What jumped out at me is that even if they thought a belly landing was prudent, what was the emergency? Perhaps we will learn why the pilots felt it wise to belly land almost-ASAP.
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The video said a bird in the engine can create a smoke smell in the cabin
I have not seen mention of that from the surviving flight attendants (who are in rough shape) or communications pre-crash from passengers. But, I guess itās possible.
The video from the 777 pilot above discusses it
The only thing that would potentially prompt a teardrop turn back to the field in a transport category aircraft would be a loss of power on all engines, or belief that an onboard fire was uncontainable.
All engines out would be consistent with not increasing drag and resultant excessive float due to flapless configuration. Crew, for whatever reason, focusing on landing on a runway.
Even with hydraulic failure due to all engines out, they would have gravity free fall of the landing gear. The only reason not to do that was a fear of not reaching the field.
Shoving birds through the engines can create quite a lot of smoke through the air conditioning system and apparently has a strong electrical smell. Fire onboard, especially electrical - depending on flight control system - is one of our biggest fears. An uncontained fire will give on average around 16-18 minutes until hull loss. If youāre over the Atlantic youāre going to ditch or burn out of the sky.
A circuit will take around four minutes if prepared. Of course you can always wing it round but you wonāt have speeds setup, will miss items - maybe something critical like the gearā¦. - and the monitoring pilot will be heads down working like a one-armed paper hanger and not actively monitoring.
This crew faced something they felt was imperative to get the aircraft back on the ground above all else; the only two things I can envisage are all engines out, or indications of a serious fire where everyone is going to die from smoke inhalation or the hull burning through.
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Should not be built on a berm like that. Most airports will have them in a breakable installation, ie itās not a solid structure and itās not a built up berm. Would not get approval in the USA.
Have watched many takes on this.
So far hard to see how a bird strike can take out all the hydraulic systems such to render there to be no ability to use flaps, air brakes and landing gear brakes. The landing gear can also be deployed manually as a last resort.
There is so much redundancy available in these systems that even a dual engine issue should not take out the critical hydraulics etc.
Without wanting to throw shade on the pilots, a consistent theme is that they appear to have rushed the go around and re-approach, it takes a heap of time to reconfigure the aircraft and go through all the checklists, unless something truly catastrophic was going on (which was expert opinions to date, would be extremely unlikely with all the evidence available to date), there would appear to be a large degree of human factors at play in this case.
I thought I heard it mentioned somewhere on tv that they were landing in the opposite direction to that usually used for that runway. Is it possible this runway was not commonly used in this direction therefore the presence of a berm covering the ILS (the normal approach) was not seen as a fatal flaw?
I seem to recall a crash from perhaps the 80ās, which may have been in the UK, where a plane overshot and slammed into a berm adjacent a motorway?
Amazing that 2 flight attendants survived. Given it went into the berm head first, Iām guessing they were in the rear? Or maybe not, since the entire thing went up in flames immediately.
And yeah, seems like a bad design to have any kind of overrun go into a wall.
I would guess they were in rear facing jump seats in the aft galley.
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Any take, including my own, at this point is pure conjecture. To take them as authoritative is foolhardy.
This was either a technical event that forced an immediate return, or crew error as a result of a technical event. Either ENG1 was inoperative due to damage, and ENG2 was subsequently not producing power as expected, or the crew inadvertently shut down ENG1 and ENG2 was damaged.
What is likely is they lost a degree of electrics. They most likely had smoke in the cockpit/cabin, and a low level loss of thrust. Iāve done elements of this in the sim several times as a crew without warning, and it is very dependent on the crew working together in coordination. Doing this for real with the environmental factors - we have stage smoke pumped into the sim, so not the same - and at lower level is another kettle of fish. Iāll wait before hanging the crew. On my aircraft lots of screens go black when the engines shut down; the RAT bangs out adding noise and vibration; and a lot of your usual information cues are taken away until you work through reconfiguring. At 20,000 feet itās no problem. At 2,000 feet, you donāt have the luxury of time.
Thereās a reasonable likelihood that the crew received a warning of birds, initiated a missed approach and ingested birds resulting in losing ENG1, and damage to ENG2.
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ILS isnāt a light system. Thatās an Approach Light System (ALS) as in HIALS. An ILS is an azimuth and path guidance - think about flying down a cone towards the tip which is the landing runway. An LPV is similar but doesnāt require the delicate ground station at each airport.
RKJB has four approaches into each runway and the MSA seems to be based on man made obstacles rather than geography. The only indication that the wind might favour runway 01 more is the presence of an LPV as opposed to an LNAV/VNAV on runway 19 - but thatās hardly definitive.
The RESA is out to 240m (iirc) and the concrete reinforced berm was at 260m. In Europe it would be fragible structures.
He mentions that a bird strike in the right engine could produce cabin smoke, but we donāt have evidence yet that that cabin smoke actually occurred or that it was so bad as to warrant emergency measures. Bird strikes are fairly common.
The light system is part of the ILS, maybe just semantics but that was how itās been taught to me in all my pilot training and instrument training.
An ALS and an ILS are two completely different concepts. The AOM for an approach is predicated on available elements of the ALS, which may explain your confusion.
The same ALS will be used for an NP, APV, and a PA - they donāt switch ALS for the different types of approach, rather to achieve a specific AOM you need the instrument approach system (ILS, LPV, VOR, NDB, LDA, etc) and the relevant approach lighting system.
We donāt have any reliable evidence. We have a lot of conjecture.
Bird strikes are reasonably common. Birds of sufficient size that are ingested in numbers through the engines at low level are thankfully less common. To suggest that the crew were wrong to prioritise an immediate return to land, based on the limit facts available, especially when the cues point to a significant loss of engine power at low level, is backseat quarterbacking at its finest.
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My post #20 is no more accusatory than what the 777 pilot said. Other sources, too, have raised concerns about why the crew did what they did. Perhaps we will eventually learn facts that will show that their decisions were rational under the circumstances and they and the rest of the lives on board were just very unlucky. But, based on the limited known facts, itās reasonable to discuss why they did what they did, including pointing out why some explanations may not be right.
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Here is another source ā a former 737 pilot and NTSB chair ā whose words are at least as accusatory as what I wrote:
Sumwalt, the former NTSB chair, told CBS News, āI flew 737s for 10 years as a captain, and I can say that the landing gear can be manually deployed, so the real question will be, what set up the sequence of events here? Did the bird strike set up the sequence of events where the crew got rushed and did not deploy the landing gear? I doubt that there was any sort of a malfunction with the gear, given that it can be deployed manually and through the normal means.ā
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I find the idea of deploying the landing gear manually very interesting. The gear is just so huge itās hard for me to wrap my mind around lowering them manually.
Have any of the pilots or crew here done it? Is it something that is practiced? Does it require a feat of strength? How many people are required?
Sorry for all the questions, like I said Iām having a hard time envisioning how it works.
The lowering manually is actually just releasing the gear and letting gravity and air loads extend it. So the extra mass actually helps you.
Maybe later I will post a good story about the 737 alternate extension system (the manual lowering).