TransAsia airplane crashes in Taipei (ATR 72)

[3WE]

Instructors work very hard...

...It's innate to pull back...

...This should stay with you but, when I went back after a few breaks, it all goes out the window.

Indeed.

But you stopped just short of THE key critical question...

When you are back after the few breaks, and the instructor is working hard to train and retrain and hone your skills...should he say:

1. "Remember how you have to be careful to not pull up too much?"

or

2. "You have to be careful to not pull up too much"

Which one of these is a better instructor?

Which one of these are you more likely to remember when you have startle factor and genuinely need to carefully pull up very hard?

[Gabriel]

Yes, Gabriel, what IS the instruction procedure out there at Sweet Monkey River?

Ok, I will disclose a real meeting minutes of the SMRFS. It's proprietary and copyrighted information, so watch out!

Gabe: Regarding your practice, one thing that we practice at SMRFSDS is called "flight at the limit of the envelope". During this practice, the student will keep modulating the elevator to keep the plane all the time at the onset of the stall warning while performing all kind of maneuvers

3we: Friendly Razz mode: Gosh- you ARE "the hell better aeroengineer"....In Texas and it's sovereign states to the North, , we simply call this "slow flight"

Gabe: Let me be more explicit. Establish a glide at idle, but try and keep -300fpm. The stall warning will eventually sounds. At that point, firewall the throttle and make a max performance escape climb keeping the stall waning in and out all the time. Of course by doing that you WILL overshoot the climb and you'll start to loose speed, keep it on the onset of the stall warning but don't let it stall (even when the speed WILL go below the stall speed, but you'll be an less than 1G). At the point of minimum speed cut the throttle and apply full aileron to establish a 60° bank turn. Keep adjusting the elevator to be at the onset of the stall warning all the time. Keep the spiral descent for a while and then full throttle and full opposite aileron to bank 60° to the other side. Establish a spiral climb always at the onset of the stall. And so on. The key of this maneuver is be bold with the ailerons and throttle. Rudder will be used as needed to keep a coordinated flight (not so easy with bold power changes and aileron inputs at low speed and high AoA). Altitude is not important. I mean, it is VERY important that the maneuver is started with a certain altitude and is immediately aborted if a certain threshold is reached. But altitude control is not important. The idea is that you practice (and then demonstrate) your ability to control the plane at the onset of the stall warning. The pass/fail criteria for this maneuver is if the stall warning is more than 2 seconds either on or off, you are out.

Couple that with a deep conceptual teaching of what is AoA and how it is managed, and what is a stall. Not the type of "aerodynamics 101 for puppy mills", rather the kind if understanding like you can see in books like "stick and rudder" and in Bob Hoover's performances. Or of the kind discussed in my Stall-rant thread back ago, before the airline industry at great listened
what we had to say from the SMRFS and changed the stall procedures for all types of commercial planes at once.

And you just start to get an idea.

[Gabriel]

Last year I made a failed attempt to re-start my flight activities. I managed to log one hour with an instructor after 15 years of not being at the controls. We eventually practiced stalls, but first we practiced 720 spiral descents, where the objective is to make 2 turns at idle (gliding) losing as little altitude as possible. In the Tomahawk this requires keeping 80 kts and a 60° bank turn and the goal (hard to achieve, and I missed it by 100ft) is to lose 1000 ft. The reason why a steep bank is used is because you want to make the turns as quickly as possible to minimize the altitude loss. While a steep bank increases the sink rate, it increases the turn rate even more. The reason why 80 kts and not the "official" glide speed of 70 kts is because, in a 60° bank, the constant-vertical-speed stall speed increases 41% over the 1G stall speed. In the Tomahawk, it goes raises to some 70 kts from the original 50 kts. Thus even with 80 kts you are much closer to the stall than in a normal glide at 70 kts.

At a point I let the nose go down too much and started to gain speed above the 80kts goal. I pulled a bit back up and... allas, the stall warning.

Can you guess what was the natural and immediate reaction of this low time PPL that had not touched an airplane in 15 years?

I expect nothing less from any pilot that is paid for flying.

[guamainiac]

I will strongly disagree with you on the innate or instinctual (your version) of the students reaction.

You can "chalk talk" a student to death telling them they have to push down to recover from a stall but when confronted for the first time while actually flying the plane, with no prompting from the right seat, a noo-bie will pull back.

It's a simple matter of "fight or flight" (in this case flight meaning to flee), when confronted by danger.

My parachute friends tell me that most everyone (military training), will start to "run" in the air when they go out for the first time and that many will wet themselves. That is innate or instinctual.

In Japan they would say that it needs to be like "mu shin" or trained to react. Martial arts are a perfect example as is the cartoon (bear with me here), "The Pink Panther". When you watch the cartoons the Panther will have his "associate" or man Friday, ambush him and he never even blinks or pauses while he blocks the attack and just carries on as if it didn't happen. Mu shin means "no thought" or "no mind", it is something that requires daily training but once the training stops being daily, the skill degrades. That leaves me with the question of how often should a pilot practice recovery motions to maintain proficiency?

When I taught skiing the old Austrian instructor who mentored me would have me out practicing basic school maneuvers every morning when the lifts opened up. Others went off for that first recreational hour and had fun, but I went our and practiced beginner maneuvers. Most guys, no matter how well they could ski fast, would fold like a cheap suit when asked to demonstrate basic beginner techniques.

[elaw]

Brian, is there no end to this? You try to explain your opinions on this forum and then are besieged by morons why recast them into something moronic, far removed from anything you've actually said.
Etc., etc., etc.

With all due respect, while I'll admit that what I wrote could be construed as a "personal attack", it differs very little from what you're doing.

By your constant advocacy of having procedures in place for every eventuality, you're basically saying that some nameless faceless procedure-writer sitting behind a desk will always know better what to do in a given situation than the actual pilot(s) who is sitting in the actual airplane experiencing the actual situation. Or to word it a little differently, pilots are too stupid to be trusted to fly airplanes without written guidance on how to do absolutely everything. If I were a pilot, I'm pretty sure I'd interpret that attitude as an attack.

Now keeping things on-topic just a little, it is clear that in *some* cases (a miniscule but nonzero percentage of the time), things go wrong in the course of flying because pilots make mistakes. Those mistakes could be due to poor training, deliberate failure to follow specified procedures, or lack of procedures to follow. Or... they could be due to none of those things. The best-trained most skilled pilot in the world, with all the procedural guidance in the world, will still do things wrong once in a while because that's what humans do.

In the case of this particular incident, it seems the pilots did not follow procedure (clearly a failed-engine procedure was in place and known to the pilots) but IMHO it was not deliberate, and speaking logically, if more/different procedures were in place who's to say the pilots would have followed them?

[3WE]

Brian, is there no end to this? You try to explain your opinions on this forum and then are besieged by morons why recast them into something moronic, far removed from anything you've actually said.

Elaw, TeeVee, Gabriel, ATLCrew, Guamaniac and I (who've I missed?) are not morons.

Some of us maintain a hope that you might get it. Hope that you might break from your closed-minded thinking and see that broad, fundamental concepts have a place in training and in human factors.

But you display an ongoing disdain for these suggestions.

It becomes evident when you say that an Air-France 6 minute stall of a mechanically healthy airliner, defying all comprehension is the same as an unfortunate, split second brain fart at a high workload time in a plane that just developed a very serious real problem that directly affects controlability, and which has several other ramifications including further airframe damage, fire, inability to climb.

It becomes evident when you try to shoot a dart at me saying that someone dicking with the autopilot in a horrendous downdraft is because they forgot to review the FCOM of a 737-236A.

We're trying but, indeed, you refuse to understand and now resort to name calling.

[3WE]

... allas, the stall warning.

Can you guess what was the natural and immediate reaction of this low time PPL that had not touched an airplane in 15 years?

I honestly don't know what you did.

But I think you did NOThaul the yoke all they way back and hold it there.

However, the only reason you acted this way must have been that you read, and reviewed the procedures for 720 degree descending turns in the PA-28 POH beforehand.

[Evan]

The pass/fail criteria for this maneuver is if the stall warning is more than 2 seconds either on or off, you are out.

In which case you get sent back down to Miramar.

1. "Remember how you have to be careful to not pull up too much?"

or

2. "You have to be careful to not pull up too much"

#3) "Remember why you have to be careful to not pull up too much."

I expect nothing less from any pilot that is paid for flying.

I think this has a lot to do with that 'pilot material' criteria. I expect operators to screen for that.

[3WE]

#3) "Remember why you have to be careful to not pull up too much."

I think this has a lot to do with that 'pilot material' criteria. I expect operators to screen for that.

Concur with item 3.

Concur that pilots, on very rare occasions, do some stupid things and I wonder how they passed screening or if the recurrent training program missed something.

I also think that if we cloned Dummy Pilot and MCM and Boeing Bobby, and Synder Snapshots and ITS and put them in every cockpit of every flight, there'd be fewer crashes, but probably a rare wrong engine shut down.

As for a 37,000 ft, 6 min, pilot initiated and maintained stall???...still incomprehensible.

[Evan]

With all due respect, while I'll admit that what I wrote could be construed as a "personal attack", it differs very little from what you're doing.

elaw, do you understand the difference between an attack and a defense?

By your constant advocacy of having procedures in place for every eventuality...

See, what's the point of going on...? I have NEVER said that. I have ALWAYS said follow scripted procedures ONLY where they are available and, in the case of the PF, only AFTER stabilizing on the flight path. I have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to make that clear with words but the words seem to have no effect. I have also tried to make it clear, with words, that the reason for these procedures comes from human factors and a long history of crashes resulting from bad improvisational errors. I have NEVER said "...humans can be made to act like machines which in absolutely any circumstance will quickly and flawlessly execute the best possible course of action 100.0% of the time." In fact, the reason we need procedures is because exactly the opposite is true. I've also tried to point out, along with other's here, that procedures are written by airman and do not contradict basic airmanship. It's not a battle of wills. It what we call professional piloting.

Now, there's a lot words in the above paragraph and I now need to see if you can put them ALL in your head and discern the meaning contained therein...

If you can, then you will no longer think I am advocating anything against airmanship. If you can't, then I'm just wasting words.

BTW: My definition of a moron is someone who can't do that. Just saying.

[elaw]

Concur that pilots, on very rare occasions, do some stupid things and wonder how they passed screening.

I think when taken in context, this makes perfect sense!

Stupid people do stupid things a lot... maybe all the time if they're really stupid (except when they get things right by accident). Smart people still do stupid things from time to time... that's human nature. And then there's a whole spectrum in between.

So the screening test will weed out the stupid person, and maybe the occasional smart person who does something stupid on the day of the test.

But it will not weed out the person who's reasonably smart, well-trained, knowledgeable, etc. etc. but who later at some inopportune moment makes a stupid mistake.

[Evan]

It becomes evident when you try to shoot a dart at me saying that someone dicking with the autopilot in a horrendous downdraft is because they forgot to review the FCOM of a 737-236A

No... ...! I was saying that they PROBABLY didn't understand the CAPABILITIES and LIMITATIONS of the advanced 737-200A autoflight BECAUSE they didn't review the FCOM or have any on-type training to speak of. The final report concurs. You can't put a 737-200 pilot into line service on a 737-200A without type training on the new level of automation. That's insane!

But the important thing about my posts is that the words have been thought out and are there to convey actual meanings. Why do you keep recasting what I post into something completely different? Human factors??

[Evan]

So those statistics don't surprise me. What does surprise me is that the local CAA hasn't apparently gone through the operation of this airline with a fine tooth-comb and discovered these issues beforehand. How many warning signals do they need?

This is ultimately where the buck must stop. The responsibility of the CAA is both to create requirements and to enforce them through oversight. An operator running a shoddy training regimen should never escape the attention of the CAA if they are doing their job. My philosophy (which has been proven over and over again) in just about every facet of business is that businesses cannot be trusted to regulate themselves where costs and profits are involved. The CAA exists to defend the public against this fact. When they fail to so this, they might as well have crashed the plane themselves.

[Brainsys]

This is ultimately where the buck must stop. The responsibility of the CAA is both to create requirements and to enforce them through oversight.

This airline is run by a successful, popular and charismatic billionaire. A man you might not cross lightly. There is the suggestion his pilots and management would not.

Now put up a good experienced and underpaid CAA civil servant. One who wishes to closely question its management detect any wrong doing and possibly introduce restrictive and costly measures. Such a servant is going to need cast-iron cover right up to the top.

You can't blame the CAA if they don't have that. Not being an expert on the the regional politics I wouldn't make a judgement about it. And if the pilots were under trained and/or under undue pressure than simply dumping pilot error on them is letting the root cause go free.

[Gabriel]

Elaw, TeeVee, Gabriel, ATLCrew, Guamaniac and I (who've I missed?) are not morons.

For the record (and for whatever it's worth):
Evan explicitly removed me (and MCM) from the official morons' list.

I think Gabriel is someone who understands that (I miss MCM) but then there is another element here that is basically just schoolyard mentality...