Posts by user "Iron Duck" [Posts: 13 Total up-votes: 0 Pages: 1]

Plenty of engine noise on the video. Aircraft appears stable, wings level, not stalled. Gear down, flaps clearly up.

It obviously got off the ground before the runway end and apparently reached 635ft, at which point you'd expect gear up, flaps down, but the opposite has happened.

Although the CCTV video is of unfortunately low resolution the trailing edge discontinuity between flaps and aileron can just about be seen on the port wing at about 3/4 span, just as it can in this video at around 54 seconds in:


Looking at the original video again the equivalent discontinuity is just about perceivable on both wings, so I was wrong at first and the flaps were not retracted. What appears to be the RAT quite possibly is; at that angle the nosewheel is completely hidden by the fuselage.

It's been postulated that pulling both fuel cutoffs would drop the RAT and cause the engines to spool down. To those with SIMs, at what point in the takeoff would this action create the flightpath shown in the videos?

Then, confoundingly, there's that swirl of dust in the port wingtip vortex on rotation. Is Ahmedabad unusually dusty? Do all takeoffs there create this, or only rotations close to or beyond the end?

How would you account for the front-wheel-down angle of the MLG bogies, clearly visible in the flyover video?

Since it was spotted we're assuming that the MLG bogie position indicates that gear had been selected up, but the sequence was interrupted. It's been suggested that the bogies might droop nose-down if hydraulic pressure is lost, even if Gear Up has not been selected.

Is this the case?

A flight recorder was found 28 hours after the accident, so it's been in the AAIB's possession for nearly 2 days, but not a word has been said about its physical condition. I recall in other recent accidents that the physical condition has been publicised quickly, perhaps not least to manage the public's hunger for information.

This leads me to suspect that it is in good condition, has already been downloaded, what happened (if not why) is clear, and it is embarrassing.

There are only three kinds of root cause:

- a design weakness or fault, but this will probably take some time and analysis to establish;
- a maintenance fault by a less-than-stellar organisation in an aircraft which has been used as a Christmas Tree;
- a personnel fault.

The last two directly embarrass AI. I think we're now in the political positioning and CYA phase.

Let's postulate that engine rollback and subsequent complete electrical failure coincided with selection of gear up. The recorders will tell you that happened, and in consequence that the flight was unrecoverable, but they probably won't tell you why, especially if the event was the result of an interaction between a latent design weakness, a maintenance error or errors, and/or an unusual control input. The recorders will clear up the control inputs, most importantly whether the engines were deliberately shut down. If there was no unusual control input the cause must be a design weakness, a maintenance error, or more likely a combination of the two, the error exposing the weakness.

Indeed, but my point is that after two days, no word has been made public about the recorder's physical condition. It costs nothing and is good news management to say: "The recorder is in good physical condition but it will be a week before we are safely able to download information from it", or: "The recorder is badly damaged and will require specialist downloading, which will take some time".

Why the silence? It's fishy.

Edit: this is in reply to Callisthenes Plane crash near Ahmedabad..

If it was a plan, the plan worked. Same with MH: if it was a plan, the plan worked. The aircraft disappeared without trace, taking all the evidence with it. These are plain facts.

If it was a plan, why do we assume this was the first attempt to execute it? The plan required accurate recognition of the effective window of action, and this would have taken research and practice. It required the FO flying, a takeoff over a built-up area to assure destruction, and a heavy fuel load for the same purpose. All of those conditions were met. If it were a plan, it appears that it included steps to create sufficient ambiguity that the proximate cause, whether premeditated suicide/mass murder or some kind of medical or cognitive event, could never be conclusively established. If this were part of the plan, it's working so far.

Others have pointed out open spaces either side of the flight path that might have facilitated a more survivable landing. The video clearly shows no attempt to turn. Why? Were these spaces actually reachable given the aircraft's vertical trajectory, or would a turn attempt in that condition merely precipitate a stall? Or was it startle effect? Or flying straight, hoping for power to come back?

Depressed pilots have access to psychotherapy just as other people do. The problem is that using that access appears to be career-terminating.

I would add that it appears established that most pilot suicides involve a dive from height after becoming alone in the cockpit. If you want to commit suicide/mass murder but obscure that fact, copying the others isn't the way to go. Actually I think the idea of cutting the engines a couple of seconds after lift-off with a built-up area at the end of the runway is very simple and clever, in all the wrong ways, because it worked.

Would "intentional collateral damage" do? That would certainly appear to describe both GermanWings and LAM Mozambique, unless those events have been deemed manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, as it's known in the UK.

I see no reason why the inquiry should default to suicide. After all of this discussion and the content of the report I fully expect the final verdict to be along the lines of "crew action, reason not established". Even if circumstantial evidence of mental incapacitation or incompetence arises from an examination of crew history there are no grounds to conclude beyond doubt that that is precisely what happened in that cockpit, and I would be astonished if it proved possible to construct a case to the necessary evidential standard that this was a suicide. I think this is probably a situation in which the consequences of a planned action and an involuntary action are indistinguishable.

That said, I think Embraer have a sensible approach.