Animation of inexerience.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/07/ntsb-wraps-up-asiana-214/
An Airbus pilot failing to understand how a real plane (Boeing) flies.
One of the pilots preset the automatic landing speed, probably before takeoff. At landing time nobody activates the system.
On approach, the autopilot was then turned off and the plane throttled back losing airspeed and elevation faster than it should. On a Boeing aircraft the manual throttle controls move to agree with what the computer says. It is called feedback. A pilot can visually see it or if he is busy he can rest his finger tips on the throttle knobs or posts and can feel any change. On a Airbus there is not visual or tactile clue to what the computer is doing, so why bother to look. Fait accompli, French for "you are dead before you know it".
Any pilot should have an internal sense that he wants to walk away at the end of the day, so at some point instinct should kick in.
A few years ago the Air France Airbus died because instincts were overruled by French computer thinking.
An airplane needs three things to survive, control, airspeed and altitude. If a plane stalls at altitude the pilot can nose it down, trading altitude for airspeed and regain control. At 100 feet off the deck that option is out and the pilot chose the wrong second option when he pulled back on the yoke. The plane had little airspeed to trade off for elevation and that plan failed in seconds. The plane stalled and lost altitude even faster. The only option available was to pull back on the throttle and maybe get out of Dodge. It is possible if the pilot had done nothing that flight 214 would have cleared the seawall and had a hard landing. It is probable with more throttle that it would have cleared the seawall and touched down and could have landed safely. Because there was construction at the far end of that now shorter runway with the slow landing speed a go around may not have been possible.
Given the wrong decision the plane stalled and struck the seawall nose high and losing it's tail. The left engine hit the seawall or the ground causing the plane to spin counterclockwise. Seconds later the plane was tail first and high, had it still had tail surfaces they would have likely caught enough air to flip it over causing great loss of life. Instead it spun almost full circle and pancaked. With such a low speed there was little energy to cause it to continue.
I would say that the Lord gave the best results given such a bad situation created by man.
Paul in PA
The horizontal stabilizer pushes down, not up.
Other than that, good analysis.
This accident is obviously caused by lack of basic stick and rudder flying by the pilots who seemed to have been merely along for the ride. They should have stuffed the throttles into the fire wall and kept the nose down.
When the horizontal stabilizer is going through the air backwards it pushes up, especially with high attack angle. Look at the animation.
I first saw the back first tail high attitude on an early news clip and then it disappeared for days. The only thing I did not see in actual video was the left engine heading South.
Oops, I said pull back on the throttle. That would be a Big Oops.
Paul in PA
I forgot about the throttle mistake.
Some of the comments in the wired story are interesting too.
I have been an Instructor and I found it easier to monitor things because the student took the workload of flying off my plate. But I was clearly in charge too.
The hard question to answer is why did these highly experienced pilots fail so badly at such a basic flying task? This is a psychological question and probably related to cockpit relationships. Maybe each thought the other was monitoring the approach, too much trust in one another.
Even just looking out the front windows they should've seen 4 red PAPI lights. This reminds me of the time I focused on a traffic light. When it turned green I drove straight ahead right past a large white sign "DO NOT ENTER, BUSSES AND BICYCLES OK", I never saw it, dumb I know. I did it right in front of a motor cop, almost an expensive mistake. He didn't show (I pleaded not guilty) so the Referee dismissed the case. I was unfamiliar with the intersection and this is an example of poor design which will result in a high number of mistakes. The instrument panel design is probably a factor. Also the cockpit culture, complacency and failure to use checklists and follow procedures.
Would not the copilot normally have hands on the throttle during the landing?
The instructor was in the copilot's seat and he may have been distracted with instructing or observing.
****
In the end it was a lot of little things, runway under construction and shortened.
Runway L 28 was 10,600 feet, 300 feet should not be noticed.
Landing guidance system turned off. Was it off because it was off or was it off because it could not be recalibrated to different touchdown point?
A raised seawall at the end of the runway.
A pilot experienced on one plane, learning a different technique on another.
A very new first time instructor.
The new instructor being very experienced on a Boeing having no idea what an Airbus pilot may be anticipating.
This was the first time pilot and instructor ever flew together.
A pilot landing in a Boeing at an airport he may never have even landed in as a Boeing copilot. He had had multiple Airbus landings there.
Was GPS in use? The first and worst GPS jamming I am aware of was in San Francisco Bay. Coincidence?
Three pilots in the cockpit, no pilot watching the airspeed.
Last comment, passengers died on US soil, but the US has no authority to require blood tests of foreign airline pilots? That should change.
Paul in PA
A lot of people think it's a big deal that this was his first landing at SFO. Remember, every pilot has a first time at every airport he flies in to.
Except for terrain obstructions that may necessitate a steeper descent or a short runway, every approach should be flown the same and one airport approach is very little different from any other - especially when you are talking about runways over 10,000 feet long. And while I don't have the exact specs in front of me, I'd be willing to bet that the approach targets (speed, altitude, etc) are very close to the same for every big piece of heavy iron out there.
I can't figure out what these pilots were up to. If nothing else they should have felt or sensed they were too slow. After you have flown several thousand hours your senses should warn you that something ain't right. Then you better figure it out PDQ.
Paul you outline a truth about accidents. They are almost always caused by a series of small factors that combine to cause the accident. If they had engaged the auto-throttle then they would've probably gotten away with their sloppy procedures one more time.
I doubt GPS had anything to do with it; they were lined up with the runway, maybe a little right of center per the debris trail I saw but they would've hit the pavement.
I agree and they were lined up and on altitude at the beginning so the hard part was done except for the stabilized approach at which they failed miserably.
It's going to take time and careful examination of the pilots to figure out exactly where these pilots went off the rails.
I did notice on their descent profile that I saw somewhere that at about 1000 feet they dropped fairly quickly below the glide path which they arrested the high rate of descent but they never recovered from being too low. It looks like they glided on idle power to a point too short of the runway then tried to make the runway with power and increasing angle of attack, the classic stretch the glide accident.
Cockpit tunnel vision
Remember Eastern Flight 401?
In December 1972 an Eastern Airlines flight was inbound to Miami International with a flight crew of 4 very experienced individuals. As they were holding a pattern all 4 of the crew got involved in a discussion about a burned out indicator light. No one remembered disengaging the autopilot. The black box recorded the men's conversation as low altitude alarms were going off in the background...it wasn't until about 10 seconds before impact that any of them realized the plane wasn't in level flight (it was night).
The aircraft flew into the everglades 20 miles from the end of the runway at around 250 mph, killing 2/3 of the 175 souls on board. Apparently all of the crew thought one of the others was flying the plane.
I guess these pilots can get so mentally fixed that external stimulus doesn't alter their tunnel vision. This seems odd to me, but I've never flown anything near that big.
What time I do have in the left seat has been SEL VFR. Airspeed, altitude, attitude and the end of the runway seem like primary things to get a grip on when landing, but good high-time commercial pilots loose sight of those things occasionally.
Cockpit tunnel vision
Yes I remember that accident.
That was the beginning of CRM (crew resource management).
