Pilots need to use the autopilot/FMS more!

[TeeVee]

"good piloting? you've gotta be kidding me. and this coming from mr. safety himself.

part of the job of being a pilot is to fly to your INTENDED airport. making good landings at wrong airports shows you were so distracted, you didn't just forget some detail like a flap setting, you missed your destination.

evan would be screaming at the top of his lungs about how training and the failure to rely/utilize basic piloting skills were the heart of the problem had this ended differently and 100+ folks were dead. but since no one died, all there is to talk about is how wonderful these idiots are because they were able to land on a short runway.

[elaw]

It's interesting that you would claim that being distracted makes one a bad pilot. Do you think it's possible for a human to be 100% immune to distraction? If so, you might want to get your hands on a dictionary and brush up on the distinction between humans and machines.

You seem to want to think that a "good pilot" is one that never ever makes a mistake. Well guess what, all humans make mistakes, and the measure of someone's skills is often not whether they make a mistake, but how they deal with it.

Example of bad piloting: an AF pilot (or pilots) makes a mistake by misinterpreting the instrument indications when an airspeed probe freezes over. The pilot(s) then compounds this mistake by adding an additional mistake: pulling back on the stick until the plane stalls. Pilot(s) compound the mistakes even more by continuing to pull back on the stick while the plane spirals into the ocean and everyone ends up dead.

Now here's an example of a pilot who may not be "top gun" but is a whole lot better than the one(s) I just described: pilot makes a mistake while on approach to an airport... he identifies the wrong runway and navigates the plane to land on it. He presumably recognizes his mistake at some point very late in the landing process, but skillfully performs a short-field landing with the result that no people or equipment are harmed.

Does that make the person(s) in the second case perfect pilots? No. But I'd reserve the term "turd" and ones like it for the pilot(s) in the first example who performed much worse than the ones in the second example.

[TeeVee]

Let me divert from the core of the discussion a bit.
Does the bolded part make any difference when judging severity of the pilots' acts and mistakes?

I mean, I know that in criminal law the consequence of one's act affects the severity of the punishment: You aim and shot at somebody's head with all the intention of killing that person, and the crime is not the same if, just by chance, you miss, you slightly hurt the person, you seriously hurt the person or you kill the person. I really don't like it because we are judging random chance and not the act and intention itself, but I understand that justice has a component of revenge and if somebody kills my son I will want that person much more dead than if he fails and just scratches him (I'd want him/her dead to, but not as badly).

But analyzing it with a systemic approach: Imagine two parallel universes that are nearly identical. So you have two set of identical crews, that are equally professional, conscious, motivated, awake and well (or bad) trained flying two identical planes an making identical mistakes along the way. Both miss identical airports that are their intended destination and wrongly land at another airport that are identical one to the other and identically located, the runway is too short in both of them, the only difference in one of them there is a cliff at the end of the runway while in the other one there is just flat, smooth, solid dirt. In one case everybody dies and in the other case the plane is towed to the gate where everybody disembark normally and the only maintenance needed is to brush the dirt.

Another difference (consequence of the above) is that one of them is aired in all the TV stations and discussed in all the internet forum while the other one is only posted at AvHerald.

Is one crew more "turd" than the other? Is the mistake itself worse in one case than the other? Somehow I tend to think that you would not be so hard with the crew that, just by chance, had the better outcome.

As a side note (or maybe not so "side"), almost daily you'll find in AvHerald cases of planes that overrun the runway, even when the crew landed in the CORRECT airport and runway.

i don't do criminal law so i'm FAR from an expert in the subject. however, other than in cases where the victim dies, the extent of injury is not controlling. i.e., if you intended to assault someone, say by just giving a nice deep cut on the arm, and you just happen to sever an artery that leads to them nearly dying, you are still getting charged with the same crime--likely, assault with a deadly weapon. although if it really isn't your day, the prosecutor may go for attempted murder as an alternate theory.

i have not debated whether these two pilots were good or bad. i merely have said that they are turds and they f'd up. i also quoted and wholly agree with a statement that what they did requires a special kind of stupid.

i cold care less if the outcome is as it was or if all died as a result of careening off the cliff and bursting into flames. the cause is the same. so no, it doesn't make a difference to me that in this case the turds got lucky. should we all sit back and hope and pray to be the lucky ones? or do we have a reasonable expectation as paying passengers, that the two people up front at least will get us to the right airport?

[TeeVee]

It's interesting that you would claim that being distracted makes one a bad pilot. Do you think it's possible for a human to be 100% immune to distraction? If so, you might want to get your hands on a dictionary and brush up on the distinction between humans and machines.

You seem to want to think that a "good pilot" is one that never ever makes a mistake. Well guess what, all humans make mistakes, and the measure of someone's skills is often not whether they make a mistake, but how they deal with it.

Example of bad piloting: an AF pilot (or pilots) makes a mistake by misinterpreting the instrument indications when an airspeed probe freezes over. The pilot(s) then compounds this mistake by adding an additional mistake: pulling back on the stick until the plane stalls. Pilot(s) compound the mistakes even more by continuing to pull back on the stick while the plane spirals into the ocean and everyone ends up dead.

Now here's an example of a pilot who may not be "top gun" but is a whole lot better than the one(s) I just described: pilot makes a mistake while on approach to an airport... he identifies the wrong runway and navigates the plane to land on it. He presumably recognizes his mistake at some point very late in the landing process, but skillfully performs a short-field landing with the result that no people or equipment are harmed.

Does that make the person(s) in the second case perfect pilots? No. But I'd reserve the term "turd" and ones like it for the pilot(s) in the first example who performed much worse than the ones in the second example.

you're misconstruing my words. of course NO ONE is perfect or even close. and yes EVERY pilot makes mistakes, as they are all human. but there are mistakes and then there are MISTAKES. and i'll pretty much guarantee you that the machines in this instance did not make a mistake or mislead the humans.

take for example pilots that have lined up with and landed on taxiways. mistake? you bet. understandable? mostly. avionics gizmos and gadgets are very good--damn near perfect. but the distance between a taxiway and a runway is a couple of yards, so lining up for the taxiway is a somewhat understandable and mostly forgivable mistake in vfr conditions.

now, either failing completely to program your flight path/plan into the fms, is it? or autopilot, or whatever it is that you program, or absolutely, completely and totally ignoring that device and the nice big digital map display for an extended period of time is not understandable and is an unforgivable MISTAKE.

i'd venture to say that 100% of pilots make mistakes. i'd also venture to say that 99.999999999999999% of pilots never land at the wrong airport.

lastly, this is not a case of human error where the pilots were understandably overwhelmed because of massive or cascading systems failures. in those cases, even if they made mistakes like not following/performing memory items, i can completely understand and forgive them. i never forget that they are human beings who, despite all the other crap they have to think about, are also thinking of their own impending deaths as they fall out of control.

so no, i don't expect or demand perfection from pilots or anyone else for that matter.

[Evan]

There's always room for the go elsewhere is the short answer.

Fixed.

[ATLcrew]

show me one time where the technology screwed up and fooled the humans into landing at the wrong and potentially very dangerous airport.

This incident was pretty close.

http://www.caa.govt.nz/fulltext/Documents/CAAProfile_2001.pdf

[TeeVee]

This incident was pretty close.


http://www.caa.govt.nz/fulltext/Docu...ofile_2001.pdf

page can't be found...

[MCM]

Just to add fuel to the fire - Air India just tried to do it down under in Melbourne in their 787, lining up for a visual approach to the secondary airport with a parallel runway (with the large note on the chart saying not to get the two confused, including flashing strobes to help you identify the correct runway).

ATC picked it up and directed them to the correct runway.

A few nice issues in this one to look at.

[TeeVee]

at least Aussie atc weren't sleeping like our US guys

[MCM]

Melbourne ATC have picked up a number of pretty big balls ups over the years, including a Thai 777 that nearly crashed short of the runway, and a Garuda aircraft that did what these AI guys did.

They really do watch closely, which is a very good thing.

[Highkeas]

Latest from NTSB

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/2014/140117.html

[Evan]

Melbourne ATC have picked up a number of pretty big balls ups over the years, including a Thai 777 that nearly crashed short of the runway, and a Garuda aircraft that did what these AI guys did.

They really do watch closely, which is a very good thing.

That is their job, isn't it? Something else to look closely into...

The pilot is the first line of defence.

The other pilot is a second line of defence.

ATC is a third line of defence.

Nav displays and charts are a fourth line of defence

Nav aids, runway numbers and field lighting are a fifth line of defense

How does all this get defeated?

Should we really need a sixth line of defence?

[3WE]

...They cited the bright runway lights at M. Graham Clark Downtown Airport...

I am constantly amazed by the really dim runway lights at commercial airports. I have seen STL many times on a downwind leg at night...the lights on the ramp and the active runway flashers are kind of clear. The rest of the airport is a black hole...if you focus hard, the blue taxi lights emerge before the actual runway lights.

I know its an over simplification to say "turn up the lights"...but perhaps a trap existed the night of this incident with the little airport on bright and Branson International on dim.

And part of the swiss cheeze is that TeeVee's Flightaware link suggests that they may have been a few degrees off course on their last leg (speculative, but that's what it looks like).

Given that wrong airport incidents happen with some regularity, perhaps the answer is to always always always peek at the mageta line, the airport symbol and the distance to go when you are on final. (peek at the airspeed too).

[3WE]

How can we collectively be so dense!

Southwest does not use ORD, it uses Midway
Southwest does not use DFW, it uses Love
Southwest does not use IAH, it uses Hobby
acknowledging that at times Southwest has operated a few flights out of the bigger hubs...

Therefore

Southwest does not use Branson regional, it uses the older airport, closer to the city...or at least that's what the pilots were thinking!

[MCM]

They are dim for a reason!

Most of the time you end up asking them to turn the lights down a bit!

When they're on bright, they are dazzling and disorienting as you try to land.

It also makes it easy to spot where the airport in a city is - you look for the large black hole where there aren't any bright lights .

These guys simply didn't crosscheck their position with the other available indications that would have told them they were at the wrong airport. I'll bet SWA crews are now briefing that like mad.