Posts about: "Mayday" [Posts: 144 Pages: 8]

Please read the thread. It has been discussed several times.

Being as this is a professional pilot's site, we will extend the benefit of the doubt to our pilot colleagues, and be respectful to them. As the facts of the event become publicly available from reputable sources, we will of course discuss them as factual entry points to a discussion, rather than speculation. Patience.....

As per my training, don't let communicate interfere with aviate. If you can do both simultaneously, go ahead. For me, "communicate" could be taking your mind away from task to formulate and interact in discussion. So yes, we don't allow a complex discussion to preempt flying the plane. For me, pressing a mic switch and calling Mayday is more instinctive and muscle memory, than distracting. If a pilot got a Mayday out, good for them! I can't see it helping much for the doomed flight, other than being a valuable "very soon after the event" indicator that the pilots knew that something very bad was happening. I've known pilots to wrestle control for seconds/minutes in an effort to regain control, before issuing a Mayday. Okay, tasks in priority. But in this case, it appears that a pilot issued a Mayday even before control was actually lost - a valuable timestamp on the order of events for investigation.

I got the idea that with no (or very little) thrust, and with the aircraft falling, the pilot (may have) realized that he was in out of control flight , and falling.
In a pedantic sense: if you make control inputs, and the aircraft won't or can't respond to them, you are in out of control flight .
The whole event happened pretty quickly. How far into "we are doomed" that his senses told him they were can have informed his decision to say something about it. (the human mind is an interesting thing).
There's also the matter of temporal distortion which can happen during stress or high adrenalin events. (I experienced that during the course of an aircraft accident: not on topic for this thread).
As to conformance with ICAO, not all investigations make good on that.


I sincerely hope that this one does.

(Note: some of what I refer to as out of control flight seems to be called upset in commercial transport jargon).

I've been in a similar situation once when the Twin Otter I was flying was hit by a surface-to-air missile . I put out an initial Mayday call as soon as I had the heading & altitude under control (that took about 5 seconds) but before taking any other actions. I didn't have any intention of entering into a long conversation when I made the call, I just wanted dispatch to know that we had a serious problem - in case we didn't come out of it alive.


Fortunately, we did come out of it alive, and after completing all the appropriate checklists, picking a nearby airport to land at, and lighting up a cigarette, I called dispatch back and explained the situation.

To me, it is understandable that the pilot made a Mayday call.