Posts by user "Lonewolf_50" [Posts: 30 Total up-votes: 0 Pages: 2]

No, not really. How many times have you operated such a switch, as described in this thread?
Disagree. It creates a hostile work environment. You don't need that in the cockpit / on the flight deck.

Just need to ask: are you involved in airline management?

I took the time to read the entire article. (It spent some time discussing how he balanced his work schedule with the need to take care of his aged father, and that he might be near the retirement decision point...).
Here are a few other bits from the article:
So they looked at his medical records, and found nothing amiss. How is that worthy of a headline?
Seems par for the course.

What were your takeaways from that article?

Thank you for this reply, check orders of magnitude and powers of ten.

I think we'll need to agree to disagree, since those cameras won't prevent any accident (all they'll do is improve post mortems) but they will create a hostile work environment which is not healthy for corporate or flight deck culture.

Your ref to MH370 is noted, and also not agreed either.
Suggest you read up on how to stop terror attacks. The psychology of what is operating there is quite similar. The perp has the initiative.

As to AF 447, the data from a sub-system provided some useful info
(before the aircraft was found and then the FDR and CVR changed the story considerably)
that was not intrusive.

So far so good.

Three seconds after lift off, setting initial climb attitude, you suggest that the PF is/was moving his hands ...where?
Walk me through how and why that happened/happens. The training and CRM implications of what you propose are pretty serious...for that airline.
Yes, the vague (in points) language used has elicited a lot of comment.
Not sure why you appear to want to throw the FO under the bus.

What basis do you have for asserting that the switches were missing a locking spring? You are apparently making this up.
Why?
(We had a similar switch on an aircraft I flew some decades ago, and if the spring wasn't working You Replaced The Switch!)

Your previously expressed hypothesis - long sleeve cuff catching on them, and then one at a time this sleeve cuff pulling on each, and then (despite the physical sensation of catching on them and the CM checking to see what the hang up is) changing the position of the switches accidentally - could be easily tested in the simulator.
The investigation team has had between 20 and 30 days to look into that possible explicit accidental switch triggering path.
You seem wedded to it.
Why?
Do you believe that they have, or have not, considered it?
(Part of the reason that I ask this is that the next expected hand movement would probably be forward, not aft, toward the gear handle to raise the gear, in anticipation of a positive rate of climb being called out since they just took off and the PF was setting the climb out attitude...)

While my own experience with knobology screw ups (when I was still flying) is roughly the same
the "WTF? Fix that!" instinct is pretty strong
I have also seen people lower the flaps, rather than the gear, and despite a warning horn going off (and the indicators showing Gear Up) continue their approach to short final, reporting the gear down...and I've had to tell them to wave off/go around. Each of those events of course results in a debrief where one walks through "what was I thinking?" as a part of the conversation.
What the investigators won't be able to do with this accident is know what was on the pilot's mind right after rotation.
Was he even thinking about what he was doing?
The takeoff seems to have been pretty standard, based on the info provided in the Interim Report, almost to the point of being routine. I have occasionally had my mind drift when I am doing something I have done many times before (and that's been getting worse as I've gotten older). Being in a cockpit / on the flight deck won't necessarily make anyone immune to that.

For Dr Bru and Engineless:
I think that there is a thread about hacking of airliners somewhere on PPRuNe, might want to take that discussion there.
(Here is one, there are others)

A short response to you both:
1. Note that the article was from 2019
2. I am very doubtful that this occurred, beyond estimating the efficacy of any protections Boeing and Honeywell will have come up with since that article was published.
I doubt that either company sat on their hands after that Black Hat conference.
3. Caveat: yes, hackers never sleep .
= So some kind of sabotage is supposedly done, you think? = (I'll put the speculation into the spoiler)



But I think that you are both grasping at straws, for a variety of reasons, among which are:
1. No evidence to date.
2. Nothing in the report (but then, it's a prelim report)
3. If that kind of thing was going on, I don't think that the report would appear to lean so hard toward the human factors piece.
4. Unless that is part of the deception plan!
5. Yeah, right, we are back to the Hollywood thriller that neither of you have gotten a producer to try and get filmed.
6. Fear
7. Surprise
8. A fanatical devotion to Saint Bernoulli.

Please take any further discussion of this line of inquiry to a thread involving hacking.
Thank you all in advance.
T28B

(As an aside: if you took a look at the debris field, and the fact of the post impact fire, finding any evidence of something like what you are alluding to would be tough unless there's a way to parse EAFR information to detect the intrusion into the system of spurious / outside signals).

I'll offer a guess as to why...later.
Why do you assume that improper installation?
How many times have you moved those switches, and the engines started without the switch being in the RUN position? (Either in the sim or in the aircraft).
Has anyone demonstrated to you something like
"watch this, Dani: if I pull the switch up and get it to hang on the little lock/cam, the engine will still start" ... in the sim or in the aircraft.
I'd be interested to read of your experiences with that switch and that non-standard positioning of it that you describe.

Beyond that, did you bother to look at the position of the fuel control switches that were in the preliminary report?
They were found in the RUN position. See page ten of the preliminary report.
Neither of them was cocked off, as in the picture of a misaligned switch from a 737 that you referred to.
On a 737.
The bulletin was Issued seven years ago. Why do you assume that people in the business sat on their hands for seven years?
Right. The facts are that the two fuel control switches were both found in the RUN position, not cocked to the side as your example from a 737 illustrates. Your entire line is unfortunately sunk by your attempt to challenge that fact.
You have established no basis for why you believe that the switches on this 787 were incorrectly installed, given that

1. the aircraft's crew (on the previous flight) successfully turned the fuel on and off on the flight from Delhi
2. the aircraft's flight deck crew successfully turned the fuel on, to RUN, before starting engines on the flight from Ahmedabad.

Your case is unsupported by the facts at hand.
As to post deletions: as with some of mine being deleted, we both seem to get involved in the running rodent machine despite any intentions to avoid it.

For DaveReidUK
Your post is, at best, disingenuous. (But thank you for posting an excerpt from the bulletin ).
The error was found on a 737, and the competent authority issued that alert having recognized that similar switches might have similar problems - they used the word potentia l - not because switches on all of those other models had been found to have that problem.
From your subsequent post:
I will also ask you whether or not you believe that airline companies the world over have sat on their hands for the last seven years, as regards fuel cutoff switches.
Given that this is the year 2025, (and the maintenance actions mentioned in the preliminary report) 1spotter's point on the "red herring" is a bit stronger than you allow. Please go back and read page 6 of the prelim report, top half.

Something else to think upon: how many 737s does Air India operate?
Does that have a relevance to this accident?
For the moment I don't think that it does, however, it might. The investigators have a variety of other rocks to turn over and see what crawls out from under them.
They may find evidence of various maintenance issues that have an impact on this accident.
As of today, though, such information has not been released (but I will offer you a guess that all of that is in the process of being collected and analyzed, even now, as a part of their investigation).

Full disclosure: I don't fly Boeings, I do not work for Boeing, I have no shares in Boeing stock, and I am still slightly pissed at Boeing for the MCAS screw up on the 737-MAX.

You have summarized something that I, not a doctor, have been both observing and pointing out for the past two decades (absent the COVID thing, which was/is a phenomenon that impacted many people very differently).

And yes, Pilots are subject to the toxicity of the modern, over-connected world as much as the rest of the population are.
That might make compartmentalization tougher now than it was 30 years ago. How good were either of the pilots on this flight at compartmentalization?
How does one measure that? (Obviously not answerable since they are both now dead).

(Thanks for the tip about Howe, I have a trip coming up and could use some different reading material - been on a Greek / Persian history binge of late, need new material).

Got it. Argument from ignorance is noted.

But I'll offer you a concern I have for the position that you are taking.
You have unwittingly made an presumption that in the last two years, see the maintenance actions referred to in the Prelim Report...
... none of the pilots at Air India wrote up a faulty fuel control switch.
This is a switch that actual 787 and 777 pilots, who have have participated in this thread, have confirmed requires dual confirmation during operation, and one that has been highlighted as 'of interest' based on the bulletin we have all discussed.

But in Dani's world, the switch not working can be pressumed and the pilots never wrote it up because of {reasons}.

What do you have against all of the flight deck crews of Air India, that you believe that they would neglect to write up a fuel control switch that isn't working properly?

As an aside:

Have I ever moved the wrong switch? Yep. I think that reaching for a wrong switch with one's mind not quite on what one is doing is more likely than your "the switch wasn't working correctly" assertion / assumption, particularly given the position that they were found in at the crash site: latched in the RUN position).

When I was still flying, if a switch in the cockpit, or a fastener for a cowling, wasn't working correctly I wrote it up.
Whether or not the maintenance team fixed it immediately, or deferred the maintenance (based on the maintenance pubs), I wanted that on record so that (1) it would get fixed, and (2) to alert the next crew. I was taught that approach over 40 years ago.

No, it was not.
From the information so far available, the ones on the accident aircraft was not installed the wrong way, else the conclusion that they were in the RUN position would not be there. You don't have a theory, you don't have a hypothesis, you have an (as yet) unsupported assertion.
Now, if a friend of your who works at Air India has sent you a text message, or spoken to you, and advised you privately that someone at that company had installed those switches improperly on that aircraft, then perhaps you can forward that info to the accident investigators (in whatever non attribution method you can figure out).

Further that point: had the installation been faulty, or presented evidence of that, that fact would have been in the report because they found the switches intact (albeit somewhat worse off due to the post crash fire).
See page 10 of the prelim, figure 13:
Given their physical possession of the switches, and the detail they went into describing the entire throttle quadrant, had the switches shown evidence of being improperly installed they'd have mentioned it.

But I'll throw you a bone: since I don't think that they have completed 100% all of their digging into the maintenance side of this, someone may turn up something odd before they issue a subsequent report, or the final report.

Beyond that, thank you for your concise response to my overly long post.