It became public this month that Qatar Airways has fired all four pilots in the cockpit when their Boeing 777 tail broke a set of runway lights during takeoff from Miami International last September. They mistakenly left from an intersection thousands of feet short of the planned full runway length. It was a serious accident, no doubt. There was a visible …
Category: Article
You Don’t Want to Fly Like Donald Trump
Donald Trump might not want to take up flying. I say this knowing nothing about the gold-plated multi-millionaire’s eye-hand coordination or his ground school scores. What triggers this is a single word I’ve found while researching NTSB accident reports—all of them sad events where a pilot destroyed a perfectly good airplane. The word that links these accidents isn’t about bad weather, …
What’s the Goal of Aviation?
What is the goal of aviation? That’s the title of an intriguing blog post on The Aviation Guy. Commercial operators want to make money. Normally by moving people or goods quickly. Or for a few tour operators, the method is by giving great views of our planet. More than all this however, there are two things that strike me about …
“We’ll Get That Straight When We Get Airborne”
It’s better to look a little stupid now, than a lot stupid later. The US NTSB has released full investigative notes on last year’s crash of US Airways flight 1702, an A320 taking off from Philadelphia International airport. We can learn a lot from this crash of a fully airworthy Airbus. It actually got into the air, and then the captain …
Blame the Pilots?
Air Force Times article from two days ago sums up the results of a six-week investigation of the October 3rd bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan that killed 30 people – Crew Blamed. However the news story also notes deeper systematic issues, a culture that places pilots into impossible situations. But you can’t discipline a procedure or …
Ball Flying and Baseball
This was sent to me by an Art of Airmanship reader, who is an active USN F/A-18 pilot. It was written sometime in the 90’s, and is credited to Lieutenant Commander James Winnefeld, Jr. He was a US Navy pilot, a real TOPGUN instructor, and worked on the movie Top Gun. He is currently an Admiral, serving as Vice Chairman of the …
Something About Not Using Superior Skills?
Theres’s an old saying that truly superior pilots are those who use their superior judgment to avoid those situations where they might have to use their superior skills. It’s a good saying. On 19 August 2013 a Buffalo Airways DC-3 with 21 passengers on board took off from the Yellowknife airport in Canada. Almost immediately the right engine burst into flames. The …
Paperless Cockpit?
“Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” Werner von Braun Are you a paperless cockpit? Is that even a thing? Chuck Cook, fleet technology manager at JetBlue Airways, told the press this week Jepp has “allowed us to … achieve fully paperless operations.” But hold on a minute. Here’s some …
Am I a Good Pilot?
I think I’m a good pilot. Above average, anyway. For sure. Over 17,000 hours, 5 type ratings, published scientific research into pilot behavior, on and on. I work at it, every flight. Well, most every flight. But a paper recently published in Psychological Science: Journal of the Association for Psychological Science (I’m not a nerd, but I am a subscriber) …
Flight Controls Free and Correct?
You have a religion that says if I want to live, I’m going to run the checklist. Robert Hulse Last week the NTSB released lots of details on a fatal accident that will keep lawyers and human factors academics busy for years. It involves rich high-profile (newspaper publisher) passengers, an iconic Gulfstream IV jet, the failure of a basic airplane …