Just on the news.....

[Kev]

I see in the news today that they think the pilots shut down the wrong engine and have published the FDR trace.

[David]

Not the first time that has happened - Kegworth being the most notable. Identifying what engine has failed is not that intuitive - I was taught 'dead leg, dead engine' but the brain makes you think the side of your body doing the work is the side with the problem. If I recall correctly, in kegworth crash, the auto-throttles masked the issue, i.e. the power setting on the engines were adjusted by the auto-throttle which gave the pilots the wrong clues.

[tenkfeet]

http://avherald.com/h?article=48145bb3&opt=0

[tut]

No matter what aircraft you are flying, or in what ever emergency, the first rule is "Fly the Aircraft" above all else. Do not get out checklists, do not talk, do not shut anything down, the handling pilot flies the aircraft and keeps it in the air if he can, at that moment nothing else matters.

If that does not result in control, then that is the time to work together and see what else can be done. There is no excuse for shutting down a functioning engine, if the other one has failed it is not working, so does not need to be shut down. The number of times that a perfectly good engine has been shut down is bordering on criminal, and has resulted from using checklists too soon or using simulator conditions that have you flipping switches and pulling levers instead of concentrating on the emergency itself.

When you were taught to fly aircraft with virtually no electronics or thousands of switches and redundant systems, it may have been seat of the pants, but at least you concentrated on the emergency itself and not on what the book thought you should be doing, not that you would have had the time to read it anyway. There is no substitute for experience. Think Jim Clark's '62 Lotus 25 and Hamilton's 2014 Mercedes W05 F1 car, chalk and cheese.

tut

[fd]

Kegworth . . The pilot smelled burning and in the type he was used to flying (not the one he was flying) the cockpit air supply came from the engine he shut down only, despite all the instruments telling him the other engine was falling apart. In this latest pilot error caused crash . . The engine he shut down had had recent issues (I believe) . . And he shut it down when it was working just fine . . The complex thing here is the pilot and his brain, not the plane . . You could argue that many of the recent pilot caused crashes would not have happened had the pilots not interfered . . That conclusion will inevitably be reached in a couple of generations of aircraft . . I guess the question is . . Would automated flight control systems have killed more or less people in recoverable incidents . .

[pete]

Kegworth . . The pilot smelled burning and in the type he was used to flying (not the one he was flying) the cockpit air supply came from the engine he shut down only, despite all the instruments telling him the other engine was falling apart. In this latest pilot error caused crash . . The engine he shut down had had recent issues (I believe) . . And he shut it down when it was working just fine . . The complex thing here is the pilot and his brain, not the plane . . You could argue that many of the recent pilot caused crashes would not have happened had the pilots not interfered . . That conclusion will inevitably be reached in a couple of generations of aircraft . . I guess the question is . . Would automated flight control systems have killed more or less people in recoverable incidents . .

Pilot error is an easy blame. Just because an aircraft crash is pilot error does not mean that without the pilot the plane would not have crashed.

[David]

There is no excuse for shutting down a functioning engine, if the other one has failed it is not working, so does not need to be shut down. The number of times that a perfectly good engine has been shut down is bordering on criminal,

Spot on! My only experience of an engine failure was in a Navajo. Exactly as tut says - our lives were probably saved by flying first, and only doing what needed to be done. If I may indulge in a bit of reminiscing . . .

I was pilot in command during a ferry flight to Tenerife for the owner of the aircraft and his friends. I was not the handling pilot on this particular leg, so I was in a monitoring mode as we took off from Jersey airport bound for Bilbao. We were not far off maximum take off weight with 10 passengers and full tanks. At about 200 feet I noticed the oil pressure twitch on the port engine followed by a steadily fall towards zero. After a few moments of disbelief, we declared an emergency and began a circuit to land back. The guy on the controls was experienced and well on top of things so I left him to fly while I assessed the failing engine - temperatures were rising and the RPM was hunting - probably due to the prop losing oil pressure. The textbook thing would have been to shut it down, but we felt it was still producing some power, so decided not to - at least not while we were trying to gain height. That was a good decision, as shortly afterwards a passenger came forward and said a large quantity of oil was flowing out from the starboard engine too! Sure enough, while our attention was focused on the port engine the starboard engine began to behave the same way. In fact by the time we reached finals it was the sicker of the two. But we landed safely to a reception of several fire and rescue vehicles.

What had happened was, having done our own 'walkround', the proud new owner of the aircraft had taken upon himself (and unknown to us) to check the engine oil levels. His knowledge was so poor that he failed to lock the dip sticks in place and they blew out at full boost, followed by most of the oil, during take off.

It was and incident that ended safely, but could have been very different. Maybe it was luck that we hesitated to shut the engine down, and if it had been training exercise, I would have done it without hesitation.

[fd]

You can speculate and hypothesise all you like, shutting down the one functioning engine (in this case) guaranteed a crash. There is no defence, but I'm sure there are lots of excuses. Sadly the excuses don't un-kill ask those that lost their lives . .

[Ferg]

The pilot managed avoid hitting the block of flats. That action in itself probably saved lives.