The date is set.

[TeeVee]

been busy with the family so didn't have a chance to report. i wasn't there for the sim session, but as soon as i met up with the two characters in a local joint, i could tell things went well. Gabe was positively BEAMING and BB looked just like a proud daddy right after his kid is born! BB then recounted gabe's performance, commenting on how shocked he was at how well Gabe performed.

we had some grub and a few drinks and chatted for a bit about pretty much everything.

always good to put faces to names and words (though BB and i met up last year, it was good to see him again).

[3WE]

Even though I have many procedure training and frew thousand hour, I afraid hand-rand 500,000 lb 777 on sunny evenring wees right rinds and need autofrottle to maintain airspeed...

Versus

***Gabe was positively BEAMING*** after hand-landing a 630,000 lb virtual 747 on a nice day with light winds and no autopilot/throttle functions...

Shall we pause and ponder the contrast?

[LH-B744]

Congratulations Gabriel, it sounds like you passed the audition. Were you inspired to fill out an application?

I knew he's able to do it! So, as Gabe says, always the best landing is where you can walk away from. But he did even more?

So, what's the airline for his application? Atlas Air?

One cup of coffee for the successful pilot, and for me. Congrats, Gabe.

PS: I just wonder if he had a wind @ 27 in gusts... But even if that were the case, he did it. You better handle 27 in gusts in a 747 than in a very slow propeller.. And only 1 pilot in Germany dares to cross the Ocean in a single engine propeller which is older than me. So would you dare to cross the peak of the Matterhorn (14,692 AMSL) in an unpressurized 86 year old propeller, with 17 passengers on board?

The Beech King Air 350 is cleared for up to 11 passengers. That's a propeller which I'd take to cross the peak of the Matterhorn, because she's pressurized and fast enough for a 27 knot strong headwind. But he was 62 years old and a former experienced jet pilot ("Alter Hase"). Damn I don't have a clue..

My smile somehow vanishes a bit at that moment... 17 passengers on board. With zero passengers, I'd try that. But not with 17 passengers in an unpressurized very slow propeller. Sorry, I'll be back on topic in a minute.

[Gabriel]

Ok team, time to finish my report. I dare you to finish reading it. Gabriellian lengths ahead.

So, we had finished the demonstration of the MTOW rejected take off.
The next task was to do a take-off at mid weight (below MLW) from MIA RWY 9 and come around to land again in RWY 9. And things started to go bad immediately.
BB's friend give us the vee speed, we set p the bugs, BB set the flaps and advance throttles to about 70%, let stabilize, set AT for take-off thrust, release brakes, and off we go.

So far so good, a little bit of rudder inputs to keep the plane on the centerline, BB calls 80 knots, we were already past 100 when I said "I guess I had to say check", and suddenly it became evident that there was too little runway ahead. BB says "I think we can still make it". I said "I will burn the fans" and advanced the throttles to the stops, and BB's friend stopped everything (he probably wanted to save me from the PTSD of crashing the sim). I don't know if we started the take-off where we left the previous rejected take off or were positioned for an intersection take-off. In hindsight I realize that I never saw the distance and touch-down-zone markers ahead of me in the beginning of the take off. I don't understand how I didn't realize, but I didn't. I don't know if BB did.

Second attempt, now I make sure that we are at the beginning of the runway, 70%, stabilize, AT, release brakes and off we go.
BB diligently calls 80 knots, V1, rotate, I pull back, and nothing happens, I pull back a bit more and the nose very (too) slowly starts to raise but stays there just a couple of degrees nose up, I pull harder, really hard by then, and we actually start to rotate and eventually we lift off. Something is wrong, definitively. I understand that the 747 is a heavy beast, bout you are not supposed to lift with your muscles. And I am pulling about as hard as I can with one hand. On top of that, we stopped gaining speed and we have not even reached V2. BB suggests that I lower the nose to 10 degrees, I release a bit the back pressure, or I expected it to be a bit, but the nose goes down more than expected and the plane starts to sink back to the runway. I try to pull up a bit again but my arm is already too tired and loosing strength. Then I do something that I never did before as a pilot, not in a real plane, not in the PC sim, not in a heavy-iron real-stuff sim (where I am for the second time in my life). I take my other hand and put it in the yoke and pull back with both hands. First time ever I grab the yoke (or stick) with both hands. So now I pull with both hands, manage to arrest the descent and then.... stickshaker!!! That was completely unexpected, took me by surprise, totally off guard, and I had never experienced a stickshaker before except in a PC sim which I have not used in several years (the airplanes I used to fly have stall horns, not stickshaker). What happened next is hard to explain. BB says that I lowered the nose 5 degrees, and I believe him, but I was not really paying attention to the pitch at that point, and lowering the pitch 5 degrees was never in my mind. I was "thinking" something else, but "think" is not the right word because it was not an active rational process. I don't want to say that it was an instinct either, and I don't believe it was a memorized muscle response since it had been years since my last approach to stall and never in response to a stick-shaker. It was more an "intellectual" automatic response to something that I knew very well what it was and knew very well what needed to be done without the need to "think" or reason about it thanks to the intellectual effort and mental "training" that had been extensively done in advance. Despite the surprise, startle, lack of previous exposure and whatever adverse factors you can imagine, I instantly reacted relieving a bit of back pressure to stop the stick-shaker. When it did, I pulled back a bit again. I expected the stickshaker start again. I was looking for the angle of attack that is in the limit of the stickshaker, and I expected to come into and out of the stickshaker a couple of times while I modulated the elevator around that angle of attack. But the stickshaker never activated again. Now I looked back to the attitude indicator and smoothly brought the nose back to 15 degrees. We were alive.

How much time elapsed since BB called "rotate" and we were back stable? I don't know. 10 seconds maybe? Amazing how many things can happen in 10 seconds.

That was my last proud moment in the sim. While I eventually managed to land without crashing, I was miles behind the plane for the remainder of the flight.

Ok, so I have just sort of stabilized the climb at 15 degrees and a bit above V2 but was still pulling very hard back with both hands. I mention to BB that something is wrong, that I need to keep pulling too hard and ask him if the trim is correctly set and he says it is. Then BBs friend says "sorry guys, I forgot to adjust the wight, it was still at MTOW from the RTO". So we had just performed a MTOW take-off with flaps and trim setting and vee speeds that were appropriate for a wight below MLW. Everything suddenly made sense.

I want to make a pause here to mention, to BB's dismay, that both take-off incidents could have been avoided with TOPMS. This last one, with the basic TOPMS that compares the actual acceleration against the one assumed during the take-off performance computation (although we really didn't do this calculation). The previous one with the E-TOPMS (the enhanced version) that uses GPS to see where the pane is in the runway, and would have caught that we were not where we were supposed to be when we started the take-off, although this 747-200 lacked a modern FMS (if it had one at all), I don't know if it had a GPS, and likely would not be able to support an E-TOPMS.

Returning to the flight, at about 1500 ft BB tells me to start turning right and to lower the nose to 10 degrees to accelerate, and as we did he start to clean up the plane. I was still fighting to trim the plane. He tells me to level at 3000 ft and I acknowledge, but I was not paying close attention to the altimeter (I was more concentrated on the airspeed and trying to trim the plane) and next time I looked at it we were like 2800 and climbing 2800 per minute. I grossly overshot the 3000 goal by several hundreds of feet and had to descend back. The speed was still increasing and the AT was in charge of the throttles. While I managed to establish a stable 25 degrees turn, in the speed/pitch/trim department things were quite out of control. Between the changes in speed and configurations as BB cleaned up the plane I was all the time making corrections and overshooting the 3000 ft to either side, and I still had never had the plane trimmed so I was actually forcefully fighting the yoke. As the speed kept building up, I found myself not pulling anymore but pushing hard on the yoke to prevent the plane from climbing. I kept trimming smoothly down but the speed was increasing faster than I was trimming down so I found myself all the time pushing down to try (not very successfully) to keep 3000.

The speed kept increasing and after in passed like 320 knots I said to BB that if we didn't do something we were going to overspeed (amazing that we were stalling a moment earlier). He pointed to the autothrottle window that showed 247 and said something that I didn't understand and I said to myself "enough, the plane will do what I want it to do and not the other way around". I put my hand in the handful row of throttles and with my best macho voice I announced "I have the throttles" and proceeded to press the thumb button to disconnect the autothrottles. Except that there was no thumb button, so I used a slightly more gayish voice to ask BB to please turn it off, what he did.

I pulled the throttles fully back to loose speed (remember we wanted to land and we were over 300 knots?) and whatever level of trim and altitude control I had manage to achieve, I started loosing it again as speed started to unwind. I was still in a right turn and BB's friend was vectoring me with headings to return to the airport, but I was so focused (tunnel vision?) in controlling airspeed and altitude that I was not following them.

Eventually BB's friend magically repositioned us in a nice spot to intercept the localizer from the right (yes, this time we would have ILS). He also gave me a Vref that I think was like 150 or 160 knots. I was intercepting it from the left at about 30 degrees. I had the runway in sight and everything. As soon as the localizer came alive I started to turn towards the runway heading but we were still going very fast and I overshot it and ended up more aligned with 8L (the left-most of the 3 parallel runways) than with 9 (the right-most and intended one) so I kept turning right back to RWY 9. As I was maneuvering to align with the runway the glide slope came alive. We were still going too fast but slowing down and BB had already started to extend slats and flaps (I also remember his hand crossing the throttle quadrant to reach and arm the spoilers), and I was still with the throttles fully closed since I had taken them by myself. I eventually managed to sort of center the glide slope and localizer but I was still fighting with the pitch and trim in the middle of the changes of pitch/vertical speed, flaps, and gear configuration. Eventually the loose of speed was too fast and BB told me "you are too slow". I said "we are still a bit faster than Vref" and he said "yes, but we don;t have landing flaps yet". Uh-oh... Not another stickshaker please. For the first time since BB disconnected the AT back then I advanced the throttles a bit to increase the speed, but quickly BB announced that the flaps were set for landing, that the plane was fully configured now, and that he had completed the landing checklist (good to know that he did it, I was in no condition to divert my attention from trying to have the beast do as I commanded).

I reduced the speed back to Vref and I think I did a more or less good job at keeping it more or less there. There was a moment shorty afterwards where I had 2 reds and 2 whites on the PAPI and was quite well but not yet totally centered with the runway centerline. For some seconds, the approach looked quite stabilized and I felt only yards behind the plane. But then I fell in my own trap, one that I mentioned in this thread before the sim ride as something that concerned me. It looks that I felt that the approach was too shallow and let the descent rate reduce and ended up too high, with 4 white lights (I had stopped looking at the ILS long ago), I reduced thrust and pitched down, still doing a fair job at keeping the speed, but by when the "50" call out sounded, I was still too high, descending too fast, and not fully centered.

I thought "I should go around", but the real pilots paying for the sim training were already knocking our door so I was committed to land. I pulled up quite a bit and at first the "40-30-20" came with a pace that was clearly faster than normal but I managed to arrest the descent... a bit too much. I floated a bit (actually I think I even ballooned a bit), and did I say that I was still fighting with the roll and heading? I ended up touching down firmly, well past the touchdown zone, with all 18 wheels left of the centerline (but still on the tarmac, or so I believe) and with a bit of bank. But, it was survivable and, applying reversers and with autobrakes set to mid, we still managed to stop on the runway and still with plenty of runway ahead. Just as a final self-vindication I made sure during the roll-out to steer so as to end up with the centerline between my legs.

And you know, every landing from which you can walk away....

[Gabriel]

Final random thoughts:

--------------------

The plane is a handful of yoke and throttles. It is and feels heavy, and the inertia is quite evident in pitch and roll.
That said, is still an airplane that feels and flies very much like, you know, an airplane. Not surprising since it uses the same formulas and laws of Physics than the Tomahawk and, more important, it doesn't attempt to hack feel as Airbus does (it does indeed hack the feel since hydraulic powered controls have no natural force feedback but, unlike Airbus, for Boeing the hack is to make the control feels as if they were mechanical, and this concept is still current even in the modern FBW Boeings like the 777 and 787).
From the purely stick-and-rudder point of view, I don't think that is much harder to transition from the Tomahawk to the 737 (that I also flew in a real sim), or from the 737 to the 747, of from a Cessna 150 to a Tomahawk.
However, it does has a bunch of systems, needles, lights, buttons, switch and levers that you must learn very well how to use, how they interact, and what is affected and what to do if one of them goes offline. There is a bunch to study, learn and practice to fly a so complex airplane beyond how to manually fly around the pattern.
Not to mention everything happens faster so you need to do better than in a Tomahawk to stay ahead of the plane.

----------------------

In hindsight, I believe I would have done better if I faced the "both pilots had the fish" scenario, or if we had climbed, stabilized somewhere at some speed and altitude, and then returned to land. Speed and vertical speed where never stable from the point we released the parking brakes to the landing. Also not being able to control the thrust and the autothrottle doing something I didn't understand confused me. I really felt better and with LESS workload when I started to manage the throttles myself. Finally, BB's managing the configuration of the plane in the background was good because my brain was already oversaturated and I would not have been able to request the configuration changes (especially since I don't know the right speeds), but had the side effect of sort of keeping me out of the loop. The combination of all these factors, plus the fact that I am not an experienced 747 pilot (or without the 747 part) was, as I said, that I felt way behind the plane, all the time correcting what the plane had just done to me instead of anticipating it and make it do as I pleased.

------------------

To 3WE: No, I did not taxi even a bit. I guess there was a tiller installed, but I didn't even see or look for it. The ground handling that I did I steered with the rudder pedals, which also controls the nosewheel in a limited range.

------------------

No Jetphotos flight review would be complete without this:
- The livery of the sim was meh.
- The legroom was much better than in cattle class, but not as good as in Business class.
- I enjoyed the food very much, especially since it was in an Irish pub sharing the table and chatter with two fine gentlemen and TeeVee didn't allow me to pay for it!!! Thanks TeeVee.
- The IFE was O-U-T-S-T-A-N-D-I-N-G. Totally unbeatable.

------------------------

I enjoyed very much the company. And I endorse what TeeVee said: always good to put faces to (screen)names and words.
I am happy I met BB, TeeVee and BB's friend.

-------------------------

I had the 30 minutes of my life, and then some in the pub. Thank you BB, BB's friend, and TeeVee!!!!! When is next?

[BoeingBobby]

Where is the video?

[Evan]

Maybe it's just the way you tell it but it seems like what broke down was CRM? Were you always aware of what BoeingBobby was doing? Did he keep you 'in the loop'? Did this experience intensify the importance you place on CRM, procedure, checklists and human factors? I'm curious because you called this a 'humbling' experience.

[Gabriel]

Maybe it's just the way you tell it but it seems like what broke down was CRM?

Sure, but there was no way around that. I was task and brain saturated, not because the workload was too much per se but because it was too much for me. If BB had asked me and kept me informed of every config change and if he had done the landing checklist with me (challenge / answer) atc, one of two tings would have happened: I would not have paid attention to BB, or I would but then would have screwed up something else. I've already mentioned how BB's friend in the back seat was giving me vectors that I could not process since I was too busy fighting the trim / speed / altitude / pitch / vertical speed equation. What I needed was time, and that was something that we didn't have and was out of our control.

Did this experience intensify the importance you place on CRM, procedure, checklists and human factors?

No. It was intense already before this experience.

I'm curious because you called this a 'humbling' experience.

It was holistically humbling, due to various factors.

On one hand, you have my performance:
I did an impressive first landing, and my save of the stickshaker encounter was extraordinary, especially because it was no luck but a real excellent performance on my side.
Does that sound humbling? No. But after the stickshaker:
- I didn't pay attention that we were not starting a take-off roll from the beginning of the runway.
- I was miles behind the plane.
- I never got the plane stabilized or doing what I wanted it to do.
- I was fighting with the elevator all the time.
- I made a "perfect" but awful second approach and landing.
I thought I would do better. I still think (I am sure) that I can do better. But I couldn't and didn't this time.

Another humbling dimension was the sim and the plane.
As I said before, the plane is a handful of yoke and throttles indeed and it does feel heavy. I expceted that, but expecting and feeling are two different sensations.
The sim itself was impressive. The immersive experience of being in a perfect replica or a real 747-200 cockpit, Flight Engineer station and all, with all the dials and switches as in the real plane and working as in the real plane, with the surrounding collimated virtual outside view focused to infinity, reallistic sounds, and the 6 degrees of motion, is just impressive. Think of the number of engineers and technicians, test pilots and managers, and the number of hours, that it took to develop the 747, and then to develop a machine that simulates it with this level of perfection. It is humbling. I can compare it, for example, to getting into the real Space Shuttle that is placed on top of the real modified 747 in the Huston Space Center, or walking around the Saturn V that is in the NASA center next to it.

And then, the human aspect of the experience. There I was, a screen name in an obscure Internet Forum, invited to "play" with that sim by 2 guys with thousands and thousands of hours in the real plane, and they were doing it for me. As I mentioned before, I found them to be also very nice and agreeable. Contrary to what I expected from the "mine is bigger than yours" discussion when the challenge was presented one year ago, BB was cheering and fanning for me, and he was happy when I succeeded in my first landing. He felt that as a success, not a defeat.

So what can I say? How not feel humbled by such a great machine, a marvel of technology and engineering, such a great experience, and such generous and nice persons who gave me the 30 minutes of my life for nothing in exchange? Even if I had nailed every aspect of the flight as a pro, with every briefing, checklist, procedure, call out and CRM practice followed to perfection, keeping speed and track within +/- 0.1%, and greasing every landing exactly in the centerline and the target touch-down zone, I would still have felt humbled. And then I didn't nail all that, not even close.

[Gabriel]

Where is the video?

[Evan]

That would be humbling...

But isn't that a -300 sim?

Ah, it has the E4B upgrade? Is that where the LCD's come in?

[BoeingBobby]

That would be humbling...

But isn't that a -300 sim?

Ah, it has the E4B upgrade? Is that where the LCD's come in?

No it is a 200 sim. The engine cluster is a Penny and Giles (sp) conversion that all of our Classics had.

[3WE]

Maybe it's just the way you tell it but it seems like what broke down was CRM? Were you always aware of what BoeingBobby was doing? Did he keep you 'in the loop'? Did this experience intensify the importance you place on CRM, procedure, checklists and human factors? I'm curious because you called this a 'humbling' experience.

More subtle and insidious, Evan...(say those words a few times)

The key phrase Gabriel uttered (paraphrased) was, "I knew my time was running out on the sim".

The textbook answer to Gabriel's trip around the pattern was to pause for 5 minutes and get the plane settled down...To hell with exact attitudes and airspeeds and altitudes...get the plane stabilized...The crew is sick and you are just an amateur- tell ATC to get everyone the hell out of the county.

But sometimes the textbook just doesn't work. Gabriel really wanted to demonstrate he could take off, maneuver around and land and time was running out*. So Gabriel reverted to cowboy MacGuyver improvisation...wrestled this nasty, unstabilized plane around the pattern and land it.

Given that he is willing fly in such a reckless manner and revert to Cowboy Improvisation, he is officially been placed on my no-fly list.

*Footnote: This is an interesting twist on get-there it is...How much are you willing to risk? A plane-load of paying passengers, or just your can and your Katana?

[Evan]

More subtle and insidious, Evan...(say those words a few times)

I have. It didn't help.

It's not a judgement. Of course this was not a professional pilot SIM scenario, and time was cut short and BB was 'spotting' Gabriel on things like configuration rather than typical CRM communication and task sharing.

My point (question) was that, if they had the time needed and were in a more professional SIM ride where two type-rated pilots were working the problem methodically and PF Gabriel was kept completely in the loop at all times perhaps he would have been able to do a better job of managing things and might not have gotten so far behind the airplane.

However, since this was the result of an incorrect programming parameter and a time constraint that has no analogue in reality, I guess the best real-world comparison would be an error on v-speeds and/or power setting and/or TOW followed by an immediate return fuel emergency. With no time to climb out and stabilize, I'm not sure CRM would go so smoothly in that real-world scenario either.

It sounds like Gabriel has proven himself a natural airman, but my other question, concerning the 'humbling' part, was if the experience softened Gabriel's apparently unforgiving stance on accidents where pilots did something 'unthinkable' after losing their composure under stress and disorientation. Colgan 3407, for example...

And, of course, I understand what he meant by 'humbling' in all other respects.

[Gabriel]

my other question, concerning the 'humbling' part, was if the experience softened Gabriel's apparently unforgiving stance on accidents where pilots did something 'unthinkable' after losing their composure under stress and disorientation. Colgan 3407, for example...

Nope. I was not tidy and I was running the situation from behind, but I kept the speed in the healthy zone all the time, in particular kept approach speeds very close to target all the time, and kept the pitch, bank and vertical speed and gradients within a very reasonable envelope all the time. And did I mention that I managed a totally unexpected stickshaker just at lift off like a boss? (talk about startle).

I still don't understand AF, Colgan, Asiana and Turkish. And whatever the breakdown in procedures and CRM (which I acknowledge could have and probably would have saved the day), that is not enough to explain what happened, and I would not like to have the pilot with the best CRM and procedure adherence that, upon indication of stall, pulls up, and pulls up, and keeps pulling up all the time, during many seconds or a few minutes.

[3WE]

***but my other question, concerning the 'humbling' part, was if the experience softened Gabriel's apparently unforgiving stance on accidents where pilots did something 'unthinkable' after losing their composure under stress and disorientation. Colgan 3407, for example...***

Gabriel soften his stance?

Good God, man, your the one relentlessly pounding that they should be running some uber specific checklist and that training on said checklists is the problem.

Maybe Colgan was pure shock and fatigue, maybe it was tail stall training...Gabriel’s deal is that it was SIX SECONDS of step 4 of the universal how to stall a Piper cub, Airbus 300 and almost all aircraft in between checklist...

Six seconds...(and I still wonder why the check airspeed every few seconds on short final OR while leveling, dropping flaps, gear, and speeding up propellers was not in play)