PAKISTAN INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES AIRBUS A320 CRASHES

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On a midnight ferry flight into Syracuse, we decided to do a practice emergency descent with the blessing of a bored tower controller, who cleared us to land on RWY28 when we were 15 miles out. We crossed the outer marker (4.3 miles to the runway) at 12,000 feet and 230 knots, went to flight idle, slowed to 190, threw out gear and flaps, and played Stuka pilot. Just before we pitched down, the FAR end of the runway disappeared under the radome, and the tower asked if we wanted a circle to land on RWY10. "Nope, straight in 28." We put it on the numbers and pulled off the runway at the first high speed taxiway.
The tower's response: "Awesome!". Stabilized at 180 knots with the drag hanging out and idle power, it felt like a vertical dive, hanging in our harnesses, but it was actually somewhat south of 60°. Can't do that in a jet.
If I do my rise over run right, I get a little short of 37°. That said it takes a little bit of time to pull the throttle back and drop the nose and hang the gear and flaps out: I'm still surprised it would have exceeded 60-degrees. I guess the Be 1900 encouraged a kind of cowboy mentality...
 
If I do my rise over run right, I get a little short of 37°. That said it takes a little bit of time to pull the throttle back and drop the nose and hang the gear and flaps out: I'm still surprised it would have exceeded 60-degrees. I guess the Be 1900 encouraged a kind of cowboy mentality...
Cowboy mentality, if you will, we just followed the published emergency descent procedure as practiced in every recurrent checkride. Except we landed afterward.
At 230 knots, a swift power reduction turns those four paddle blades on each side into very effective speed brakes. Gear down at 190, one notch flaps at 180, then pitch down and hold 180. The visual effect is like shoving off the platform and down the inrun of a large ski jump.
Your flight path is not the hypotenuse of a triangle, but more like the path of a ski jumper in flight, including after he/she's touched down, but you're still in the air. At about 2/3 the horizontal distance from marker to threshold, and just under 2000 feet AGL, we started raising the nose and adding flaps as we slowed to each successive speed for each increment. We hit Vref as we crossed the localizer antennas, flared over the threshold, and greased her onto the numbers, adding a little power to make it to the taxiway, duplicating the flight/outrun path of your mythical ski jumper. More like a conchoid curve than a hypotenuse. We both had been ski jumpers in high school, and the skipper in college as well, but neither of us recognized the parallels until after the fact. Our chief pilot (a former FB111 pilot, instructor, and check pilot) said he should chew us out, but since we accomplished it with good safety margins, in the middle of the night, with hardly anyone watching, and polished our skills, he'd let us off with a "never again!".
"Take up flying, it keeps you young!"
Cheers,
Wes
 
Is it possible he realised it was all wrong and tried to power up and go around but the engines touched the ground before he had enough speed to start climbing? A bit like the Mig 29 at the air show?
 
Is it possible he realised it was all wrong and tried to power up and go around but the engines touched the ground before he had enough speed to start climbing? A bit like the Mig 29 at the air show?
I haven't seen the CVR/FDR readouts, but from the video, it looks like they slid at least a couple thousand feet on the engine pods with not much apparent deceleration.
 
Cowboy mentality, if you will, we just followed the published emergency descent procedure as practiced in every recurrent checkride. Except we landed afterward.
It's kind of funny that there are some actions that seem completely chaotic and crazy, but are actually completely rational and executed with control and precision.
At 230 knots, a swift power reduction turns those four paddle blades on each side into very effective speed brakes. Gear down at 190, one notch flaps at 180, then pitch down and hold 180. The visual effect is like shoving off the platform and down the inrun of a large ski jump.
Your flight path is not the hypotenuse of a triangle, but more like the path of a ski jumper in flight, including after he/she's touched down, but you're still in the air. At about 2/3 the horizontal distance from marker to threshold, and just under 2000 feet AGL, we started raising the nose and adding flaps as we slowed to each successive speed for each increment. We hit Vref as we crossed the localizer antennas, flared over the threshold, and greased her onto the numbers, adding a little power to make it to the taxiway, duplicating the flight/outrun path of your mythical ski jumper. More like a conchoid curve than a hypotenuse.
That actually makes sense, the time it takes to set up the aircraft and the pushover, followed by the need to pull out, and then flare. That does look like you probably would reach around 60-degrees in such a maneuver.
We both had been ski jumpers in high school
That's pretty cool, actually.
 
If I do my rise over run right, I get a little short of 37°. That said it takes a little bit of time to pull the throttle back and drop the nose and hang the gear and flaps out: I'm still surprised it would have exceeded 60-degrees. I guess the Be 1900 encouraged a kind of cowboy mentality...
Wait ,a minute Zipper, I thought you had never flown a aircraft, surely you're not on here talking about a flight simulation program and think it has any relevance.
 
Wait ,a minute Zipper, I thought you had never flown a aircraft, surely you're not on here talking about a flight simulation program and think it has any relevance.
Rise over run is a math formula -- it isn't from a fight simulator. I figured if a small amount of time was needed to throttle back and hang out the flaps, since push-overs and pull-outs are not done instantly, but a small amount of time is required to do them, and the dive was terminated at 2000 feet, it would be greater than 37-degrees, and considering the variables, it might very well have gone into dive-bomber territory.
 
So math is relevant in this situation ??
Math is relevant in every situation, just not in the simplistic way some like to make of it. Math can even track and define the variables generated by human factors, it just takes more resources than you or I or Zipper can command. Some of us are addicted to it and expect more of it than we have the ability to manage. Others (like me) are allergic to it and don't trust our ability to manage it beyond simple straightforward applications. I tested over 700 in the math SAT, and yet managed to flunk calculus twice and get myself thrown out of the college of science and engineering at university. Go figure. "Human Factors", right?
Cheers,
Wes
 
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If I do my rise over run right,
Rise over run: Opposite Over Adjacent; that's Tangent, isn't it? Trig comes drifting up from the depths of long forgotten lore. Good ole Chief SOH-CAH-TOA, how could I forget? Is regression setting in, or what?
Cheers,
Wes
 
So math is relevant in this situation ??
It did establish a baseline minimum flight-path angle based on 12000' of altitude and the distance from the runway. That said, if you come out of the dive at 2000' that changes the parameters. When you factor in that it takes a few seconds to retard power, put out the flaps and ease the plane over into the dive, and then a few seconds to ease out of the dive, you're entering the dive later, you're producing a curved flight path with certain areas over a straight-line rise/run and some under it.

Good ole Chief SOH-CAH-TOA
Yup
 
You'd hope the A320 is a little more advanced than a late Jurassic era 727 sim!
I would hope so too, but I don't know enough about the plane to judge for sure. It's certainly got a lot of advanced technology in it, but how well the human factors integration has been done, I don't know. I think our man Biff has experience in the 'Bus. Maybe he'd tell us. My ex airline pilot lady friend scored a brief ride in an idle A320 sim on her retirement day, and said she thought her first jet, the Embraer 145, was better from a pilot standpoint. It had an "emergency prioritization" system designed to inform and guide the crew through interrelated multiple emergencies in a flow path style of action, rather than barraging them with competing alarms reporting multiple issues. The secondary EFIS screen on each side would flash a subdued yellow or red around its perimeter and display the relevant emergency checklist with the already accomplished automated responses checked off. As each manual item was accomplished, the highlight would shift to the next. A lot of system functions, such as electrical load shedding, hydraulic system switching, APU start, or RAT deployment, that are manual checklist items on most aircraft, are automated emergency responses in the Embraer when the situation calls for them. All such actions can be manually reverted by the crew if necessary.
She said the B737-800NGs she flew were dynasaurs by comparison. "A Model T Ford with a killer home theater system".
Cheers,
Wes
 
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"A Model T Ford with a killer home theater system".

Nice, I like it. Although not a pilot (I had a ppl once and know how to fly, but I wouldn't call myself a 'pilot'), the Dash is apparently a good thing to push around when it is lightly loaded. It's a bit on the prehistoric side in some aspects - ours still have distinctly 80s cockpit displays and they chirp and beep and tell you stuff during emergencies too. From what I've learned, it appears the latest generation of Airbusses don't make as much noise as their predecessors, to make it more obvious when something goes wrong, although that might be relative to what a driver might be used to. The office of the ATR 600 is nice, with its flat screens and slick blue tone replacing the ugly 1970s brown of the earlier models, but it's still an ATR.
 
but it's still an ATR.
My lady jet pilot friend started at Eagle about a year after one of their ATR72s augered in at Roselawn IN after it iced up and the tail stalled. Naturally, she was assigned to the 72, which was just coming back online after getting modified and issued a new type certificate. She had to ride through a reenactment of that event in the sim over and over and over again. She had a couple hairy experiences in the 72, and didn't like the plane much.
I don't know if you're aware of the international brouhaha over the ATR's airworthiness certification after the Roselawn accident, but it's quite the tale. I won't bore everybody with it here, but it's all about the pitfalls of Joint Airworthiness Certification.
Cheers,
Wes
 
My lady jet pilot friend started at Eagle about a year after one of their ATR72s augered in at Roselawn IN after it iced up and the tail stalled. Naturally, she was assigned to the 72, which was just coming back online after getting modified and issued a new type certificate. She had to ride through a reenactment of that event in the sim over and over and over again. She had a couple hairy experiences in the 72, and didn't like the plane much.
I don't know if you're aware of the international brouhaha over the ATR's airworthiness certification after the Roselawn accident, but it's quite the tale. I won't bore everybody with it here, but it's all about the pitfalls of Joint Airworthiness Certification.
Cheers,
Wes
Bore us please :)
 
Bore us please :)
OK, here goes. The ATR aircraft were the first types to be type certificated in the US under the reciprocity provision of Joint Air Worthiness Standards (How's that for an acronym?), meaning that the US FAA didn't conduct it's own airworthiness certification program, but accepted the European one IAW the international treaty that established the program.
Accident investigation established that the deicing system on the accident aircraft was unable by design to cope with the conditions encountered, allowing ice to build on wing and stabilizer surfaces aft of the deicing boots. These conditions are not so rare and unusual in the US as to be statistically insignificant, but are much less common in Europe. It's all about supercooled droplet size, atmospheric vorticity, velocity and angle of impact, and other meteorological esoterica.
Upshot was, the plane needed extensive and expensive redesign of its deicing system and major changes to its operating procedures, flight manual, and training program. Rather than issuing a stream of ADs, making US operators pay for all this, FAA revoked the plane's US type certificate, and pressured the other signatories to JAWS to do likewise, which would throw the cost and trouble back on ATR.
Needless to say, the Europeans refused to play ball, whereupon Bill Clinton closed US airspace and aeronautical cooperation to all aircraft from nations that refused to join the US in ganging up on ATR. At this point it became obvious that a number of mysterious ATR losses around the world might have a new explanation in addition to pilot error. ATR was tasked with researching meteorological anomalies worldwide, and not just in Europe, and JAWS standards were amended to require same for all new certifications. (Wouldn't our current fearless leader love to pull off a power play like that?! And Billy C did it mostly under the radar of the media circus.)
Worldwide variation in icing behavior was cutting edge meteorology in 1994. US operators grounded their ATRs until they could be issued temporary emergency airworthiness certificates, then sent them to southern climes until they could be modified and recertificated. ATR routes in the northcountry were served by a motley crew of smaller aircraft, some even dragged out of retirement, for a year or more, resulting in several fatal accidents.
Not quite James Bond, but an interesting tale (and lesson), nonetheless.
Cheers,
Wes

PS: I was flying single pilot night freight in the northcountry at the time, so paying close attention.
 
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