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Yeah that's right my name's Yauch!
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Have you read the Popular Mechanics article about Air France 447?
****NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART OR FEARFUL OF FLYING****
Yeah that's right my name's Yauch!
Re: Have you read the Popular Mechanics article about Air France 447?
Yes! It's fascinating yet terrifying. I do feel vindicated though. My husband has an obsession with this crash and was insistent that A330s are defective.
I fly on tons of A330s so I insisted that it was pilot error. It actually makes me feel better/worse because it's harder to prevent and I fly a lot of airlines with less well trained/experienced pilots than Air France!
That was a really fascinating read--and also very saddening.
The one thing I wonder is that there is no juxtaposition of this situation with that of the KLM flight in the Canary Islands that took off into the Pan Am flight, killing everyone on the KLM flight and many on the Pan Am flight. They determined that the situation there was that officers weren't willing to question the decision of the captains, and that the hierarchy led to poor decisions going unchallenged.
This seems to contradict the suggestion implied in the PM article that the captain should have taken control. Perhaps they are two different scenarios (one where the captain made a poor choice and should have been questioned and one where the captain should have taken control because his officers were making poor choices), but I would be curious how flight schools would address these somewhat paradoxical conclusions: The captain is the most qualified and responsible, and officers should question his judgement.
There was also a situation discussed in Outliers where a Colombian pilot is in charge of a plane that is running low on fuel. He tells the New York/NJ ATC that he needs to land soon, but doesn't push them because culturally for him, it is not his job as the speaker to be understood. And when ATC pushes back, he yields to their authority, instead of trying to get them to understand how dire it is. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed.
I think there is a lot of human error (on top of bad weather and mechanical issues) that can be hard to anticipate, and of course it's good for training to address them. I wonder if there's any way to dream up the scenarios that doesn't involve losing a plane full of people....
It's crazy, isn't it? I found it more comforting than not, but not much.
oolaloo - I run training seminars at my company, many of which have a little and most a lot to do with Risk Management. We will likely use this as a case study at some point, because it does pose the excellent question of what to do when the man at the top is incapable or putting the situation into risk. When authority should be obeyed and when it should be questioned? The issue you bring up of the Columbian pilot is really interesting!
The Captain of the Titanic was hired because of his bravado, not his skill; he had been in multiple incidents before he sank the Titanic. How companies hire people in charge of potentially life or death situations is interesting to think about... what ARE the vetting processes, the stress tests, the accounting of fatigue (both short and long term). A few years ago one of our client's vessel masters comitted suicide after being caught operating under the influence in U.S. waters - not the guy you want driving your 300+ meters long fully laden container ship to begin with, you know?
The most recent large oil spill in the San Franciso Bay was caused by Pilot error and a Captain who was just blindly letting someone else be in charge. There were enough risk factors present that someone could have said, "hey woah, maybe this is not a good idea."
Yeah that's right my name's Yauch!
I was thinking of Outliers as I was reading this!
I read this a few months ago, and it makes an interesting counter-point about how the pilot's reactions may not have been as foolish as some articles at the time were claiming:
http://www.gadling.com/2011/08/12/cockpit-chronicles-theres-more-behind-the-air-france-447-crash/
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
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