Posts about: "Action slip" [Posts: 110 Pages: 6]

"...and here is my concern with our assumption of intent from evidence of action."

It is worth pointing out that action slips are actually incredibly common but rarely critical - or reported - events. Suicide attempts, by their very nature, have a significantly higher profile. Looking at the literature, action slips on the flight deck are actually pretty common but usually trivial - and that's the ones that get reported. Dangerous action slips are common enough that Airbus have openly available training material on them. Action slips that lead to situations that can't be recovered from are always going to be remarkably rare in an industry that goes out of its way to get the ergonomics right to avoid action slips as a result of designer error. A good example would be the similarity of location, action and shape of the flaps and undercarriage of the B17. The flight deck is one of the few places deliberately designed to make action slips harder to be dangerous and this shows how common they have been.

Action slips occur all the time - most of us have had a few - and used to be far more common in flight before aircraft were designed to avoid them. Suicide attempts remain remarkably rare, attempts with no clear buildup (that can at least be unearthed later) are rarer still and suicide attempts on takeoff are not something I can find online.

So if the investigation is left unable to infer intent from action, it's clear which intention is more likely and also which is more visible.

Subsy: good points all.
What gets me, with the info I have available so far, is the reported delay in turning the fuel back on. This is a bit more striking given that the verbal challenge "why did you turn them off" got "I didn't" as a reply.
My experience with action slips is that "Ooh, sheet, moved the wrong thing, fix it!" is the more common reaction or behavior.



In the case of this flight, each bit of delay in getting the fuel flowing again made the chance of a quick enough relight to salvage the error (if error it was) more remote.
I think someone in a previous thread told us that they tried to salvage this scenario in the sim - fuel off about 3 seconds after takeoff - and found the results unsuccessful, but I can't remember who it was.

I have no interest in that TV show, given the avalanche of info and discussion here on PPRuNe since this tragic crash occurred.

Thanks for sharing as I doubt I'm the only one who appreciates these "war stories" - as a LONG-time lurker, any post from you (or fdr ) gets my attention and I appreciate the inside insights about Boeing.

BTW, I was flying in a GA aircraft out of Renton (complicated story that had to do with non-rev travel closing up out of SEA, so my brother flew us to PSC which had good availability) and we thought it odd that there was a bit of hoopla going on ... but then realized it was the first flight of 757-300.

As a teenager one of my favourite books was The Unsafe Sky, Air Safety The Terrifying Untold Story by William Norris. In it he quotes someone as saying (I paraphrase) "air safety is 8 things going wrong at once, an incident is 9 things and an accident is when 10 things go wrong." Or, to put another way, stuff goes wrong all the time, but rarely causes a problem and it is often that one more (the "tenth") tiny problem that is the final trigger for an accident.

This strikes me as one of the most apposite of questions in this incident.

If we take it as read - which I do but some clearly don't - that the preliminary report contains all the pertinent details as known at the time it was written, then that delay is rather inexplicable. The absence of any reported further confrontation or verbal exchanges on the flight deck rather suggests the pilots were not sure what had happened.

Even if it is taken as read that one pilot was acting intentionally, unless their hand covered the switches - in which case surely there would be some audible action or demand by the other - it would not likely take that long to act and correct the problem.

I watched it last night - nothing new or that hasn't been discussed endlessly here. Reasonably even handed, although I didn't like all the attention to the 737 MAX fiasco (IMHO, a Red Herring with regard to this crash).
Go into some detail regarding the possibility of pilot suicide (although not much attention to the "brain fart" possibility) - with the obligatory rebuttal from another pilot.
Lots of interviews with grieving relatives.

Another pointless commercial broadcast then. Not surprising though, as the producers have no more facts to divulge than anyone, outside of the investigation team.
On a side note, I really would have hoped, that on this, a professional forum there would be a more appropriate means of describing a Cognitive lapse.

This is a Professional Pilots website, not a literary or professional poets website😄

For Abbas Ibn Firnas, and your objection to using the well worn and easily understood term "brain fart"
If you have read this whole thread, you'll find that some of our contributors use the term action slip .
(The above post is from much earlier in the thread, numerous others subsequently also used that term).
As pilots (and other professionals in the industry) are human, they also use less formal terms from time to time.

It\x92s long been known as a \x91far cup\x92.