Future Pilots: what would you do in this situation?

[Leftseat86]

Mike, I'm not saying the crew did wrong, they did the best they could, and very well under the circumstances, but it was a case where the prescribed procedures didnt work. Any speed above 159kts would have kept the aircraft in the air. In fact, as soon as the left wing dropped, they could have lowered the nose and accelerated out of the stall. Problem is, they had no warning of the left wing stall, nor of the slat position on that wing.

-Clovis

[Freightdogg]

AA191 was simply too slow and too low to effect a recovery. There are times when you simply run out of options. Take off is the most critical phase of any flight simply because when things do go wrong there is so little recovery room available. You can sit in a simulator all day and second guess the pilots' performance on a flight like that, but when you do you cannot recreate that moment of disbelief that occurs any time something catastrophic occurs in an aircraft. When you are sitting in the sim and knowing you are about to lose an engine and a slat your performance will be considerably different from when it happens for real and you had no way to see it coming.

In the case of AA191 a higher speed might have offset the effects of the loss of lift, but it might have also aggravated the rolling tendency caused by split slats. I had a split flap occur on a landing approach and managed to roll it all the way around while I retracted the deployed flap. That gave me the time to regain normal flight control, but I seriously doubt even that would have been possible for AA191. They simply ran out of luck.

[Leftseat86]

Freightdogg, AA used DC-10 sims to re-create it, and they proved that a speed over 159kts would have kept the aircraft in the air and controlable. They were even able to land the aircraft safely.
Of course, the sim pilots were ready for it...

-Clovis

[JeffinDEN]

They simply ran out of luck.

Errrrrr......Altitude! :P

[Freightdogg]

Clovis,

My father began his flying career with the Navy well before WWII. He served on numerous accident investigating boards while in the service. After the war he was hired as a pilot for a major airline and was also on the line's accident investigating committee due to his Navy experience. As a result of that I have been around accident investigations since I was 8 years old. I have even been in the back of a simulator while the conditions of an accident were being recreated.

Most of the time the manufacturer has a vested interest in proving that the plane was safe and that the accident was caused by pilot error. For this reason most sim recreations are done by the factory test pilots who have been well briefed and have discussed alternative procedures to recover from the situation believed to have caused the accident. They might spend all day in the sim and try hundreds of alternative procedures to recover from whatever went wrong. All they need is to have any one of those procedures work (maybe the only one of all the attempts) and they can then take the sim results for that one procedure to the NTSB and to the press and say, "See it wasn't our plane. We proved you could recover from this."

Even if you were to use a typical line crew who just happened to be coming up for scheduled sim review as the guinea pigs to see if an average pilot could recover you would get skewed results. Accidents just get too much press and any crew going into a sim shortly after a major accident would have that crash on their minds. They would have already spent some time thinking about how they might have handled the same situation and would be mentally prepped for the exercise if you gave them a similar scenario in the sim.

I don't doubt at all that MD was able to show that the pilots of AA191 could have recovered if they had done things just a bit differently. I would have been amazed if they had come out of the sim and said anything else. But in the final analysis no sim exercise can ever recreate the, "What the .... was that?" moment that occurs when you are really airborne.

Given your s/n here in the forum I suspect you hope to have a career as a pilot. Before you second guess any other pilot and think maybe they weren't trying everything they could think of in the moment of crisis remember my father's words. Whenever anyone asked him if he worried about the responsibility of having so many lives in his hands he had a standard reply: "The front end hits first!"

[screaming_emu]

At the time I was quite willing to sacrifice the engine if need be, was just glad that things turned out so that wasn't necessary.

As it turned out the engine in that aircraft was changed out roughly six months later after I took a massive lightning strike in the same aircraft. The strike hit on the left wingtip and I actually watched it vaporize about 18 inches of the fuel vent line located there. (Which made me wonder for a few seconds if I wasn't about to see my first fuel tank explosion in flight. Thankfully the ambient air temperature meant that fuel was not venting outward and the line was filled with inert air instead of fuel vapors.)

The damage list included: most of the wingtip gone, a 2 inch hole blown through one of the composite prop blades, a chunk blown out of the nose gear leg, over 1200 pinhole burns in the skin all over the airframe, and all the engine bearings were magnetized, which necessitated pulling and replacing the engine.

Oddly enough none of the electronics failed.

The plane is still flying today in regular cargo service.

If i was flying you'd have to add a soiled seat to that list I think

[Leftseat86]

Freightdogg, I entirely agree. This book even states that although they found it could be succesfully flown in the sim, there was no way the crew of AA191 could have known that, or fully understood their predicament, in time to save the airplane.
I have the utmost respect for all aircrews that have perished in such horrible circumstances.
I was just saying that it was possible to keep the airplane in the air. No one expected the crew to know what to do in such a 1 in a billion situation though...and they did their very best considering...

-Clovis

[JeffinDEN]

Clovis,
How many pages are in the "book" you mention? Or is it the one on the FS cd?

[DeltaCappy]

[Freightdogg]

Clovis,
How many pages are in the "book" you mention? Or is it the one on the FS cd?

Jeff,

Clovis is paraphrasing more or less correctly from the NTSB report on that accident. One of the appendicies to the report covers the sim testing done to recreate the accident conditions and does claim that higher airspeed allowed for flight recovery in sim testing. Insufficient airspeed was considered a causual factor in the crash.

[JeffinDEN]

Water under the bridge man. Anyone can quote someone else's report. Obviously a higher airspeed would have been advantageous.

I'm just teasing him. :P

If we were to take all the info and recommendations from all the investigations and abide by them all, trains would be BIG! No one would ever fly.

[Leftseat86]

Jeff, I'll forgive you for that since I called you an old fart a little while back :P

The book is AIR DISASTER Volume 2 By MacArthur Job page 59.

I highly reccomend the author.


-Clovis

[Greg]

Volumes 1-4 are good.