[omegant]

It goes way beyond checklist stuff.

Imagine having an intermediate system in your Tesla, one between fully manual and the autopilot. This system uses the navigation capabilities of the autopilot to draw in the big screen some squares that guide you to your destination without the need to look outside. Something you may find in a videogame. This system is helpfull and easy to use, and allows you to pay attention to more important matters.

Well, now imagine getting so used to this system that you forget how to drive without the squares telling you what to do every single moment. So used that if the squares guide you to drive straight to a wall at 100mph you do it without hesitation.

This is what supposedly happened in this case. The flight director is there to help you, but you are supposed to know how to fly without it.

When you rotate an airliner the initial pitch is around 15 degrees nose up, that way your rate of climb and the optimal climb speed is maintained.

They kept the nose almost horizontal, against any natural instinct for a pilot. They almost overrun the runway without rotating, and they barely rotated just enough to be able to keep the flight director centered in their screen.

It seems that the speed went beyond the structural limit of the tyres (around 200 kts) and if they didn’t retract the flaps, beyond their structural limit too. And then they proceeded to fly almost scratching the obstacles in their path.

Why does something like this happpens? Because in an airline like Emirates actual piloting skills are actively punished!. You are not allowed to fly the plane manually, nor disconect automatic systems if they are available.

They expect robot like precission applying procedures, modern airliners log dozens of instruments and have automatic reports when procedure limitation are exceeding (is a big brother like work environment). This may seem a good philosophy, but it actually creates an situation where pilots loose necessary skills, and when computers or procedures fail, as they often do in airplanes, pilots are not able to react properly anymore.

I’m sure Emirates will punish the pilots and will set new procedures over the current ones, to try to avoid this kind of situations in the future. They will solve nothing, they will only make it worse. Is a culture of fear and punishment. This also happens in other middle east airlines like Qatar. Airlines in Asia are making this mistake too.

In contrast airlines in the US and Europe (except Ryanair and some other British carriers) give pilots much more freedom regarding manual flight, which helps them to keep their skills honed.

Hope this gives a different perspective on the problem. The wrong altitude selection is the minor of the problems in this case IMHO.

I am an Airline captain with 22 years of experience (737, MD88, A320, A330 and A340) and more than 14k flight hours.

Edit, some typos and making a couple of sentences more clear.

[kchoudhu]

This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training program.

He was recently bemoaning the following situation:

1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!)

2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time.

3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!

This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again, failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.

Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.

[WalterBright]

My dad flew for 20 years in the Air Force. He more than once defied procedure that would have put him in jeopardy on a flight. He told me he was not going to die because of a bureaucratic rule written by someone whose ass was safely behind a desk.

One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew into the ground. He said he'd be damned if he was going to do that, and kept one eye on the lead and the other eye on the ground.

He spent some years as a flight instructor, who sits in the back seat. There were incidents where the student would panic and crash the airplane. That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.

(That Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic a few years ago was an example of the junior pilot panicking and holding the stick back till it crashed.)

[jacquesm]

On that note: I have had a triple go-around and even though everybody was super happy about making their connections on time I personally thought that that was an extremely unsafe landing with the port side wing coming uncomfortably close to the tarmac. Severe windshear, ours was the last flight to land before the airport was closed. The pilot stood at the door to say goodbye to the passengers and was visibly upset.

Any kind of pressure on pilots to make connections or to reduce the number of go arounds or even alternates should be pushed back against hard. It can only lead to more accidents.

[Aeolun]

Ooh, it’s like internally reporting security vulnerabilities!

[WalterBright]

Interesting comparing this with the 737MAX crashes. There, I regularly get excoriated on HN for suggesting that the pilots not knowing to turn off the stab trim system when it goes haywire is unreasonable, despite it being a "memory item" and despite Emergency Airworthiness Directives reiterating this.

[bumby]

It’s because from a safety standpoint, procedural controls are not preferable to engineered controls. PPE controls are lower still.

It would be like alleviating a motorcycle manufacturer from responsibility of a bad design by claiming riders wouldn’t be hurt if they were wearing all their protective gear. It may be true while also being sub-standard design practice for a safety-critical system.

[jquery]

I made that same point repeatedly, to mixed reception. Boeing is absolutely at fault but the airlines that had crashes were also guilty of cutting corners. Boeing is (rightly) held to a high standard. I try to fly on airlines that have similar high standards for the operations.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

I would like to know what the Ryanair pilots are ordered to do by their higher ups. Been on a few of them in Europe and they all hit the runway pretty hard coming back down.

[smilespray]

That's just to shake loose any spare change you might have in your pockets. Pays for the crew's busfare.

[jrs235]

Maybe they prefer Navy pilots? /s

An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway and you have to get the hook down.

[jacquesm]

Try KLM. Drop it down from 3' up and ensure firm contact with the runway, rather than those endless landings where nobody knows if you've touched down or not. Better to avoid the ambiguity. You have to break ground effect somehow and the decisive way is the best, then at least you know you're no longer flying but rolling.

[throwawayboise]

I think GP is saying that Ryanair demands that pilots use the automation to the fullest extent, and disallows "hand flying" (with an exeption, one presumes, for when the automatic systems fail, and a hope that the pilots remember how to hand fly).

[alamortsubite]

Navy pilot vs Air Force pilot.

[redis_mlc]

FYI: firm landings are actually correctly done, especially with rain or drizzle. It should not feel like a crash though.

The worst landing I ever had was when I landed with no sensation of touching down on the runway (a zero feet rate of descent.) Both myself and my CFI went nuts trying to figure out if we were down, or still flying along the runway and about to bounce.

[emptybottle]

When you say an airline like Emirates, what do you mean? Are they in a certain category of airline?

I’m wondering how to avoid flying on airlines who have bad practices but at present I’m not sure how to tell.

[t0mas88]

Gulf carriers in general share that reputation for bad working conditions for crews and bad safety practices.

Your safest choice is a US or EU legacy carrier. But for example in Asia you will not have that choice for local routes. Then there aren't that many things you can see on the outside. But one thing that can help is going with a large airline that also operates long haul flights into the US and Europe. There is a list for example of airlines banned from operating into Europe. You get on that list by having questionable safety or maintenance practices. So being allowed to operate flights to Europe is a small positive signal.

[omegant]

Yes Gulf carriers, but not all of them, Emirates and Qatar are the most important.

They really have high standard and try their best to have the best safety standars. Is not for lack of trying. Is that their system has gome far too much in one direction that is now backfiring.

Absolutely you may have an airline that allows too much manual flying and too low procedure standars (it is what happened at first in commercial aviation). There is a sweet spot between standart procedure and manual proficiency, and some airlines have been going way beyond that spot for some time.

[vt240]

Testimony given during the Asiana NTSB Sunshine hearing is probably a good place to start, for anyone who wants more detail on your comment here.

[nobodyandproud]

Some good lessons there for automated driving; or any skills that once acquired, are lost when taken for granted and not actively cultivated.

[bencollier49]

Out of interest, which British carriers? Am British so would like to know so I can avoid.

I thought Ryanair were Irish?

Also, why are Ryanair et al doing this? I mean, obviously Ryanair have a bit of a reputation.

[brigandish]

Ryanair is an Irish company but Stansted is its largest operating base.

[jacquesm]

Good point about the tire v-max, that wasn't mentioned elsewhere as far as I've read on this.

[hammock]

The systems you describe exist. Backup cameras, blind spot indicators, etc