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  • #46
    Originally posted by 3WE View Post
    Wow...you do see the world in black and white.

    Gabriel- help, please...how many absolute statements have I made...
    Ok, let's start counting...

    Wow...you do see the world in black and white.
    That's one. Do I go on?

    --- Judge what is said by the merits of what is said, not by the credentials of who said it. ---
    --- Defend what you say with arguments, not by imposing your credentials ---

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    • #47
      Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
      Ok, let's start counting...



      That's one. Do I go on?
      Two- almost no exception regarding monitoring airspeed...
      Les règles de l'aviation de base découragent de longues périodes de dur tirer vers le haut.

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      • #48
        Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
        That's one. Do I go on?
        Thank you.

        Originally posted by 3WE
        This is the ole elephant in the room deal...and you are focused on a house fly. Both can drop excrement in the room, that excrement is undesirable, but one is a bigger problem than the other and might deserve more focus...get the elephant out...and yeah, sure, then get your flyswatter and work on the fly...
        No. I am focused on distinguishing what is universal from what is type-specific. There is a problem out there with some pilots who feel, because basic airmanship is universal, recovery procedures are as well. They don't feel they need to be re-educated on things they have already learned. This is sometimes a fatal mindset. It is a mindset you seem to embrace however.

        Now you incorrectly interpret that as me placing an inferior importance on the universal stuff. I said this years ago but it never sunk in with you. Airmanship goes without saying, but the idea that all things about flying are universal is not good airmanship. Where type-specific procedures exist, learn them, practice them and reliably execute them and everybody will most likely return to earth in a non-spectacular fashion. They are designed for time-compressed action under stress and confusion. Improvise with your universal assumptions and your compromised situational awareness and cognitive skills and you might learn the reasons for not improvising as your final lesson in airmanship. Execute the right procedure for the wrong type and that might be your last lesson.

        The argument between us started with AF447. I was angered to learn that in none of the reported cases of UAS were the proper procedures used. Those procedures virtually ensure that nobody gets killed. JUST DO THEM. No, you said, a good airman can just use known pitch and power settings. Ok, what about the bad airmen? What about the good airmen under stress and panic? The procedures exist to allow the crew to first stabilize the immediate situation, then improvise with a clear head. You can't, for instance, pull up relentlessly if you are tasked with maintaining 5° pitch, can you? Nor can you follow the erroneous flight directors if they are switched off, or lose airspeed due to thrust lock if you have moved the levers into CL, etc.

        You call that black and white thinking. I call it disciplined airmanship in the modern age. Because following procedures where they are called for is good CRM and good CRM is a universal piloting skill.

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        • #49
          Evan, while you are responding to 3WE, I feel identified too since, with contrasts, 3WE and myself tend to have a similar direction of opinion in these subjects.

          (CAPS are to highlight key concepts, not shout)

          The FUNDAMENTALS of recovery procedures are largely universal.

          When the industry developed "stall / CFIT / RTO decison / windshear / upset recover / you name it" guidance, they didn't do it type specific.
          Yes, those are guidelines and not prescriptive procedures, and you ALWAYS NEED TO REVERT TO THE AFM AND YOUR COMPANY'S SOPS AS PRIMARY SOURCE, because THERE ARE SPECIFICS THAT YOU BETTER KNOW.

          However, when pilots fail at a FUNDAMENTALS level, 3WE and myself have very little confidence that they will conquer the SPECIFICS. It's like, yes, you need both, but one comes BEFORE the other. We (or at least I) are not dimishing the importance of the specifics, but there is a hierarchy of not importance but prerequisites.

          Yes, the AF guys should have (note the AND connection):
          1- Disconnected the AP/AT/DF
          2- AND Set CLB (which involved taking the thrust levers OUT OF THE CLB detent, which is a very un-intuitive step, so specifics here)
          3- AND Establish a pitch of 5 deg ANU

          However, while the following would have been incorrect (and believe me, I was absolutely indignated when it was uncovered than, from the previous UAS events, in NONE of them had the proper procedure been followd), these fundamentals would have kept them alive (note the OR connection):
          1- Keep a healthy and about cruise-typical thrust and pitch.
          2- OR AT LEAST don't relentlesly pull up when the stall warning is shouting STAL STAL STAL.
          3- OR AT LEAST don't touch a damn thing, instead go to the toilet, then aim for the galley and serve yourself a diet Pepsi dude!

          Again, any of these last 3 optios would have been TOTALLY INCORRECT, ILLEGAL, AND WITH A NOT-AS-BIG A SAFE MARGIN AS FOLLOWING THE PROCEDURE, but they would have kept them alive. AND YOU CAN'T BE INDIGNATED BY THEM NOT FOLLOWING THE PROCEDURE IF YOU ARE NOT INDIGNATEDx10^GOOGOLPLEX FIRST FOR THEIR OUTMOST LACK OF ANY REASONABLE AIRMANSHIP.

          So a cook serves you raw poultry with a ton of salt, a salad with rotten lettuce and 2 cockroaches, and mashed potatoes that you have to drink it instead of eating it, and you are concerned that he didn't follow the recipe?????

          I AM NOT, AND NOT BECAUSE I DON'T THINK THAT FOLLOWING THE RECIPE IS NOT IMPORTANT, BUT BECAUSE I HAVE ANOTHER THING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT FIRST.

          --- Judge what is said by the merits of what is said, not by the credentials of who said it. ---
          --- Defend what you say with arguments, not by imposing your credentials ---

          Comment


          • #50
            Originally posted by Evan View Post
            Thank you.
            A well deserved razz from Gabriel to me.

            Originally posted by Gabriel, immediately above
            Blah, Blah, Blah.
            And a genuine thank you for that too!

            I am pretty sure that my message (like I have one) over the years regarding airmanship is that I thought pilots should be procedure geniuses AND fundamental geniuses. (Does Gabe sort of say this above?)

            Yeah, I'm kind of black and white towards Evan...although, and again- I actually agree with you that one ought to know how to unstall (or un-almost-stall) their aircraft, and know it well.

            It's just when you look at this crash, there really isn't an indication that there is a problem with stall training...it's another problem with a STRONG trend of guys buying high-performance aircraft and crashing them- and when they do crash them, they seemingly blow ALL the rules. After all the crazy stuff he did on the approach, is it a surprise that maybe he wasn't good at stall recovery?

            And, again...distraction and startle factor: How many times do we see planes fall out of the sky from 500 feet...it's not rare...lots of light plane pilots on base-to-final turns and MU-2 pilots with more dollars than sense and, yes, even Hui Theiu Lo AND his PM ATP PARTNER. We address this not by better stall recovery training, but by somehow preventing these slow incidents. There was no genius airmanship option for Hui Theiu Lo...he was too low and slow with no time to power up...but his failure was exactly the same as MU-2 guy...and the same failure of Captain and MS Colgan...level-flaps-props-to-high = airspeed decay... Some of these guys were probably well versed in stall recovery, but when you are low and slow and surprised, it's easier to recover from your computer keyboard than in the plane itself.

            Call it CRM (oooo a cool acronym) or call it "watch the airspeed and attitude especially during critical phases of flight" (less sexy)...but yes...it's important...procedurally and fundamentally, along with knowing how to un-almost-stall your plane, along with doing everything you possibly can to never ever ever get the stall warning to sound except for the moments before touchdown...

            Footnote: Yes, Evan's disdain regarding Air-France and momentarily keeping a known power and attitude when you get UAS (or maybe even initiating a slow descent) is one of those defining moments. AND it's actually essentially PART of the procedure when you think about it.
            Les règles de l'aviation de base découragent de longues périodes de dur tirer vers le haut.

            Comment


            • #51
              Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
              Evan, while you are responding to 3WE, I feel identified too since, with contrasts, 3WE and myself tend to have a similar direction of opinion in these subjects.
              Yes and no. FIrst the no:
              you ALWAYS NEED TO REVERT TO THE AFM AND YOUR COMPANY'S SOPS AS PRIMARY SOURCE, because THERE ARE SPECIFICS THAT YOU BETTER KNOW.
              3WE has consistently rejected that opinion.

              Now the yes:

              However, when pilots fail at a FUNDAMENTALS level, 3WE and myself have very little confidence that they will conquer the SPECIFICS. It's like, yes, you need both, but one comes BEFORE the other. We (or at least I) are not dimishing the importance of the specifics, but there is a hierarchy of not importance but prerequisites.
              You both seem to hold the opinion that all these crews failed at fundamental airmanship because they didn't have it to begin with. Yet there are two strong arguments against this.

              1) it's required knowledge before you get into a cockpit, and any pilot who is not a stupendous idiot is aware of the crucial nature of monitoring airspeed, for instance.

              2) Over and over again, accident reports have revealed the humbling and debilitating power that stress, shock, fatigue and g-forces have on the human mind and proficiency. Volumes have been written about this. And yet you both still address the failure of fundamentals as an indication of a poorly-trained inferior pilot. That may be so in some instances or it might not be true at all.

              No matter what the cause is, that failure of fundamentals is going to happen from time to time. It probably happens much more than we ever hear about PRECISELY because there is a second line of defense that allows pilots who have lapsed in a critical phase of flight to recover either before or after an upset. Again, in the example of this thread, if the pilot had applied the correct low-energy procedure* nothing bad would have come of this. That's the idea. Multiple lines of defense. Multiple levels of redundancy. The cornerstone of aviation safety.

              However, the mindset 3WE has been stubbornly adhering to is that these recovery procedures are universal enough that any pilot can recover any aircraft using fundamental knowledge. All those accident reports prove that this isn't true. There are idiosyncracies that are sometimes contradictory or counterintuitive (you mentioned the A330 thrust lock). There are traps. There are stealth factors.

              Now I hear you say:
              The FUNDAMENTALS of recovery procedures are largely universal.
              What does that mean? "Largely"?!! That might be true but "largely" doesn't cut it when the specific things are the things that kill you. They could say at your funeral, "well, he largely recovered..."

              Lastly, I am not prioritizing these things. That is the narrative that 3WE has built up against me out of nothing. You are correct, OBVIOUSLY fundamentals come first. That's why they're called FUNDAMENTALS. But fundamentals also fail first. I entirely disagree with the rule that a pilot who lapses on fundamentals with also fail at recovery. It might happen that way if the pilot remains in a confused SA or panicked state and can't think clearly, or that pilot might recover his senses and his SA in time and successfully recover that aircraft. And I'm willing to bet the latter happens much more often than the former. This might have something to do with the miniscule fatality rate we are seeing today.

              But again, if the pilot lacks specific knowledge of the aircraft, and is confident that his procedural skills from a Cessna 172 are going to apply perfectly to a MU-2, then we haven't gotten anywhere.

              * When I use the term 'procedure' I mean any learned procedure, not just written ones.

              Comment


              • #52
                To put it simply, here we have an accident in which:

                - the pilot allowed the aircraft to get into an unstable, low-energy situation at low altitude. FAIL

                - the pilot then induced an upset that caused the aircraft to roll steeply, enter a stall and strike a hill short of the runway before recovery was possible. FAIL

                The first is a failure of fundamental airmanship.
                The second is a failure of type-specific low-speed power handling to recover airspeed (and go-around).

                Make either one of those a SUCCESS and no bent airplane.

                Comment


                • #53
                  Originally posted by Evan View Post
                  To put it simply, here we have an accident in which:

                  - the pilot OPERATED IN GROSS VIOLATION OF MULTIPLE FUNDAMENTAL AND PROCEDURAL RULES and allowed the aircraft to get into an unstable, low-energy situation at low altitude. FAIL

                  - the pilot then induced an upset that caused the aircraft to roll steeply, enter a stall and strike a hill short of the runway before recovery was THEORETICALLY possible but GIVEN THE STARTLE FACTOR, LOWNESS AND SLOWNESS HAS BEEN PROVEN STATISTICALLY TO NOT WORK AT A SUPER HIGH LEVEL OF RELIABILITY. FAIL


                  The first is a failure of fundamental airmanship.

                  The second is a failure of type-specific low-speed power handling to recover airspeed (and go-around).

                  Make either one of those a SUCCESS and no bent airplane.
                  1. Green Font: Fixed.
                  2. Red font: No disagreement.
                  3. Evan's black and white world- all bits of procedural airmanship are equal. Gabe and 3BS's views- Yeah, stall training is important, BUT IT'S MORE IMPORTANT to have guys fly fundamentally- and procedurally-proper so that they never ever wind up 4 knots above stall at 500 feet...
                  4. And bigger yet is the problem of pilots who are willing to make gross violations of procedures and fundamentals, but have $ to purchase MU-2s, Bonanzas and Cirruses- better stall training does not really address that.
                  Les règles de l'aviation de base découragent de longues périodes de dur tirer vers le haut.

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