Manual Overrides in Aviation

I was reading Scott's post this am from my phone and missed the Alaska Airlines reference. Those pilots were faulted for an unapproved trouble shooting procedure. Instead they should have landed at the nearest suitable/emergency airport. The thinking in that crash was had the crew not tried the trouble shooting procedure and simply landed the jack screw failure would not have caused a loss of control and CFIT (controlled flight into terrain).

It was loss of control, not CFIT.

I believe "Loss of control" and "Controlled" are mutually exclusive, if not linguistically then definitely in the aeronautical sense. You need to study more here. A lot more. (I have 34 years flying large transport category aircraft, so don't even start with me).

That is correct, I’m not sure why I put that in there and I was wrong. It was loss of control and not CFIT. That accident was of particular interest to me. It occurred during my 10 years on the MD80. A good friend had a similar incident and it took three pilots to hold enough back pressure on the yoke to save the aircraft. Had it not been for a commuting pilot in the jump seat there would have been another jack screw crash. Not something that was ever in the news.
I won’t start as I have 30 years so far and god willing 11 more to go.

I’m sure this thread will get corrected from a moderator soon so I’ll stop adding aviation info. Thank you for the information and I hope the captain of Go comes out okay if it was a mechanical failure.

I wish I could split the posts in this thread over to JetForums. It would be great to have knowledgeable aviation minded folks take up residence on our sister site. Short of that, the aviation related posts in the Turquoise Yachts "GO" thread are being split into a new thread titled: Manual Overrides in Aviation and moved to the yacht club forum.

It's been a long time since a thread veered this far from heading.

I read a book that analyzed “accidents” in transportation and you are spot on with non western crews unwillingness to question the captains authority. A Korean airline had a crash due in part to the crew being intimidated by the air controllers in La Guadia (apparently LaGuardia air controllers tend to be intimidating with little patience) and the co pilot not wanting to ruffle the captains feathers with how critical the situation was becoming. In the Korean case I believe the Korean airline hired a consultant to help the flight crews overcome their somewhat blind respect of the Captain’s authority and their crash record improved considerably as well as I remember.

Oscar, I have 47 years working in commercial real estate. I still don’t consider myself an expert and would never tell someone don’t even start with me. Especially someone in my field. If someone asks I tell them what I know and remind them that my opinion is relevant but it is just my opinion and someone else may have a better thought. I am 56 and still a student. I hope you as a pilot don’t feel that you know it all and there is nothing left for you to learn.

Most pilots have thicker skin than that. I didn't realize the extent of David's experience and his Controlled vs Loss of Control statement sounded like it came from a wannabe which he readily admitted. So I think we're good there.

FWIW I was a realtor once too, and never got even close to knowing what I needed to know. As far as me knowing all there is I need to know about aviation.... yes I do. But, let me qualify that: It used to be a fun job until 9/11 took half the fun out of it. COVID did the rest so I hung it up last September. And although the BS around it was worse than ever before, it was still a very good job though and all I need to know at this point is that it's allowing me to sit in my Moho in Florida as I type this, and head back up to the Chesapeake in a few weeks to exorcise the "pink" from my Hatteras.

Back to the subjects at hand and I will add my $.03

I have somewhere near 30,000 hours in a variety of bug smashers, ATR-42, B727 100/200, DC-9 30/50, B-737 300/500/700/800 B757 200/300 B767 300/400.......

SOP (Standard Operating Procedures): I used to brief "We fly it by the book until the book falls short and then we do what it takes." And the book fell short a couple of times where an abnormal checklist left us hanging. And we did what it took and no one noticed and we set the parking brake, wrote it up and went to the hotel. Happens every day, and you don't even get a thank you. If you screw it up you may end up in the paper and then you're the bad guy, if you survive. And trust me, there's a LOT more that happens than makes the papers. Cratering engines is a regular occurrence. Over the years I've heard of many more than I read about. Uncontained engine failures are a little messy so those do seem to make it to the news. Especially now with 120 video cameras on each side of the airplane.

CRM (Crew Resource Management). Used to be (back in the Pleistocene) that stuff breaking was the leading cause of crashes. Then the engineers got better and eventually the "human factor" became the low hanging fruit. Enter CRM..... I remember the first training sessions, boy that was fun. Short version is that the guys (and gals) that really needed it never got it. But that generation is about gone. If you want to read THE classic case study google the KLM/PANAM crash in Tenerife. Highest casualty count in an airplane crash in history, to this day. The KLM Captain bore most, if not all of the responsibility. We've made a LOT of progress since then, and the cockpit I left behind was a LOT safer in that respect than the one I walked into in 1986. That said, yes there are parts of the world where they haven't quite gotten there yet and it is not so much that they don't understand how it would make their airplanes safer, it's the fact that their CULTURE (losing face and all that) is in the way. "Us Westerners" have a lot more liberty to say stuff about and to others, and have a lot thicker skin. In fact I think we've carried that liberty too far when I watch the loss of class by people who should care more on TV. But I digress.

Aircraft design. Yes, the pilot has less and less control over what the airplane is doing. There are two driving forces there. Money and Money. First off, the drive to make airplanes more efficient. There was a time you stuck a screw driver into a screw on the (4 barrel) carb on your big block V8 to mess with the mixture. Now, forget it. Yes you can "chip" your ECU but you have a lot less control over what it's doing. This is the price we pay for more power per pound and more MPG. Airplanes the same way. The Stealth Bomber has hundreds of computers to keep it flying as it is dynamically unstable. No human yanking a yoke/stick around is going to keep it in the air. No human (ok, maybe one or 2 but not me) is going to keep a modern airliner in the air at high Mach and Flight Levels without the aid of limiters, feel controllers, yaw dampers and all that.

But that goes one step further. Aviation is growing at a rate that makes it impossible to have pilots with decades of experience in the left (or right) seat. The market demands someone that can go from zero to hero in a few years. This requires airplanes that are more and more "pilot proof". Yes, when the gizmos fail the pilot can't save the day and everyone dies. That is the cost of doing business. But doing it that way kills less people than building airplanes that rely on the supreme airmanship of the aces in the seat to stay aloft. It's as simple as that.

There is an acceptable failure rate, and there is an economic feasibility design point at which that rate needs to be achieved. "They" will never say it in those words on the news as it would ruin the emo buzz the media need for their survival, but it is a fact.

I will now turn it back over to the forum "experts". (Except David, he actually knows a few things ;-) ).... The Maddog eh? Always loved to ride just aft of the cockpit in that thing. Quiet as anything. Never flew it. A bunch of rusty EAL 50's is the closest I ever got.

Yup but we refined her name to The Seabiscuit or the biscuit for short. I miss the old girl. No worries here and what a well written post.