Here is an interesting anatomy of a tragedy from Der Spiegel of last year's mysterious crash of Air Frances's Airbus A330 -
The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447
The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447
I was doing a check flight on a 727 after a C Check (overhaul). We figured out on rotation that our pitot system was f'ed up (both matched at 80 kts then went miles apart). Flew pwer and attitude with no problem. Not a big deal.
I have friends at Hawaiian in A330 training right now. Click-click, click-click. AP & At are off and there are charts for power/attitude flying. Just like a Boeing. These Frogs got the utlimate pink sheet for airmanship.
You're speaking out of your ass. This is a normal procedure called enroute re-dispatching. It is used all the time and is perfectly safe. We use it at Hawaiian for our Manila flight. International / overwater flying in the airlines requires a lot bigger fuel reserve than your normal FAR 91 IFR flight. When you reach your redispatch point if you do not have the required reserve fuel for your destination from that point, you land at the airport you were originally dispatched to and get more. It's not a loophole. It's safe, it's legal and it's professional.Did any one else pick up on the "loophole" the pilot used to depart - by entering Bordeaux instead of Paris in the flight computer as the final destination so as to be able to take off without the legally mandated planned reserve? Not a good sign for the professionalism of the pilot.
You're speaking out of your ass. This is a normal procedure called enroute re-dispatching. It is used all the time and is perfectly safe. We use it at Hawaiian for our Manila flight. International / overwater flying in the airlines requires a lot bigger fuel reserve than your normal FAR 91 IFR flight. When you reach your redispatch point if you do not have the required reserve fuel for your destination from that point, you land at the airport you were originally dispatched to and get more. It's not a loophole. It's safe, it's legal and it's professional.
Fair enough, but "loophole" was exactly how the article described it and didn't portray it to be common or proper practice.
When you reach your redispatch point if you do not have the required reserve fuel ... It's not a loophole. It's safe, it's legal and it's professional.
Good to know that my worst fears about Airbus aren't quite so bad.
Sidebar: I thought the 80kt power and airspeed check was unique to P-3s. Then again, this is from a guy who's only flown four different kinds of aircraft so I may be showing my lack of knowledges.
The human factors and automation part of this story (and the informed comments by HAL Pilot, Catmando- thanks) have me scratching my head.
In college (engineering) I had to write a short paper about an infamous and then-in-the-news airliner crash in Cali, Colombia (AA 965). Some of the aftermath centered around the spoilers, which on that type were not designed to automatically retract whenever the pilots went to full power (in some types of aircraft the opposite is true). This was from an engineering perspective and not an operator perspective (fair enough). My prof wasn't too happy with me that my position on the spoilers was that while sure, it was a dicked up design feature, the pilots really should have known that was how their airplane worked...
And the great debate of automation and aircraft design philosophy goes on.
....
... Some of the aftermath centered around the spoilers, which on that type were not designed to automatically retract whenever the pilots went to full power (in some types of aircraft the opposite is true). This was from an engineering perspective and not an operator perspective (fair enough). My prof wasn't too happy with me that my position on the spoilers was that while sure, it was a dicked up design feature, the pilots really should have known that was how their airplane worked...
And the great debate of automation and aircraft design philosophy goes on.