Posts about: "Muscle Memory" [Posts: 65 Pages: 4]

B2N2
July 15, 2025, 23:50:00 GMT
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Post: 11923351
Originally Posted by Mrshed





Personal opinion perhaps, but I think this level of speculation without evidence probably isn't really warranted. There's nothing at all to suggest this.
I think we can move away from switch mysteriology and muscle memory and simulator games. We don\x92t even know if the CA was a line instructor or a sim instructor. There is a difference and they are not automatically the same.
What we do know is that it\x92s less likely for the PF than it is for the PM to manipulate FCO switches.
For the simple fact that the PF is rather busy and concentrated on other things like doing pilot stuff and the PM is well\x85.monitoring.
Would you as CA and PM not even try to stop the PF from throwing the second switch?
Versus the PF who may detect motion in his periferal vision but is concentrating on rotation and looking through the HUD?

The CA had taken bereavement leave 3 years ago and according to Indian sources leave for mental health reasons?

How would you suggest we connect the dots?

https://liveandletsfly.com/air-india-flight-171-pilots/

https://www.ibtimes.sg/was-air-india...g-probed-80758

Mrshed
July 16, 2025, 06:03:00 GMT
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Post: 11923446
Originally Posted by B2N2
I think we can move away from switch mysteriology and muscle memory and simulator games.
Sorry just for clarity - there's sufficient information clearly to speculate on this being a deliberate act.

It was your suggestion that the pilot here potentially had been allowed to retire rather than being sacked that I think is a little far in speculation given no evidence behind it.
JustusW
July 16, 2025, 10:23:00 GMT
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Post: 11923614
Attention, Wall of Text incoming. Take appropriate precautions and fasten your seatbelts!

Originally Posted by andihce
I will say that in reading your earlier post, I came away thinking you were arguing for the unlikelihood of suicide in this case, at least in part because it is unlikely in the world of commercial aviation as a historical fact. If that's not the case, I apologize. But I will add I think other commentary here has fallen into this trap, as discussed in my referenced post.
It is a bit difficult to not appear to use statistics in this fashion when trying to refute people using made up numbers and stories as argument.

Originally Posted by B2N2
I think we can move away from switch mysteriology and muscle memory and simulator games. [...] The CA had taken bereavement leave 3 years ago and according to Indian sources leave for mental health reasons?
If you had read the articles you quoted you might have realized that the basis for these "media reports" is a single individual who "heard from some Air India pilots". The supposed source wouldn't even have any way to actually know about the claimed information. Unless you want to elevate the Company Rumor Mill to hard evidence standard. This stands against:

Originally Posted by za9ra22
TATA, the parent company of Air India, pushed back, saying, “He did take bereavement leave in 2022 following his mother’s death, and his medical records were submitted as part of the investigation, and the preliminary report did not find anything noteworthy.”
Can we please stick to the actual facts, like za9ra22, and not spread baseless rumors that are self contradictory to begin with?

Originally Posted by DutchRoll
Lots of stiff competition for "most implausible theory" going on but I think my favourite so far is "could've mistakenly moved fuel control switches to cutoff when going for gear up selection". Geezus. 🤦‍♂️
I find this a particularly concerning statement coming from someone who claims to be a pilot. Things like "Action Slip" and "Mental Load" should have been covered extensively in any CRM related education. If you think you are exempt from that kind of failure you are rejecting some very costly lessons learned over the last 50 years of accident investigation.

There have been many accidents where unindicated or even counter indicated action was taken by one or more pilots involved. As discussed in the first and second thread extensively many pilots could report incidents where they observed someone retracting flaps instead of gear. There have been major fatal accidents with pilots shutting down healthy engines instead of surging or burning ones. There's good reason the 787 has extensive takeoff configuration warnings, because we have had accidents and incidents with unsafe configurations taken to takeoff, beyond and sometimes even into a crash. Humans make mistakes. It is the goal of Safety Culture to prevent those mistakes from causing harm.

Originally Posted by AirScotia
The. question about enforcing idle throttles before CUTOFF has been discussed voluminously on this thread.
It was certainly mentioned. I'd not say it was discussed in any big way. Someone mentioned that for Embraer this is indeed the default, I haven't really found anything beyond that, despite considering it a worthwhile train of thought and possible recommendation as a result of this investigation.

Originally Posted by Mrshed
But TL;DR - I'd posit that the rate of truly experienced mental health issues experienced in pilots is higher than whatever rate almost anyone is thinking.

Around 12% of people globally have a mental health issue at any given time - even being incredibly conservative, the rate in pilots is clearly going to be at least in single whole figure percentages (which is far from rare).

Obviously the majority of these issues are not going to be those with severe outcomes, but some will. And almost all mental health issues tend to affect cognitive ability to at least some level. Slowness in action and fatigue are diagnostic criteria for many of the most common mental health conditions for example.
This is a topic of actual research: https://www.pmhc.org/research
Currently 12.6% of pilots meet the medical threshold for depression, with a slight but below average difference between males (12.8%) and females (11.4%), with 4.1% of all pilots experiencing recent suicidal thoughts. https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/...940-016-0200-6

It should be noted that the utilized test (PHQ-9) is considered insufficient to assess suicide risk. Depending on scoring these values could be about average, or significantly below average. Based on their wording I would expect the latter, because their methodology does not specify severity.*1 Results of 0-4 points suggest no intervention necessary, 5-9 (classified as mild) simply suggest retaking the test after a few weeks. Research shows that for the general public Major Depressive Episodes have a prevalence of ~5-10%, with the prevalence of minor depression being less studied but significantly higher than major depression. There is also significant symptomatic overlap of mild depression with stress related conditions such as "Burnout" (if you know, please don't, this conversation is already complex enough without bringing that in). Considering the prevalence of stress in the industry I am actually surprised the numbers here are not higher. The lesser delta between males and females could be indicative of just such an issue, meaning that based on the data available the number of pilots actually suffering from depression could be less than even the comparably low number reported here. The actual suicide risk is usually orders of magnitude below even that but not easily covered in this data context due to the test used.

Cognitive impact is highly variable depending on the individual, actual symptoms and severity. It would be wrong to assess that 12.6% of pilots are a risk factor from this data. Quite the opposite, in fact. After the Germanwings crash the topic was discussed and has reached the awareness threshold for many. Mild cases usually require little to no intervention beyond raising awareness and helping the brain fix its chemistry through positive reinforcement. This can be as simple as taking PTO, reducing work hours, or focusing on social or physical activities. In the past 10 years these kinds of low impact measures have been made more readily available, most notably during the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting turmoil.

Further political activity has lead to some positive action as well. I already mentioned the recent success of the Pilot Mental Health Campaign getting legislation through Congress for improvements of the outdated FAA guidelines on mental health in an earlier post. Similar efforts are underway globally, be that internal review within regulatory bodies, or political movements.

Originally Posted by slats11
As a critical care physician (with AVMED background), these last few years we seeing unprecedented rates of self-reported stress, anxiety, depression, and deliberate self-harm. This is being experienced in most western countries (perhaps globally, but I have less direct knowledge of non-western countries). It is absolutely off the scale. In my 35 year career, I have never seen anything like the last 4 years.

Sadly, I am confident this phenomenon will result in more incidents like Germanwings, MH370 and this.
Keeping what I wrote previously in mind I would still caution against extrapolating your personal experiences too far. Having family in the field and having volunteered myself I can certainly relate, albeit with far fewer and less impactful personal experiences. The research is obviously lagging and we haven't really understood the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic generally, let alone in all its intricacies. There is indeed an observable global trend. Some correlation has been shown to climate anxiety, but other factors like the deteriorating condition of international relations as well as a global rise in movements against individual rights are obvious sources for this trend as well.
This is certainly a challenge for healthcare everywhere, but I do not consider the data available to be majorly applicable in the context of aviation over the already very current research closer to the industry and GA. The positive impact of what has been done and is being done is highly likely to outperform whatever global mechanism is at work here. It's certainly a very important field of study, but based on the data I would still consider the industry and regulators as a global whole to be on a positive path.

We can certainly discuss this topic further, but I would not currently see it as likely to be causal in this particular case.

Overall I am still not convinced we are looking at an individuals mental health crisis in this case. I have already detailed the massive differences to all known or suspected cases of pilot suicide at least twice. There is no evidence of mental health issues for the Captain or the FO. There is certainly a strong indication for a human factors cause to this accident. And as mentioned above I find the idea of improving the safety of the Fuel Cutoff Switches a worthwhile topic to discuss. No single action, and I see these two switches as a single action just as much as operating both thrust levers, should be able to cause a major accident. I find it perfectly reasonable to require the Throttle Levers be at idle for the Cutoff Switches to work, and in case of an incorrect setting some sort of alert would be appropriate.

*EDIT*
*1: I missed this in my original readthrough, the cutoff is sensibly set to 10, starting with moderate depression. I'd have to look into the classification scheme but from memory both mild and moderate depression fall into the same category as relevant for the following statements.

Last edited by JustusW; 16th July 2025 at 10:37 .
Lord Farringdon
July 16, 2025, 11:33:00 GMT
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Post: 11923656
Originally Posted by JustusW

There is no known evidence for the claim of intent. There are documented instances of pilots making fatal mistakes out of the blue. Human Error is by far the more likely explanation.
Are we still going down this road? You (and many others) are saying we all can make mistake...an action slip...right? To use an analogy that is perhaps more familiar to most people, when driving my car I have set the wrong destination into my GPS, I have inexplicably locked my keys in the car, I have driven with the handbrake on and, my favorite, I have put petrol in a diesel car. But when operating a vehicle in a highly critical phase of driving such as entering a busy freeway and merging into high speed traffic, or overtaking with a single lane in each direction, I have never reached down and turned the engine off!! In fact, except for engine start and engine stop, there is never any reason or muscle memory to go anywhere near the ignition keys.

In a similar manner pilots can make errors, some small, some large that subsequently turn into disasters but at the time they thought their act or omission was the right thing to do. They didn't just do something absentmindedly that clearly wasn't the right thing to o.

But you suggest that during a critical phase of flight any highly experienced, professional pilot with thousands of hours under their belt can have an action slip or 'brain fart' and switch off fuel to all engines. Well in that case we should all be very worried and never fly again since every airliner has two crew who by your reckoning could potentially expose their inner 'brain fart' capacity and randomly (but unintentionally) deselect some very important switches during takeoff. I, m sorry but I just don't buy that.

I'd much rather accept that we have a very few CPT Fruit Loop and FO Looney Tunes types out there who are intent on bringing the aircraft down but that the chances of being on a flight operated by them is extremely slim.
Musician
July 17, 2025, 13:34:00 GMT
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Post: 11924410
The issue of intent

Assumed: a pilot moved both fuel switches to CUTOFF, and that caused the accident.

Argument against intent:
1. The CVR, taken at face value, reveals that neither pilot was aware he had moved the switch himself
2. On a G650 simulator, CUTOFF after 10 seconds (then RUN after 10 more seconds) was barely recoverable. ( See upthread. ) This suggests the "unrecoverability" window on the 787 was quite short, making a suicide plan risky.
3. Similar accidents were survivable (someone said upthread).
4. Typically, pilot suicides start with the pilot alone in the cockpit at cruise altitude.
5. "Shut down both engines" is an action that often occurs after a flight, and could thus be learned as "muscle memory", and be subject to an action slip.
6. The airline stated that the captain's medical records were found "unremarkable".

Argument for intent:
1. It's the simplest explanation.
2. "I can't believe any pilot would do this unintentionally, and neither should you."
3. Pilot took 10 seconds to correct his "mistake"
4. Uncorroborated reporting has it that the captain did not sound panicked on the CVR.

Did I miss any points?

To be clear, given the facts in the preliminary report, I could not decide this question today.
Whatever happened in Ahmedabad is not affected by the outcome of our discussion.
I hope that the AAIB and the public prosecutor will gather as much evidence as possible, and then the question can hopefully be resolved from facts.

Last edited by Musician; 17th July 2025 at 14:02 . Reason: link added