Fly the Airplane

http://dcurt.is/2011/12/15/fly-the-airplane/

by drewblaisdell • 15 years ago

172 84 15 years ago

bulte-rs2• 15 years ago

I fully support this message; having performed an instrument rating renewal check just yesterday in sub-optimal weather I experienced a frozen pitot-tube (the thingie that measures dynamic pressure; or a component of the airspeed). Having no speed indication is scary in instrument conditions (i.e. no visibility) but continuing flying is the best decision you can make (that and turning on pitot-heat). But please apply this 'motto' to other fields as well. No matter how bad the situation is; do the thing you're supposed to do: Fly the damn airplane, Talk to your customer, Keep your hands on the steering wheel and: keep breathing.

yread2• 15 years ago

in order of priority: aviate - navigate - communicate

I.e. make sure to stay in the air, know where are you flying and tell others about where you're going or what you've learned

einhverfr• 15 years ago

I think that this can be a good order of priorities for different disciplines too. In fact I recently came out of a major project that ended up with multiple issues that surfaced and threw us off. As a result, I spent three years "flying the plane" if you will rather than trying to figure out how to get my own business going in the direction it needed to go. The result was a hard transition after, but not as bad as I might have feared.

When I have seen projects "crash and burn" it has always been due to someone not "flying the plane." One thing one can do also is see where customers are in this process and if they are not flying their planes, avoid taking them on.

But beyond this, process breakdown is a real thing. Once someone loses confidence in a system compensating measures can often cause more harm than good. Once you don't know what's happening, you can lose control very quickly. One of the roles of a consultant is to get people back up to safe processes while you get everything back up to speed. But this can be a big task.....

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

They tried aviating. The person with control knew he was on manual controls, and did the wrong thing.

This is why the message "FLY THE PLANE" is a useless exhortion - he thought he was doing that.

Had the priority been: communicate - aviate - navigate, they might have been alive.

Imagine instead:

"Manual control"

"check"

"pulling back rudder to gain altitude and avoid storm"

"we can't go much higher, and we don't want to lose speed"

"ok, flying straight on"

unwind• 15 years ago

The article was clearly not limited to literal flying, it ends:

So, the next time you’re in a crushing situation, remember how irrational humans are under stress and remember to FLY THE AIRPLANE.

After observing that people today tend need their brains much more now during moments of extreme stress, since it often involves interacting with machines, as opposed to just running away or putting up a (physical) fight.

drewblaisdell• 15 years ago

The transcription from the recovered recording of the pilots is also particularly unsettling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Findings_...

ajhit406• 15 years ago

Just curious how many purchases popular posts like this drive on Amazon / affiliate sites. For 10k visits, is it like 1% of traffic? Or more like .1% or .01%?

Would be cool to be able to preprocess blog posts through a product search engine that had links to everything (maybe just amazon) mentioned in the blog post-- then let the author affiliate link to those products and profit!

kayoone• 15 years ago

http://yieldkit.com/

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

An even more interesting air disaster is United Airlines Flight 173. Just prior to landing a malfunction caused the indicator for the landing gear being lowered to fail to indicate that it actually was lowered. The plane circled the airport while the crew concentrated on figuring out what was wrong. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed.

It's easy to get side tracked by a problem while losing sight of the big picture. That crash led to a complete rethinking of the way planes are flown.

yread2• 15 years ago

It was also caused by "cockpit gradient" the flight engineer and FO knew about the problem but were reluctant to point it out to the captain (because it was such a silly little thing)

dolbz• 15 years ago

That is interesting. I'm sure I've read of planes doing a fly-by for the control tower to assess whether the landing gear is actually down or not in situations like this. Were there reasons something like this wasn't attempted in this case?

CWuestefeld• 15 years ago

I've just been reading an autobiography of a WWII aviator (a tailgunner in a B-17). He mentions that for planes with substantial damage, it was standard procedure to bring the plane in on its belly with no landing gear. This was because there was a good chance the landing gear itself was damaged, and if so, having it there would do far more harm than good.

If it's possible to bring in a B-17 on its belly as a preventative measure, surely it's possible to do so with a modern airliner when the alternative is a real crash.

kens• 15 years ago

A vivid example of forgetting to fly the plane is the similar case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401 where the landing gear light bulb was burnt out. While investigating this, the crew didn't notice that they were slowly descending and 101 people died when they hit the ground. Last words: "We're still at 2,000 feet, right?"

Transcript: http://planecrashinfo.com/cvr721229.htm

n8agrin3• 15 years ago

I followed through the entire essay in complete agreement, but I wished the following paragraph had at least a reference pointing to its claim:

The human body’s physical “fight or flight” response evolved to help it evade a dangerous situation, which historically involved extreme physical exertion. The rush of steroids into the bloodstream essentially turns off unnecessary systems, including some higher thinking processes, to aid in escape.

When we make statements like this proclaiming we understand the complex workings of things like human physiology I always have to shake my head. We may be smart, us programmers and designers, but let's not pretend to understand the order and meaning of everything. And if you do understand and you have the means, provide some kind of reference to where the claim originates from so we can all learn more.

* edited because I sounded like a jerk and wanted to make my point clearer

dcurtis2• 15 years ago

It has in fact been shown in countless studies that corticosteroids (stress hormones that are released in situations like the ones I described in the article) cause cognitive deficits in humans and other animals. Here is one slightly strange example:

The present study investigated the acute effects of cortisol administration in normal healthy male volunteers on immediate free recall and recognition of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral nouns using a between-subjects double-blind design. Two hours after cortisol (10 mg) or placebo administration, impaired recall and recognition of neutral and pleasant words was found in the treatment group, whereas recall and recognition of unpleasant words was similar in both groups.

See: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/12820857/reload=0;jsessionid...

n8agrin3• 15 years ago

Your essay is well written, I agree with the premise of it and you clearly know a bit about biology. But I still think it's important that when we make these general claims of scientific fact we point to the giants whose shoulders we're standing on. Maybe it's just the ex-scientist in me, and if so, apologies. I appreciate you found a cortisol related article to prove your point, and I agree it's an odd choice as the abstract, which I'm assuming is what you read as well, seems to state little other than pleasantries are forgotten when under a chemically induced stress response.

rzezeski• 15 years ago

There may be more to the situation. I wonder if Normalcy Bias also played a role in Air France 447.

xenophanes• 15 years ago

How can the study be double blind when it involves drugs which have such noticeable effects? People can notice things like impaired recall and figure out which group they are in, so it's not really double blind.

tomhoward• 15 years ago

This is a fairly straightforward matter of whether his statement is right or wrong, I don't think it's fair or helpful to describe it as "particularly arrogant".

I agree that in general, people's understanding of human physiology tends to be simplistic and wrong.

But Dustin's description here aligns with what is generally known and accepted, and he doesn't venture details beyond what anyone with with a sound understanding of physiology could reasonably claim to know.

If he's wrong, that would be easy to prove, in which cas you should do so, so he can amend his post.

n8agrin3• 15 years ago

He's not wrong. I just want to learn more and to have others be able to learn more. Arrogant may be too strong a word, I'll edit that.

bond• 15 years ago

I just can't believe the stall warning sounded continuously for 54 seconds and he just ignored that. WTH was he thinking the stall warning was for?

ricardobeat• 15 years ago

According to the descriptions the stall alarm sounded for a full 4m30s, 75 times!

exDM69• 15 years ago

This has been mentioned in other articles about the crash, including ones that have been posted in HN.

Under normal conditions, when the flight computer is receiving airspeed and other telemetry normally, the fly-by-wire Airbus operates under "normal law", a mode where the pilot controls the aircraft but the flight computer prevents stalling and other dangerous situations. In this case, the pitot tube was frozen and the flight computer didn't receive proper airspeed data and went into "alternate law" mode, where the pilot controls the craft and there are no computer enforced limits. The co-pilot with the controls had probably not flown the aircraft under alternate law or incorrectly believed that he was operating under normal law, and had never heard the stall warning before. So either he thought that the stall warning was false and just another instrument malfunction or he just didn't understand it's meaning in the confusion.

omegant4• 15 years ago

The flight mode is important but not the reason why they crashed the plane (IMHO). The reason they didn´t do anything else but pull the sidestick and apply TOGA was that they thought it was the solution to the problem. The problem to them was thunderstorm + fast speed variation (unreliable speed indication or no indication at all)+ autopilot disconnected. So they applied one of the most practiced maneuvers in commercial airplanes simulators the wind shear which is one of the most dangerous situations an airliner could face, and therefore one of the most practiced maneuvers(due to economical reasons refresh simulators are more and more condensed and reduced, almost no time for "basic" maneuvers like real stalls, regular manual flying, etc...).

Usually severe wind shear takes place in the presence of thunderstorms (they were flying inside one ), then there is a severe change in speed indication and wind speed(also present at the AF flight) How do you fight a windshear?. First there is a loud alarm ringing(in modern planes like the A330) + visual alarms (that wasn´t present at the AF, at least not this particular one), then you apply TOGA and pull the stick full backwards (check this video, is very well explained, also the part of the plane taking care of the stall in normal mode http://es-la.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1015017491047010... ). The plane will flight just above the stall speed (in normal mode) and that way you´ll be able to avoid ground obstacles, as the windshear is only dangerous when flying close to the ground (take off, approach, and landing). If you have altitude enough you are able to change altitude for speed and recover the control without further problems.

Obviously the wind shear maneuver is not designed to be flown at cruise altitude, as the engines don´t have enough thrust to take the plane of the stall and keep climbing, also the plane is already very close to the coffin corner (over speed and stall aerodynamic limits are just a few knots apart), so any "extreme" maneuver (banking more than 20º or pulling or pushing hard in the controls) will simply put you outside of the flight envelope creating a control loss (usually you lose 2000´to 5000´ being unable to stop the descend), this happens also to planes entering sudden warmer zones like the ones you encounter in the tropic(due to the loss of air density).

There is a point when you simply disconnect from the alarms (no matter how many times stall or alternate law where sounding), you don´t hear them anymore (this was discovered or more studied with the Vietnam war pilots, who had very complex environments full of radio communications and SAM alerts), you only keep trying what you think will work, may it be the correct procedure, the incorrect one or just touching buttons because that damned computer is not behaving the way you want to.

Is difficult to know exactly how they suffered the problem and is also extremely difficult to judge it from a computer chair(even in simulator is well known the fact that the instructor can see obvious mistakes from the instructor chair, which the pilots are unable to recognize or detect for several minutes, once he sits in the pilot seat it is very provable that he will make similar mistakes).

What initially seem the correct actions(to the autopilot disconnection and lost of speed indication)are: to use the unreliable speed procedure(keep the throttle position and a pitch position) and then try to recover at least one of the speed indications (or at least checking which one was correct). But setting TOGA and then pulling the sidestick, this is (in my opinion) the automatic reaction to thinking they were suffering a wind shear(incorrectly), and so they keep fighting that imaginary wind shear for the long, long remaining 4 minutes till they crashed. No amount of other information or alarms took them away of that mental procedure (unfortunately), not because they where lost in they assumptions (they were), but because they thought almost all of the time (till it was too late) that they were performing the correct actions.

I must say that almost none of the pilots I know have the same opinion as me.(I am A320 pilot with B737 and MD80 experience).

jrockway• 15 years ago

Many possibilities:

1: Panic. His brain's "we're falling out of the sky" alarm was louder than the plane's stall alarm. (The correct reaction to the first is the opposite of the correct reaction to the second.)

2: Mental error caused by UI confusion. "Stall speed" is shown on the airspeed indicator, and he knew his airspeed sensors had failed. Therefore, he concluded that the stall warning was wrong. (But, stall is not detected by the pitot system, it's detected by angle-of-attack sensors which were working just fine.)

3: Training. Pilots are casually taught "you can't stall this plane" because under "normal law", that's true. No matter what input you apply, the computer will not let you stall the airplane. Unfortunately, the plane was not in "normal law" at the time, because of the failed systems. (This is indicated somewhere, the information that the plane's not in normal law is available to the pilots.) I'm guessing that no instructor ever mentions those exact words in bullet-point form, but I'm guessing that someone has said, "just pull back as hard as you can, you can't stall this thing" when practicing, say, engine-out-on-departure procedures. And statements like that stick.

RomP2• 15 years ago

Great narrative, but factually wrong on at least two accounts:

>If the pilots has switched a button to re-enable autopilot, everyone on board would have lived. But they didn’t. One co-pilot made a single, absurd mistake–for twenty full minutes–that brought the plane down.

First factual error: The button they should've switched is not the auto-pilot button (which they operate many times per flight), but the flight mode button (which most pilots never operate in their career). When the plane lost at least two of the three pitot tube readings, it went from the NORMAL "Law" to the ALT "Law", where the airplane doesn't guard itself against many pilot errors. When the pitots de-iced shortly thereafter, the plane did NOT go back to NORMAL "Law": it had to be switched there manually. The pilots did not do that and it seems to be the consensus so far (can't state that for certain before the official report is released) that they did not realize they were flying the plane in ALT and then DIRECT Law.

Second factual error: the "absurd mistake" lasted nowhere near 20 minutes. The first problem appeared at 2:10:03UTC and flying into the ocean occurred at 2:14:28UTC -- 4 minutes 23 seconds in all.

dcurtis2• 15 years ago

Oops, thanks. These are fixed.

mseebach• 15 years ago

As it's completely meaningless to have the autopilot operate out of normal law (why would the computer operate the plane outside of the envelope the computer considers safe?), isn't it safe to assume that re-engaging the autopilot would have put the plane back in normal law?

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

Isn't it also safe to assume:

- Pilots wouldn't be trained with marketing speak so they believe the Aircraft is uncrashable, and ignore 75 repeats of the STALL warning alarm.

- The change of modes between "can't crash" and "can crash" laws normally never happens, so when it does it deserves a huge and explicit attention grabbing ongoing alert of its own.

- The plane would never, ever, detect that it was barely moving forwards, nose pointing up, falling at hundreds of feet per second, and then switch the STALL alarm off.

- The plane designers would make it so one pilot has no clue what the other is doing with the controls, and if both offer conflicting instructions, the plane will not alert them, but just average the instructions.

- The "about to hit the ground" warning would be built to sound early enough that they could use it to avoid hitting the ground.

- The pilots would be trained so that if something goes wrong, seems weird, panic is setting in, they must stop what they are doing and cooperatively restate their assumptions and reassess the situation.

RomP2• 15 years ago

I'm not an Airbus engineer and I'm not privy to their research (undoubtedly many thousands hours involving scenarios we can't even imagine) and the reasoning behind this design. This catastrophe is rooted in human-machine interface and we should wait for the official investigation report, which will come very shortly and will include recommendations to aircraft designers (including UI aspects), training procedures and crew management procedures, to mention just a few.

My layman view is that the first step in principle "fly-navigate-communicate" could be accomplished by placing the aircraft into the "pitch an power" configuration: 5 degrees nose up + TOGA. This didn't happen. But this is my layman view: I'm down here in a comfy chair with a cup of tea, and they were up there, in a thunderstorm with flashing warning lights, frozen pitot tubes and 228 souls behind their back. We shouldn't judge them: we should only learn.

omegant4• 15 years ago

You are right about the 4 min, but there is no such a thing as a flight mode button. Normal, alternate and direct law change automatically depending the number of computers or inputs available. There is a big red ALTERNATE LAW at the HSI, also a big red STALL. The problem is not that they where in alternate law, is that they used the wrong maneuver to recover the plane.

gcp6• 15 years ago

From reading the reports, what you say doesn't make sense. As far as I understand, it's not possible to stall the plane in normal law. They crashed the plane because it was stalled for over 4 minutes. This implies that the plane did not go back to normal law.

Given that the plane was fully functional after the initial glitch (all inputs and all computers OK), this means they had to either force it back to normal law either via a kind of switch (the flight mode button), or pilot it into a configuration where normal law applies (essentially, recover from the stall manually). They obviously failed the latter.

An obvious question resulting from this (also asked in another thread here) is: can the autopilot recover the plane when it already is in alternate law?

gldalmaso• 15 years ago

>> The rush of steroids into the bloodstream essentially turns off unnecessary systems, including some higher thinking processes, to aid in escape.

>> So, the next time you’re in a crushing situation, remember how irrational humans are under stress and remember to FLY THE AIRPLANE.

The advice is good, but irrelevant as the article itself states it.

Maybe the first step in the checklist manifest should be to take a steroid inhibitor pill, or even better, always take some pill that only kicks in when steroids are above normal levels (if that could even be acomplished).

alabut• 15 years ago

There's a subtle shoutout to The Checklist Manifesto - that book is amazing. I thought it was another GTD-style productivity book but it's not, it's a lot more than that. It studies several seemingly unrelated fields like medicine and construction to bring together unique insights into group collaboration and workflow on complex projects with lots of stakeholders. The chapter about venture capital has a bit of a Moneyball vibe to it.

4ad2• 15 years ago

Much better article about the crash: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...

I don't feel like this article has any substance, and I am particularly annoyed by the lack of contrast.

Also, see http://contrastrebellion.com/

baxter• 15 years ago

The OP links to the Popular Mechanics article in the first paragraph. I don't think it was intended as a replacement for the Popular Mechanics article, but as an addition to it.

4ad2• 15 years ago

And I feel it adds nothing to it, plus it hurts my eyes, for reasons explained in my second link.

Also, pretty pathetic I'm downvoted for personal preferences and opinions.

jes5199• 15 years ago

Yeah, I agree. It's frustrating that you can get hundreds of upvotes by summarizing an article from last week's HN and adding nothing but a trivial, trite suggestion.

elevenE• 15 years ago

While not relevant, the yellow color while selecting text makes it unreadable. (Yes, I select/highlight the text that I'm reading.)

llambda• 15 years ago

> Unlike car accidents, which are often blamed on driver (and thus human) error, airplane crashes are considered engineering failures...

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something about the way these accidents are investigated and understood, but directly after this the author goes on to cite Air France 447, which many of us have by now read about in Popular Science, among other sources I'm sure, wherein it's made clear that that particular flight fell into the ocean for no other reason than a persistence fault on the part of the copilot who had control of the plane. So how does that qualify as an engineering error and not simply human error? Could the author mean by "engineering" such an abstraction as the engineering of flight training?

fredoliveira• 15 years ago

He missed a word like "frequently" after "airplane crashes are", and that might confuse a few people (as it confused you). His point is - much like you said yourself - that most airplane crashes are often related to engineering failures (actual mechanical/system failures), but that in this particular case, it was human error.

lucasjung• 15 years ago

He's still wrong: human error is a factor in the overwhelming majority of aviation mishaps (I don't have stats handy, but it's something in the neighborhood of 85% IIRC).

This must be understood in the context that while it is almost always a factor, it is rarely the only factor. Aviation mishaps typically occur when three or more factors combine. For example, if you're just low on gas, or just in bad weather, or just a little bit tired, you probably won't have a mishap, but put all three together and things can rapidly get out of hand. In the case of AF 447, they were in bad weather (which caused a malfunction in the FCS), they had CRM problems (Captain was not in the cockpit, and the two pilots who were in the cockpit did not coordinate well), there were serious flaws in the HMI design (the most egregious example, in my mind, being the averaging of the stick inputs), and the crew was not sufficiently trained on how to respond to FCS failures.

gcp6• 15 years ago

I think it means that any crash, even if caused by the pilots fault, is seen as a fixable technical problem, either in automation, equipment, reliability, or pilot training.

We don't send all car drivers back to get their license if somebody crashes his car. We do try to "fix" the pilots if something like this happens.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

Maybe a better term is "systems failure", where the pilot is part of the system.

pkamb• 15 years ago

The cockpit has two switches, right next to each other, on the control panel. They're exactly the same size, shape, and color. They feel the same in your hand.

The only difference between these two switches are the labels. One says "Recover from Stall", the other "Self-Destruct".

After the explosion, is it "pilot error" that you pressed the wrong switch? Or is an engineering failure that those buttons were so indistinguishable to begin with?

jorkos• 15 years ago

On a whole other topic, that's quite the footer....Dustin Curtis is a superhero!!

joshwa• 15 years ago

A core concept they drill into your head in flight training is the following axiom:

    Aviate, Navigate, Communicate 
    (in that order)

First and foremost, keep the plane in the air. Then you can worry about where you're going (e.g. don't fly into terrain, start heading towards an airport). Finally, coordinate with others (e.g. controllers) to let them know what you're doing and seek guidance.

This axiom can be applied to lots of other areas, too, including startups. For instance, it explains why I don't blog: I'm concentrating on execution and strategy.

It's one of the reasons I wonder if the many prolific startup bloggers have their priorities straight.

EDIT: oops, just saw yread's comment below. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360071

ditojim• 15 years ago

the co-pilot did fly the plane, incorrectly, for 4 min & 23 seconds. he was pulling back on the stick to climb because he didn't have all of his instruments (due to the icing of the sensor) or understand why the plane was not climbing. the reason the plane crashed was because he flew the plane wrong, not lack of flying the plane.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

Flying the plane wrong is not flying. The point of the saying is to not get distracted by what's happening to the point that you fail to fly the airplane. And that's exactly what happened here.

mmcconnell1618• 15 years ago

The Professional Pilots Rumor Networks has a bunch of excellent discussions about AF447 (and other incidents). It's nice to get the perspective of people who fly for a living:

http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/466259-af447-final-crew-c...

seanos4• 15 years ago

One obvious improvement would be to replace the warning "Stall!" with "Stall! Stall protection disengaged!" when flying in alternative mode. Even better might be "Stall! Push stick forward!" when a stall is detected and the pilot is simultaneously pulling back on the stick.

gcp6• 15 years ago

I don't think more complex aural warnings would have accomplished anything [1]. (Edit) This guy basically had his brain disengaged due to panic and was useless at that point. The tragedy is that the other pilots couldn't prevent it.

The plane also warned them aurally that they were giving conflicting inputs. None of them "understood" it, in the sense that they thought about what that must have meant.

[1] Though, having the stall alarm go off when the stall was too deep is very, very weird and may have contributed to the issue.

(Edit: I initially said that pilots are deeply trained to use stick down to recover from a stall - but apparently this isn't really true for commercial pilots who are trained to avoid height loss when near a stall.)

seanos4• 15 years ago

The crash report says that the second pilot and pilot (when he arrived) were both unaware that the other copilot was pulling back on his stick. E.g. at one point the other copilot had his stick forward (causing an averaging of the two inputs resulting in nose still up) and right before the crash when the copilot replies "But I've had my stick back all the time!" the other two get a shock. The warning "Stall! Push stick forward!" would therefore have saved the day, even if the copilot pulling back ignored it (and it seems he thought he was doing the right thing by pulling back, so the explicit advice "Push stick forward!" might have helped in his mental state), the other two would realise he was contravening normal response.

arjn• 15 years ago

I found the Popular mechanics article linked to in the OP well written and far more interesting. One of my family is a retired pilot so I'm gonna show him that article. The sad thing is, if they had gotten the captain into the cockpit a couple of minutes sooner, this may never have happened.

crikli2• 15 years ago

Let he who has flown on untrustworthy instruments in the soup cast the first stone.

feralchimp• 15 years ago

+1000. I'm a PPSEL of the Cessna-exclusively-outside-the-soup variety, and these kinds of transcripts often bring me to tears. I understand the fascination with (and importance of understanding) accidents and human-error events especially, but the pilot in question was just about my age, and I can't begin to put myself in his shoes in the first moments of this tragedy without crushing pressure entering my guts.

Rest in peace holmes, and don't take it personal.

crikli2• 15 years ago

I'm a PPSEL also, training for my IR right now. We had some icing on my last flight that caused some pitot/static issues, fairly quickly solved by flipping on the pitot heat and climbing out of the clouds. Very interesting psychological experience; I had to use a good deal of mental energy to shunt the terror out of the way and used what little was left over to fly the airplane.

I've come to the conclusion that dealing with those situations is analogous to lifting weights: when you start out your ability is weak. Experience and training increase your strength but there is an upper limit. You just gotta hope you don't have to press something that's beyond your max. The likelihood can be mitigated against but not completely eliminated.

hxa7241• 15 years ago

This seems like a somewhat rough diagnosis.

The pilots were not making an 'absurd error'. They did not forget to fly the plane.

It is that what they thought they were doing was not what they were actually doing. Their mental model broke away from the reality. (They thought the plane was in 'normal mode' when it was actually in 'abnormal mode' -- an expression of which: one them declaring "this cannot be happening!")

Telling them just fly the airplane is not (quite) the solution -- they thought they were flying it.

But the remedy is sort-of basically correct. It just seems better expressed as: when nothing makes sense (your mental model has suddenly utterly failed), fall back to a more basic backup mental model and system -- like primitive manual override.

(How clear can such separation of a basic mode be? How practical would it be? How reliable? It leads to a set of engineering/UI questions . . . were they well designed in this particular case?)

mikeash3• 15 years ago

I'm not so sure. They weren't flying the airplane, but rather were letting the computer fly it for them. (The control movements made by the one pilot who was horribly in error were not something that one would ever make if the controls were directly connected to the control surfaces.) Meanwhile, the computer was letting the humans fly. If the pilot in error had flown the airplane instead of driving the computer, everything would have come out fine. (And, while I'm not completely familiar with the Airbus's fly-by-wire system, I'm pretty sure that doing this still would have been safe in the event that the computer hadn't given up, either.)

They spent all this time trying to figure out what was wrong with the plane when their immediate concern should have been to get the nose down and get their airspeed up. Figuring out the underlying problem can wait. That's what "fly the airplane" is all about. Even if stuff is on fire, the first priority is to keep your speed up and don't run into anything hard.

onemoreact2• 15 years ago

The problem is they did not know there airspeed and they did not understand they where stalling. The airspeed issue related to simple icing. Stalling was a little more complex than that. They had plenty of indications that they where stalling one of the pilots simply did not believe them.

maeon3• 15 years ago

The solution is not to average flight stick data. Had it not, then non panicking pilot 2 would say why the bleep are you yanking back on the stick (fleeing the scary bear) when we are losing altitude fast and stalling.

Human panicking error. he thought the 75 stall warnings were due to loss of flight speed indicators.

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

Reminds me of the Zen story which recommends just focus on doing the next thing, no matter how chaotic or absurd the situation. "Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water."

raldi• 15 years ago

Here's my preferred version of this koan:

http://i.imgur.com/p7WU7.jpg

LaGrange• 15 years ago

One thing this is, in my opinion, missing: panic is a weird state. You might even know that what you're doing is irrational. It doesn't really help, and to make things worse, people telling you what's rational don't actually help (you know that you're not doing the right thing, you feel helpless about it already, last thing you need is people passing judgement on you).

It's a tough problem, because sometimes panic attack strikes completely out of nowhere, even a person who was previously stable, even in situations less stressful than described (there's records of people panicking while crossing a street, to the point where they couldn't move). And it isn't always completely obvious to onlookers, and it might get your co-pilot, your climbing partner, or you.

Fly the Airplane

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