One of the earliest telemetry systems was a beacon where you can only tell how far away you are from it. Like, you know you're X miles away, and you can see X increase or decrease. But you had no indication what direction it was in, or any of the miracles we take for granted today. So they would set up a path of these beacons, and you would fly from one to the next, and that's how you'd know where you were going. I want to say "at night", but honestly I am probably misremembering some of the fascinating details. But the point was, you were often navigating using primitive instruments that gave you very little data about how not to die within the next N minutes.
From the title, I thought the plane had accidentally landed with the gear up. But no, a master warning kicked in and the worst that happened was... they pulled up and went around. Woo.
but it really is woo. It's so fucking cool that humanity as a whole went from no flight to safe flight in one human lifespan. One old guy's worth of life! Modern civilization is only a few thousand generations old, and we're going from ground to air to air-but-safe in the blink of a slice of a microsecond of human evolution, relatively speaking.
I wish I'll be around to see it happen for space travel. SpaceX is coming tantalizingly close, yet space-but-safe is a different matter entirely. I think it will take a few generations for us to work out those problems.
A lot of my navigation training involved a stop watch, map and a compass just a year or so ago!
--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-directional_beacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_direction_finder#Automat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_deviation_indicator
Larger aircraft never fly on NDB. Everything with a flight management system (which is all airliners currently in service in developed countries) will use GPS + DME/DME + inertial systems as backup and auto-tunes VOR also as a backup. The computer will not use NDB to update the position, even if GPS fails.
We do fly procedures (holdings for example often in Europe) based on NDB, but we do it using the GPS position of the NDB, not the actual radio signal.
I wouldn’t say “most aircraft” rely on NDB — at least not most IFR-certified aircraft actually flying. It’s pointless to use it. ILS and RNAV are by far the most common. NDB approaches aren’t required anymore on an instrument checkride.
Yet these people just...jumped.
Talk about commitment and belief!
Franz Reichelt warrants a mention at this juncture. In 1912 he was so invested in the success of his parachute invention that he refused the pleas of his friends to test it with a dummy and simply jumped off the Eiffel tower, to his death. Rather shockingly, Wikipedia has video footage of this event:
The Wright Bros were very concerned about their personal safety and went to considerable lengths in their experiments to be safe.
There were large concrete arrows painted yellow every 15-20 miles and towers with flashing lights for night time. This was the 1920s so there weren't so many lights in rural areas.
The arrow shown in the wikipedia article looks a little rough to access, but the one at 37.0648086,-113.5952549 is an easy walk from the back of a suburban neighborhood. And I mean, what else are you going to do to break up a drive through southern Utah?
- didn’t remind approach to hand me off to tower
- didn’t talk to the tower at all
- landed at a class c airport without authorization
- radioed approach from the taxiway that I was holding and then realized how many things I fucked up.
It’s so easy to forget stuff and get tunnel vision and “remind ATC” isn’t on the checklist.
B - Brakes: Checked / Working O - Oil: Temps/Pressures Green U - Undercarriage: Down / Green M - Mixture, Master, Mags: Rich, On, Both F - Fuel Pump: On I - Instruments: Baro, DG, Radio's set S - Switches: All in H - Harnesses: Secure -- P - Pitch: Full fine U - Undercarriage: Down / Green F - Flaps: Set L - Landing Clearance: Received R - Runway: Clear
Most pilots in the US learn a GUMPS check:
G – Gas (Fuel on the proper tank, fuel pump on as required, positive fuel pressure) U – Undercarriage (landing gear down) M – Mixture (fuel mixture set) P – Propeller (prop set) S – Seat belts and Switches
Between flying the aircraft, communicating with ATC, and ensuring all the procedures are correctly followed (including monitoring each other) - there is a lot of stuff going on in the cockpit; and things are happening really quickly; you can sometimes get "behind" the aircraft - especially when unexpected things crop up, kudos to the pilots for recognising an unstable approach, going around, and then responding appropriately to the alarms in the cockpit and not being afraid to go around again.
I'd say it takes around 3-5 seconds for each checklist item; calling out, verifying it's in the required state, and continuing to the next one - you're looking at about 30 seconds on average; which is less time than what the pilots would have between going around and coming back for another attempt. Not to mention they're already likely following a missed approach procedure etc etc, so already pretty distracted, and then given "unexpected" (to them) directions by ATC (different circuit direction).
--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUMMMFITCHH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUMPS
If it does that while the crew is distracted (why else would they forget the gear) you're putting them in an unstable situation, close to the ground, descending rapidly.
The current warning is fine. After what this crew got, if you still continue, it will literally shout "too low, gear!" at you in a continuous loop.
Qantas https://forums.jetphotos.com/forum/general-discussion-forums...
El Al https://www.timesofisrael.com/el-al-pilots-nearly-try-landin...
IAF https://indianexpress.com/article/india/chandigarh/when-an-a...
Jetstar, 2012 (!) http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/323319
Once this 737 MAX stuff dies down, we'll probably stop seeing every pilot fart or hiccup reaching the front page. Pilots make mistakes, they always have and always will, we just haven't seen them reported as much. Commercial aircraft are still as safe as they ever were.
It's a little bit bigger of a deal because this was their second going around due to being misconfigured for landing.
The terrain warning system is aware of where airports are and will also call "too low, gear" if you're approaching an airport without the gear down.
> Investigators said that because the pilots flew the second circuit at 1500ft, the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitor (ECAM) had not reset on the second approach and it did not display a landing memo at 950ft.
“The absence of the landing memo should have prompted the flight crew to perform the items of the landing checklist as a ‘read-and-do’ checklist,” it said.
Like the lock icon in a browser’s address bar, it is not effective to rely on the user to notice the absence of an indicator.
I'd expect that the aviation industry be very much aware that relying on people noticing that something is NOT there is error-prone. But they did have several backup options, so even if the crew inadvertently managed to work around the first one, the second one (700ft warning) worked as expected.
For example, on takeoff the pilot monitoring watches the instruments and reports "positive rate" (means "we're climbing from the runway in a stable manner"), as pilot flying you always command "gear up" at that point. It is quite common in simulator practice to get an engine failure right after takeoff, and the most made mistake is forgetting to command gear up, because you're handling the emergency right at the moment you would normally do it.
Luckily (as described in the article) you would normally run a checklist after any of these events, and usually that makes you catch the mistake.
The distraction argument didn't really make any sense at all to me. They were not distracted, they were flying the aircraft.
The UX moral here is that if you have a system that always prompts the user then you have to live with the fact that failing to prompt will almost always result in failure to act.
This surprised me (I’m a naive non-pilot). I guess I assumed that things like this would be decided by manufacturers and regulatory agencies, with (as happened here) pilots making on the spot decisions. I had not realized different companies might make different safety protocols. Is that common?
SOPs are very detailed, down to the level of the things each pilot says and how the other responds. As an example: "80 knots" is said by the pilot flying when reaching that speed on takeoff, the other pilot verifies and says "checked", or "abort" if the speed on their side is not the same. You don't say "hey Bob, mine is different", you say exactly what the SOP prescribes.
It makes it possible to fly with every other pilot from the same company. Usually pilots don't know each other before the start of the trip. It's safe because everyone does everything in exactly the same way.
I’m pretty sure the manufacturer would say if something wasn’t going to work on that aircraft.
I have read that the frequency of major safety incidents is so rare now that detection and diagnosis of errors has had to go farther and farther "upstream" towards monitoring and detecting the potential contributors to eventual safety problems. There just are almost no more accidents to study each year. A non-stabilized approaches is itself now cause for study. Truly admirable.
Which points out that the incorrect configuration was on their second go around
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iigjodCiK0g
Early, setting the thesis of the video, "...these [loss of control] accidents always follow a pattern. The pattern is: an event occurs, the event causes distraction, distraction causes loss of control."
While not exactly loss of control, it certainly sounds similar and seems to follow that central thesis.
