Posts by user "DutchRoll" [Posts: 8 Total up-votes: 0 Pages: 1]

I think there's a good chance that there might be mandated CCTV in cockpits in the future as a consequence of this accident. There's also near enough to a 100% chance it would not and could not prevent this type of accident, but "accident prevention" will be the reason given. It always makes me curious how knee-jerk regulatory actions get justified. I don't care that much if they do install it - the worst that could happen is I get sprung picking my nose. But I do care when authorities or Governments issue nonsense reasons for it in an effort to be "seen to be doing something" by the public.

I'm late to the party here (deliberately) but I'm slightly surprised there seem to be quite a few commenters not acknowledging the elephant in the room after this report. I spent years on the B767 and the B744 before moving to Airbus. These are big chunky switches requiring two different muscle actions to change their position. "Accidentally" moving them from run to cutoff with a neat 1 second split is extremely improbable even at the best of times, and makes no sense at all during the first moments of the takeoff phase. The hypothesis which does make more sense based on the facts now available is just a bit disturbing to mention, but that's unfortunately where we are at the moment.

You’re making the fundamental mistake of assuming that all suicide attempts include rational thought processes prior to occurring. Unsuccessful attempts are disturbingly common.

I'm not surprised though it gets frustrating when folk start defaulting to the most remote possibilities instead of the more likely ones. The flight data recorder logged the fact that the switches were moved to cutoff, 1 second apart, very soon after airborne, then some seconds later moved back to run. None of that fits with any realistically conceivable mechanical failure nor automated system fault. Both of those are physical actions taken by a pilot. The first action was to shut them down, and the second action was an attempt to start them up again (tragically close to being successful). Nor does it fit with a muscle memory mistake or confusion with another switch.

Which leads to a very unpleasant possibility that many people would rather not consider, and some even refuse to consider, despite there being at least one historical precedent that I can think of (a pilot for a particular airline many years ago who had an undiagnosed mental health condition and admitted to struggling with impulsive thoughts of shutting down all 4 engines on a B747).

Not a B787 pilot but many hours on its wide body predecessors.

It is conceivable that you could notice hand movement around the throttle quadrant in your peripheral vision (noone's hands are on the thrust levers between V1 and shortly after takeoff), however even if you didn't, you'd immediately notice the loss of performance. The instinctive reaction is big loss of performance -> quick glance across at instruments -> why are they winding back? Also if the fuel control switches were moved to cutoff you'd suddenly get EICAS messages saying the engines were shutdown. So there are immediate clues and it's only a minor head movement to see where the fuel control switches are because they're right down there behind the thrust levers. Then the immediate action for a dual engine failure, which would by then likely be obvious with both sets of instruments showing everything winding back, is "fuel control switches cutoff, then run". There is no significant pause in that action because it's only to reset the electronic engine controls, so the 10 second gap between setting them back to "run" is not explained by the dual engine failure procedure but perhaps by a startle factor. One way or another, your eyes are going to end up checking where those switches are.

Brand new to PPrune are we?

Well..... having read through the discussion here and looked at the critical info in the prelim report, this former Boeing (now current Airbus) pilot is confident the elephant can safely hide in his dark little corner for a while yet.

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. 🤦‍♂️ Plenty of others, including engineering related ones, around this level of plausibility too. The phrase recorded on the CVR by one of the pilots involving questioning why the fuel control switches were moved to cutoff needs to be taken very, very seriously.

I don't disagree that strange stuff happens. However the plausibility of such things is important when determining a likely sequence of events, not just that they're "possible".

I have to totally disagree with that. Publicly released CVR transcripts are edited to remove things like swearing, shouts, screams, etc. Basically stuff which investigators consider not directly relevant to the chain of events in the cockpit and determining actions taken or not taken. Nor do I necessarily trust that brief transcript released is all that was said. If one pilot had said "why did you move the switches to cutoff you *******!!!!!" and if he had shouted it, none of that tone or colourful language would be in the public transcript. You would get exactly what was released in this case.

Someone who \x93claims\x94 to be a pilot eh? Let\x92s just accept that I\x92m not going to paste 40 years of military and commercial aviation logbook pages on here to appease your concerns or alleviate your doubts.

Nor do I claim to be exempt from that type of failure. Quite the contrary - I\x92ve experienced it. But I\x92ve never experienced reaching for a completely and utterly unrelated switch/lever in a totally different location such as fuel control switches versus landing gear levers (which are literally at opposite ends of pilot reach) on a Boeing (or Airbus) either in the sim or the real aircraft. Even with gear vs flaps, those errors occur where controls are proximate, or with controls that both involve \x93retraction\x94 (ie a similar action), or which have a similar method of operation, or which look vaguely similar in outward appearance. None of these principles apply here. So please, be my guest and find it as concerning as you like. And with that, you have convinced me to bow out of this discussion. Cheers.