case of the A320. After the aircraft starts moving, flight data recorder indicates that the auto brake selector is moved to max, showing the checklist is on his way to be completed.There are signs on the side of the taxiway indicating which runway is going in which direction. There are also markings and lead on lights but the lights are turned off at this stage because it's daylight. As they come out onto the runway, the first officer instead of turning left, turned right, now lining up in the direction of Runway 12 instead of Runway 30. Since they take off from that intersection thay only have 1 000 meters until the end of the runway. This is not noticed by the captain. They are several ways to see they are in the wrong position from takeoff, including markings on the runway. Since they are taking off from an intersection she wasn't expecting to see thr Runway 30 markings that would be further down thr Runway. The touchdown zone marking for Runway 30 is another indicator. The captain seems concerned about what happens inside the cockpit because he is not looking out at this point. There is a system called RAAS, standing for Runway Awareness and Advisory System. That system works together with the GPS and the internal nav database to tell the pilots where they are in reference to runways or taxiways. RAAS was not installed on this aircraft. Other applications from RAAS can tell you if you are about to take off from a taxiway. It can tell you when you come in for a landing that you have an unstable approach or that you ahve a too long landing.
There is also an internal airbus system called Takeoff Surveillance System that works together with the ECAM messaging. to tell the pilots they are not in the correct runway if the system feels takeoff thrust is being set but not in the position. This system was not installed eithr on this aircraft. On the flight mode annunciations when it comes to the point the runway should be enunciated, the box is blank an indication that the aircraft is not on the good takeoff runway.
The first officer calls it out to the captain who realize what is about to happen. The plane was now accelerating through around 50 knots. As they pass 57 knots the captain takes a curious decision. At this point, he reaches over, takes control of the aircraft and adds maximum thrust At this point there is 730 meters left in the runway, at 57 knots. He had the time to reject the takeoff. Runway 30 had something called the dispatched threshold meaning that the landing distance available was shorter than the takeoff distance possible. So the threshold markings for Runway 30 will come about 300 meters into the runway. So he sees the threshold markings coming and that's much closer than the 730 meters actually available. At 109 knots that's 9 decisions after he took the decision to continue the takeoff. He selects flaps 2 instead of flaps 1 probably because he realizes that the runway is just too short and he wants to get more lift enabling him to rotate the aircraft earlier and get it airbone. The aircraft finally takes off about 30 meter into the stopway, 30 meters after the end of the runway. When they take off, the speed if about 132 knots. When they do, the right gear slams into one of the approach lights for Runway 30. It makes a couple of deep cuts into the number 3 main wheel but the traffic control doesn't realize this until later.
Simulations of that incident showed that if the captain rejected the takeoff, closed the thrust levers and selected maximum reverse thrust, that would have given him maximum auto brake at that point. and the aircraft would have come to a stop before the end of the runway. Even if he rejecetd the takeoff at about 100 knots, 7 seconds after he made the decision to continue the takeoff, the aircraft still would have stopped within thr end of the runway. Standard operating procedure for takeoff in Airbus is that the pilot flying should apply nose down pressure on the control stick on his or her side. They should keep that from about 60 knots to 80 knots where they should lightly let go of the forward pressure. In this situation, she was sitting with that same amount of forward pressure. Because the captain didn't formally had taken control, He has not said " my controls " or " go ". First officer kept the forward pressure on her control stick all the way until rotation. The captain had the ability to press his priority button. If he kept that pressed for 40 seconds, that would have given controls to him. That didn't happen either. So in those type of situations the flight control computer try to average out the input from the right and the left side stick. As they started rotating, the first officer let go her side stick It seems that there was no discussion between pilots and air traffic contrl until they arrived at Oman ( except just after the takeoff ). When the plane landed at Oman, the cew had been contacted by Arabia Operation Control who was aware of the incident. But the captain said there was nothing wrong with the aicraft and didn't see the cuts as they were probably on the downside of the third main wheels.
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BETRAYED by their Own AIRPLANE? The Strange Case of Alitalia flight 404.
November 14, 1990, Alitalia Flight 404 was moments from landing when disaster struck. A failure in the aircraft's navigation system led the autopilot to follow a false glide slope that didn’t exist. As multiple warning signs were ignored or missed, eventually it became too late. Pilots flew with each other in previous day so they knew each other quite well. We were about to operate 4 more evening legs; The plane was a McDonnell Douglas DC 9 32. First they would go from Linate to Frankfurt airport and then go back to Linate followed by 2 shorter flights to Zurich and back. Only issue is that it looked like some fog might form over Linate on their last leg. . The captain was a 47 years old italian with 10 200 hours of flying time. He started his career in the military before joining the company where he flew on the DC 8, DC 9 and B727 before getting on the DC 9 30. He had almost 3 200 hours of expeirnce on this type but only 1 200 hours as captain on it. Having a total flight time of 811 hours, the first officer was significantly less experienced. He was a 28 years old italian and started his professionnal career in the previous summer. Looking at the previous log, captain saw 2 remarks from the previous captain. Both of them had something to do with navigationnal and autopilot system.
When engineers were advised on the issues, they swapped the 2 nav radio receivers around to see if that could rectify the failure. After, they allowed the aircraft d=to dispatch after having downgraded it to CAT I approach only. They probably wanted to verify if it was the receivers or instruments that caused the problem. It was during the third flight of the day that troubles started. After landing to Frankfurt there was a broken groud flood light and it was the only technical issue until then. During the second flight back to Linate, same issues with nav radios were again observed.
BETRAYED by their Own AIRPLANE? The Strange Case of Alitalia flight 404.
November 14, 1990, Alitalia Flight 404 was moments from landing when disaster struck. A failure in the aircraft's navigation system led the autopilot to follow a false glide slope that didn’t exist. As multiple warning signs were ignored or missed, eventually it became too late. Pilots flew with each other in previous day so they knew each other quite well. We were about to operate 4 more evening legs; The plane was a McDonnell Douglas DC 9 32. First they would go from Linate to Frankfurt airport and then go back to Linate followed by 2 shorter flights to Zurich and back. Only issue is that it looked like some fog might form over Linate on their last leg. . The captain was a 47 years old italian with 10 200 hours of flying time. He started his career in the military before joining the company where he flew on the DC 8, DC 9 and B727 before getting on the DC 9 30. He had almost 3 200 hours of expeirnce on this type but only 1 200 hours as captain on it. Having a total flight time of 811 hours, the first officer was significantly less experienced. He was a 28 years old italian and started his professionnal career in the previous summer. Looking at the previous log, captain saw 2 remarks from the previous captain. Both of them had something to do with navigationnal and autopilot system.
When engineers were advised on the issues, they swapped the 2 nav radio receivers around to see if that could rectify the failure. After, they allowed the aircraft d=to dispatch after having downgraded it to CAT I approach only. They probably wanted to verify if it was the receivers or instruments that caused the problem. It was during the third flight of the day that troubles started. After landing to Frankfurt there was a broken groud flood light and it was the only technical issue until then. During the second flight back to Linate, same issues with nav radios were again observed.