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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc.

I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's crew. Train each crew to assume the plane they're prepping for their next flight is FUBAR in every way, checklist everything, fix it as necessary, and go from there. Don't rely on the prior crew for anything.

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I’m not a pilot either but I am shocked that there’s not some standard “reset” procedure so that each flight starts with the plane in a consistent clean slate. It seems bizarre for any process to rely on the previous flight coincidentally leaving the plane in a certain state.

It doesn’t. The pilots didn’t do their preflight checklist which would have caught a poorly set up flight computer.

Then I do fully support firing them. (If they didn’t follow the checklist)

At first I saw they might have been fired and thought damn that is strict.

They are responsible for flying a plane full of passengers. Strict would be fair.

Right, but what I mean is that it shouldn’t be possible to skip those steps and have things coincidentally work because of the state the plane was left in. I’m not a pilot or even much of an aviation geek, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the description of this incident, but it sounds to me like this crew did what they always do, and that normally works fine, but this time it didn’t.

There isn't much in these planes that works "coincidentally" because of a previous flight -- almost all important state has to be reconfigured each flight. The article is over-indexing on the flight director's altitude setting. These guys missed many basic things, like rotating at V1 speed and in general monitoring the plane's situation.

You rotate at Vr, not V1. Vr is almost always close to V1, though. The 777's flight computer can calculate all 3 (V1, Vr, V2) for you, put them on the speed tape (on the left of the Primary Flight Display), and audibly call them out.

Doh you're right! I was still closer than these pilots though :)

There’s a lot that goes into deciding how and what tasks to do, how quickly, at what points in flight, and those numbers change as winds, weather, traffic, and fuel burn changes. Each flight, the pilots need to basically take all the factors going into the flight (# passengers, bags, cargo weight, routing, taxi time, and so on) to figure out how much fuel to use, what particular climb profile they’ll use, and a bunch more.

It makes sense that there’d be a “clean cockpit” magic button to push, but not only would the magic button need to be tested in every aspect of flight, in every configuration, in every combination of working and broken sensors… but airplanes are flippin’ complex, and flying modern airliners as part of an airline is even more complex.

That's what pre-flight checklists are for. Even a "simple" one for a small plane like a Cessna 172 comprehensively covers setting or resetting literally every control in the plane.

It doesn't matter what the previous crew configured, because you reconfigure for the conditions and scenario you're about to fly. And this is all part of the preflight checklist.

Even if something was missed, it's very strange to not realize that the plane is still on the ground when you can see the end of the runway, despite what the computers are saying. Usually pilots have trouble trusting the instruments over their own senses, but in this case it's like the opposite.

Is there a reason for these checklists not to be automated? I would expect the pilot to set the plane in takeoff mode with destination and weight (if the plane cannot measure the weight itself) and the plane to run the checklist itself, calculate v1 and v2, check there is enough fuel to the destination, check all the control surface positions, etc.

The Boeing 777 (the plane in this incident) does have an integrated electronic checklist, which can automatically tick off items that are already completed, but the pilots still have to actually use it.

Nothing can help you when you refuse to operate the plane correctly.

Yes, assuming that the previous crew left you a 'perfect and ready to fly plane' is one hell of an assumption to make. With tiny little pieces to collect if it ends up being wrong.

Emirates has a pretty good rep but this doesn't help.

> Yes, assuming that the previous crew left you a 'perfect and ready to fly plane' is one hell of an assumption to make. With tiny little pieces to collect if it ends up being wrong.

This is very bizarre. I once had a morning flight out of Denver (not too long ago, August 2008?) and talking to people there apparently the plane had an electronics malfunction of some sort. They said they would fly us out as soon as the plane was ready but about ten hours later, they gave up and flew us out on a plane with a different airline (which I assume was not free for them, I doubt American Airlines would fly a plane for free for United). Point is the initial problem, at least what they told us, was some lights failed to turn on but they refused to fly. I thought flight crew were very risk averse but clearly not everyone.

That's proper procedure. When in doubt: fail safe.

These guys even flew the plane back instead of being replaced by another crew, and that's with a plane that has just been used way in excess of its design parameters on more than one measure.

I've heard pilots put this as "it's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than to be in the air wishing you were on the ground".

Or "take-off is optional but landing is mandatory" :)

Emirates may have a good score on some passenger metrics but they don't have a good rep with most pilots.

There has been another incident where an Emirates crew lacked any kind of basic aircraft handling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Flight_521

Their main problem is a very bad rep for working conditions. Crews being overly fatigued, arcane labour laws in UAE, that makes it harder for them to hire pilots and to retain experienced pilots. Combined with a local market that doesn't have a big aviation history so less people to build on.

Perhaps this game should be part of the UX of cockpit controls: find the error, or lose your permits.

Hehe. Gamification for the win... I really don't want to think about the red team version of that.

In the US this is explicitly part of training for major airlines. They will line up failures in The simulator and have the pilots solve/fly through the issue. You can’t fly until you pass these checks

Is it really unexpected failures or do they discuss scenario / do you expect one of a few typical scenarios?

Really throwing failures at pilots without them knowing what's going on seems to mean too many fail or rather there is not enough time to train pre-discussed scenarios and do scenarios that aren't announced.

I'm not sure it's really what you'd want.

It's truly unexpected failures,in the context of flying the plane. Basically every failure state in flying has a procedure, and as a pilot you're expected to memorize some, and know how to find and follow the checklist or red page for all emergency situations. Beyond that, you have to know how to assess and evaluate any emergency because that's your job.

It's exactly what you want, because it simulates reality. Unexpected failures are by definition unexpected.

Yeah i know it is what you want.

I'm just asking if it's really a reality as i previously got the impression airline training wasn't quite at that level. As in mostly you get an engine out because that needs training every time. And if the unexpected scenario is an engine out most of the time ... it's not really unexpected.

I wonder how often stuff like static port blockages and even maybe the flight director being wrong during takeoff are trained in an unexpected fashion. I'd expect quite rarely if at all. That's ok i suppose as it's rare failures, but the descriptions here kinda suggested a level of random scenarios being thrown at pilots ... which isn't quite realistic i think due to limited simulator time alone.

I just fly small planes, so I don't know much about commercial airline sims except from what I've read -- but I think if you have just a limited time in the simulator then for sure you'd want to be hitting up flight failures more frequently to test yourself. These things are complex, so I'd imagine there would be discussions after of how it could have gone better etc, rather than just a pass /fail.

It's not that unexpected, because you do recurrent training in the simulator every 6 months. And there is a set of emergencies that is done every time, for example engine failure / fire during takeoff must be done.

All pilots are trained to know the immediate actions required for a whole set of scenarios (we call these memory items) the point of the sim check is not to learn them but to check that you know all of them and to keep some recent experience. Because these things happen so rarely in real flights.

I've had for example only once had an engine failure after takeoff and it was a partial failure without fire. In the simulator I think I've done it at least 100 times and most times they put it on fire for good measure so you're in a hurry to get on the ground. The real world one was very uneventful, return to the airport, taxi back, do a lot of paperwork.

My father is a retired airline pilot and instructor. Everything that can fail in the simulator is fair game. Pilots have recurrent trainings all the time during their career. They get tested every X months. They have medical exams.

And that is how it should be. Pilots must be able to handle every possible failure. They don’t need to know every single procedure by heart, they’ve got the manuals in the cockpit for non-urgent procedures.

My father loves _flying_. He’s from a generation that trained on airplanes with little automation. He often talked about younger pilots relying too much on instruments. He would get annoyed with pilots that didn’t appreciate manually flying a plane.

Some settings in airplanes are last left. And this is okay. If you had to reset every setting at all times it would cost time. Sometimes you find one that you go "man I wish that wasn't last left." Then software updates fix that.

> I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's crew.

It's not a matter of responsibility, it's a risk mitigation measure. Adding the additional check is common in aviation. Yes, it is the next crew's responsibility, however if you can mitigate a risk by adding some procedure to what the previous crew does, at little or no cost until a software update is released fixing the issue, you do that every time.

I know nothing about aviation but it seems to me like the auto pilot software could use a lot of improvement.

Why on earth would you give the pilot an instruction that would almost certainly lead to a crash ? It seems like there aren’t enough sanity checks. Any such dodgy situation should trigger an alarm and disengage the auto pilot imo.

Auto pilots disengaging and sounding an alarm in unexpected situations have lead to multiple crashes, also the autopilot wasn’t engaged at the time, but the pilot was following a computer created flight path.

Commercial aviation is designed around highly trained people following defined procedures. Auto pilots are not supposed to second-guess the inputs because that adds to confusion and cognitive load on the pilots. Pilots tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.

What _should_ have happened here is the pilot monitoring should be watching the instruments and calling out flight stages. When the pilot flying didn’t initiate a proper climb they should have called this out, or taken over control until a safe altitude was established. This wasn’t an autopilot issue, this was a breakdown on crew resource management.

By my reading, auto pilot was not involved. Flight Directors are basically an overlay on the instruments showing where the pitch, roll, etc. of the plane needs to be to achieve the programmed navigational fixes.

Is there any situation when it would make sense to have the flight director set to an altitude of zero before takeoff ? If not, then maybe it shouldn't stay switched on and set to zero after landing when the crew leaves the cabin ? Couldn't it be reset automatically ?

That's what the memo the airline company put out said about this.

It's hard to say if it's a good thing or not, imagine an incorrect flight plan is entered but non 0, you could fly straight into another flight path or an obstacle, like a mountain.

Yes, if the field is below sea level. They do exist!

The preflight checklist covers setting this (and all other parameters) to correct values. Not only did the flight crew not do that, the statement by Emirates heavily suggests that instead of making people actually follow the preflight checklists (which cover many other safety-critical settings), they're relying entirely on the plane being left in the right state by the previous crew.

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