Air India equipment / fuel trouble (and other situations)

boscomantico wrote:

It also shows how difficult it is to talk to ATCOs about equipment failures and such, since they just don’t understand (and still keep asking loads of questions)

Really interesting videos, and while ATC was generally helpful and supportive, some of the conversation was IMHO not the way it should be in such a situation.

• In the first video, the crew started asking for weather at other airports, made lengthy explanations about what equipment had failed instead of just saying “we have lost some instruments and we need the runway with the best weather in the area”. That should have made the controller scramble immediately, instead it took nearly three minutes to get that simple message across.
  Many other accidents and incidents come to mind (e.g. Avianca 052 in JFK) where failure to be assertive enough led to disaster

• The controller asked a lot of questions, but seemed unable to make any use of the answers. The crew OTOH could not provide one crucial bit of information (the endurance remaining), despite being asked several times. Presumably this figure is readily available in a B777, even with degraded equipment!?

• The crew kept talking about a “VNAV Approach” – a term that the controller obviously did not understand, as it is not a category of an instrument approach but rather a way to derive vertical guidance from the FMS

• Even after it had been sorted out and confirmed several times that the approach clearance should be a standard ILS to RWY 4R, the APP controller at EWR asked “what approach would you like today?”, as if this information never had been passed on to him (9:55 in the second video)

Imagine all that with two non-native speakers from xxx airlines at an airport in yyy (insert your favourite airline and country with the lowest LP requirements )

Yes, they are well done visualisations of the live-atc archives. I look out for new ones very often indeed.

There is a lot of this stuff out there, not only VAS but they are by far the best. Most others are simple ATC recordings sometime underlayed with some pics of the incident. Some of the VAS movies are quite sobering too as they involve accidents with loss of life. But again, any of us can be faced with a situation where you are airborne and listen to something like this. For me, I hope never to get into that particular situation again, once is enough.

I loved to listen to the JFK ground controller Kennedy Steve (Abrahams) who was a well known original guy there, heard him almost every time I had the chance to fly into JFK on Swissair JS at the time.

It was all pretty weird.

ATC sending him to an airport 7nm away when he was showing at 1200ft. Maybe he was non-TXP / they didn’t see his altitude? Probably a total lack of awareness of aircraft performance by ATC. Pretty common these days I am sure. Here too; I recall @timothy posting somewhere years ago that Spanish ATC asked him to climb after he reported a double engine failure on some jet. Also UK ATC used to have to get a PPL but this stopped many years ago.

But the pilot reporting he lost his propeller? What kind of nonsense is this? If his prop came off (possible due to a crankshaft failure at the flange) then why get smoke in the cockpit?

People don’t always head straight for land, when they obviously should – for some reason. One UK pilot was recently lost off the south coast, with an engine failure, but he just flew at an angle and ditched. VMC.

Peter wrote:

ATC sending him to an airport 7nm away when he was showing at 1200ft. Maybe he was non-TXP / they didn’t see his altitude?

Highly unlikely given the type of plane and airspace. ATC makes reference to loss of radar contact towards the end of the video.

Lots of smoke when a CS prop comes off and the crankshaft squirts oil all over the place.

I think in an emergency, ATC communication often results from ATC trying to maintain their sense of control, a pointless objective. For the pilot it should regardless be ‘Avigate, Navigate, Communicate, in that order’. Turning down the radio entirely might sometimes be warranted if ATC is subtracting value.

Peter wrote:

It was all pretty weird

Totally. If the FR24-plot and the audio are indeed in sync, then the controller sent him towards the nearest airport 7 NM straight over the water when the coastline was perhaps 2 NM and a 180 away. Not to mention the joint effort of ATC and the pilots to make an airport 15 NM away from 4500 ft without a propeller… According to METARs from that time, they should have been in good VMC:

SA 11/12/2016 19:52→
METAR KBDR 111952Z 20005KT 10SM FEW060 OVC070 02/M09 A3045
RMK AO2 SLP312 T00221089
SA 11/12/2016 18:52→
METAR KBDR 111852Z 21004KT 10SM OVC080 02/M09 A3045 RMK AO2
SLP310 T00221089
SA 11/12/2016 17:52→
METAR KBDR 111752Z 22009KT 10SM OVC100 02/M08 A3048 RMK AO2
SLP320 T00221083 10022 21039 58033

Peter wrote:

I recall @timothy posting somewhere years ago that Spanish ATC asked him to climb after he reported a double engine failure on some jet.

Only a single engine failure! But we still had to descend in the “float down”. We were at either F390 or 410 (I forget) and our SE ceiling was about 250, so were going down, but the dreadful ATCO was screaming at us to climb back to our cleared level. I tried to explain a number of times, but she didn’t understand, so I asked if anyone on frequency could explain it to her in Spanish, which someone did.

On the Air India one, I agree with tschnell. Too much info was kept in the cockpit and selectively ‘leaked’ to ATC. Of course decision making should always be in the cockpit, but instead of telling ATC bits of info they should have just started with “ATC we have a problem with multiple equipment failures. We need to find somewhere which has a cloud base above 600ft so that we can do a non-precision approach”.

What was the point in going somewhere with a 500ft cloud base if they needed 600ft? Hoping against hope?

Regarding the last one, I wouldn’t be so hard on ATC. They didn’t sent him across the water. They simply told him where the nearest airport was after he told them he had a rough running engine. The pilot themselves asked for vectors to a different airport and ATC game them that.

ATC was the ones to suggest going to the coastline that they were unlikely to make the airport. The pilot seemed to be focused on going straight to this airport no matter what.

I find it hard to believe that a pilot in VMC with a loss of prop (ie no hope for a restart) would not have seen the futility of trying to glide 15 nm from 2000ft if the coast line is just 2nm away. But obviously panic took over and that’s what they did.

dublinpilot wrote:

What was the point in going somewhere with a 500ft cloud base if they needed 600ft? Hoping against hope?

If you don’t have fuel to get to anywhere above 2D minima of 600’, then 500’ seems a whole lot better than 200’.