In any case the other posts are absolutely correct, monitoring your airspeed on the approach is arguably priority one for a pilot flying an approach. Even if the autopilot is selected and even if airspeed is being controlled by autothrottle, monitoring the airspeed is supposed to be one of the key things to check on the routine "scan" of the instruments as you come in on your approach.

It's inconceivable to me that both the pilot AND the right-hand-seat instructor both missed the drop in airspeed.

Also raising the nose is the wrong thing to do in response to being to low. In fact increasing power (engine thrust) is the thing one is supposed to do in order to increase altitude. Raising the nose is what you do in order to decrease airspeed. It's actually a rookie mistake that beginning private pilots flying single-engine cessnas make. They think throttle = airspeed and elevators (nose up/down) = altitude. The opposite is what you're supposed to do for stable flight.

>It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes.

Three pilots didn't overlook it. One did. Ironically, it was a different Boeing/Airbus distinction that prevented the guy in the left seat of Air France 447 from realizing the mistake the guy in the right seat was making. Airbus has separate (unlinked) controls for both pilots, so the guy in the left seat didn't realize the guy in the right seat was commanding the aircraft to pitch up. In a Boeing, the controls are linked, so it would have been immediately obvious what was happening.

The other pilots were confused because it never occurred to them that someone would try to pitch a staling aircraft 'up'.

But the Asiana crash is a Boeing 777

This is drilled into every pilot. Besides, on a visual approach with clear weather, there is absolutely no excuse not to do a go-around if your glideslope is too shallow.

Part of the problem is Airbus aircraft. Similar to how if you write a lot of Python, you slowly forget all of the baggage of C, if you fly with Airbus and the FDC on most of the time, you'll get more used to not having to do more manual work. The sidestick spoils you. Even though the triple-seven is fly-by-wire, there's still a lot less hand-holding in it than the Airbus craft. Same goes for the 787, even though it's a brand-new airplane.

If you know you're prevented from making this mistake on an Airbus, depending on your attention and what you're thinking, you may not remember that the 777 doesn't have the same failsafes.

I really don't like the tone that so many post-accident discussions take regarding automation, Boeing v. Airbus, etc. -- when the plain facts of the incidents (specifically this, and Air France 447) boil down to one small, really important bit willful negligence.

A wilfully negligent pilot would be unlikely to get through training. And even if he was sloppy, it's hard to imagine somebody being so negligent that he didn't bother to check his airspeed when landing a 777 under the watchful eye of his instructor. And why didn't the instructor intervene?

Something else is going on. And, yes, if I was a gambling man, I'd put money on the Airbus explanation. I've spoken to Boeing pilots who describe the experience of flying with an Airbus as "creepy" and "eerie". To me, that's a hint that something interesting is happening. I suspect that, by removing certain kinds of feedback, the experience of flying an Airbus is rewiring pilots' brains in dangerous ways.

If I'm right, when we finally get to the bottom of what's going on, we'll learn something important about human cognition and response. This will have important implications for the design of safety critical systems.

This time, it was easy for me to make the case against pilot negligence. It's rarely so clear-cut, and it's normal for people to want to blame the pilot. None more so than the pilots themselves, who love to say, "That couldn't happen to me. I wouldn't make that dumb mistake." This is why the "no-blame culture" is so important in aircraft and medical accident investigations. If we insist on pointing the finger at the human involved, we never learn.

I don't know whether that's true or not, but that seems something it might be possible for an aircraft design to do, and if so, something to avoid. Does anyone know to what if any extent aircraft designers try to avoid letting pilots become too detached from the experience of flying?

The 757 flight controls were hydraulically operated, and were controlled by cables operated by the pilot that opened valves on the actuators (hydraulic rams) on the control surfaces. The pilot's controls did not directly feel the flow of air over the control surfaces feeding back into the stick, like a light plane would with the cables moving the control surfaces directly.

To correct this, Boeing designed a "feel computer" that would push back on the controls as if actual wind were pushing on the controls. The idea was that as close as possible the pilot's controls should "feel" like he was directly connected to the control surfaces.

The feel forces generated could be well over a hundred pounds, if I recall correctly, though Boeing had to reduce them in order to accommodate female pilots. Note that for a high performance aerobatic plane with direct controls, it is a physically exhausting task to control it.

My father flew B-17's, which were probably the biggest airplanes without hydraulically assisted controls. You had to be a strong man to fly it. It would fly with only one outboard engine running, but the force required on the rudder pedals meant the pilot and copilot had to constantly relieve each other.

The primary disadvantage, aside from the complexity of the system, is that it tends to delay feedback, which results in PIO.

For instance, when I started driving, I sometimes used the brakes too aggressively, and experienced a number of "micro-skids". These experiences quickly taught me how hard I could get away with pushing my vehicle. But it's not something I'm consciously aware of: my foot just automatically reaches for the brake pedal at the right moment. There's a subconscious "anti-skid system" built into my brain.

And that's the way it has to be. I couldn't possibly maintain conscious awareness of all aspects of vehicle operation. I'm not that smart!

The Airbus control scheme takes that feedback away. Pilots don't directly control the plane at all. They merely tell the plane what they want it to do, and the plane's control system decides whether it's a good idea or not. If a pilot does something that would stall the plane, the plane just doesn't respond.

I suspect that this causes the Asiana 214 pilot's subconscious "anti-stall system" to atrophy, to the point where he was no longer competent to manage a Boeing plane. The bit of his brain that automatically monitored flight speed and the red pips was no longer functioning. More seriously, his higher faculties were not aware that his subconscious systems could no longer be trusted (beyond a vague sense of unease).

Well, that's my theory, but note that I haven't explained why the instructor didn't spot what was going on.

In this accident, I think the main problem was not anything Boeing vs Airbus, but more a lack of experience with hands-on flying visual approaches, and a lack of monitoring, which would quickly have uncovered the fact that the auto-throttle wasn't operating. If the linked PPRune posting has any truth in it, I think we a have a substantial part of the explanation there.

Prof. Missy Cummings (former F/A-18 pilot) at MIT is involved in research into cockpit automation. She was featured on at least one documentary into AF447.

What is interesting in the Airbus vs Boeing debate is that pilots like Capt. Sullenberger who has flown both Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s doesn't claim its an "Airbus" problem. The problem is that airline pilots are becoming overly reliant on autopilots and forgetting the basic skills of flying the aircraft. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/capt-sully-sullenberger-airplane...

Completely agree. Unfortunately, the vasty majority of aircraft incidents occur because of pilot error. People can and will make mistakes. We need to accept that or automate more. I'm in the automate more camp.

In that case, however, you could point to a big UX problem: It was not announced in big, red letters that the fly-by-wire system had in fact been deactivated. If I remember correctly, this was hidden under some menu in the flight computer and simply abstracted away to a "master caution" light or something in that vein.

It was announced in medium-sized orange letters reading “F/CTL ALTN LAW (PROT LOST)”. At least one pilot did notice this; the co-pilot who wasn’t pulling up the whole time said “alternate law, protections lost” out loud, as recorded on the CVR, when the message appeared.

I think there was a similar problems at Qantas Flight 32, where the crew had to spend a lot of time going through 54 error messages after an uncontained engine failure.

Sum them?

Only take the most extreme of the two inputs (in any given direction)?

Only take the most recently seen input?

Averaging makes more sense than any of those, given the premise of "Control sticks that can move in different directions"

I'm not a pilot but I am a technical diver, and we eschew many of the conveniences that recreational divers use, such as relying on dive computers. We work out dive plans on paper, and backup plans, and carry them with us on a slate. The only instruments we rely on are watch, depth gauge and compass, and these are of the simplest possible design, and we have backups for them. If something happens on a deep dive or a cave dive, you know exactly what the state of your system is and can reason about it. Not so if you were used to something else tracking it for you, and you had to start discovering it from scratch.

Not paying attention to your airspeed is the sort of mistake you should be able to eradicate.

I want to know why a pilot who says that he is "very concerned" with doing a simple visual approach is allowed to have a couple hundred lives in his hands in an airliner. This is Piloting 101.

Mistakes are inevitable, but we shouldn't just throw up our hands either, especially when this particular mistake comes down to straight-out incompetence and a pilot who's afraid of a basic and straightforward flight operation.

Would you feel better if he said he was "not concerned at all" with landing the airplane?

> [The pilot] "stated it was very difficult to perform a visual approach with a heavy airplane."

From http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ntsb-asiana-crash-pilot-very-con...

This is, of course, complete bullshit.

From the same article:

> Lee said he told his instructors about his concerns in the flight's planning stages. He told investigators that as he realized his approach was off, he was worried he might "fail his flight and would be embarrassed."

More:

> Since “everyone else had been doing the visual approach … he could not say he could not do the visual approach,” according to NTSB

From http://atwonline.com/safety/asiana-777-pilot-sfo-visual-appr...

Would I feel better if he said he was "not concerned at all"? Of course I would. He was performing an easy landing in completely benign weather at an airport with nothing at all tricky or unusual about its approach. There was no reason whatsoever to be concerned.

-First of all, it is what it seems, it´s an elementary piloting failure. Once you disconnect the Autopilot and/or auto-throttle you must be first of all flying the plane on it´s envelope then navigating and last combating an emergency (if there is one).

-Second, I´ve heard first hand how the basic piloting skills like a visual approach or manual flying are very scarce in several Asian countries, one of them is Korean. This is due to the initial and airline training philosophy, for example Chinese copilots are not allowed to take the controls for landing or take off EVER (they have eternal training periods that are useless as they have no skills at all to learn ) I´dont know if this is true for all companies but at least several big ones work like this. Opposite to this in European and American companies, flight officers do half of the take off and landings due for the day, the only difference between a captain and copilot is that the captain is the one who decides the big questions, but the copilot is required to have the same piloting skills. In this case they were two captains one of them an instructor.. No words.

-third, there is an American instructor who wrote at Pprune (a pilot forum) about how for Korean pilots (trained in Korea), the worst emergency they can suffer in a simulator is a visual approach. Even worst than losing both engines or total hydraulic failure. They are scared to death of visual flying. . He was fired from Asiana for failing to pass the annual exam to one of Asiana´s top pilots for failing a common visual approach. It seems that due to the problems with North K. it´s not possible to flight small airplanes and practice the basic skills. I can not find the article right now, I think it was erased shortly after being posted.

-Fourth, it´s common to do mistakes with the flight modes while on final approach, both with airbus and Boeing, there are several descend and ascend modes, speed modes, and auto-throttle modes. But basically is that if you are high you want to descend faster, if you are low, you want to reduce your descend or even climb (in case of obstacles ahead), and you want to keep your speed inside the restricted limits needed to flight with the flaps for landing (too fast and they bend, too slow and you crash). When a mistake happens is normal to disconnect the autopilot and/or auto-throttle and take over on manual. But of course you are aware of what´s happening, is like going with the cruise control on the car, disconnecting it and failing to brake at the next light.

-Fifth, there are differences between airbus and Boeing, an airbus would have done an automatic full throttle to recover the low speed. But this kind of automatic behavior has other costs, for example the Air France´s A330 that crashed in my opinion was due to an overconfidence in such automatic recover. The problem (and this is my opinion) is that the pilot flying thought that just pulling the stick the airplane would do the rest to recover whatever he thought was happening ( Once it was in to a deep stall, it was impossible for the computer to recognize what was happening).

I think that crashing in crystal clear weather on a big airport just because you don´t know how to flight manually is a problem that some companies and countries have with the flight instruction philosophy, no amount of technology is going to solve that. Now Airbus is trying to increase the manual training of the pilots just because this same reason. They just went too far automatizing the flight, but airplanes and computers fail, and when they do it while flying you just can not stop everything to solve the problem, you have to land the plane safely no matter what.

Here's a reprint. It's very interesting: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3041469/posts

I've experienced this throughout my professional career as an engineer, to the point where I am very reluctant to work with foreign born asians. I find that this trait is very cultural, as it is almost completely absent in asians that were born in the US.

I don't care if American airlines offer crappy inflight customer service compared to Asiana airlines, I DEMAND a pilot that have the qualification to fly and land the airplane in all possible scenarios. If Asiana pilots can't even pass the flight sims, no way in hell I'm letting them fly the plane.

I'm just so angry after reading the article. How fucking hard can it be? I played Microsoft Flight Simulator since 4.5 since the DOS version. Of course the flight simulation is more difficult than a simulator on the computer but I am trying to illustrate how ridiculous the Korean pilots attitude is. It's like they treat it as some demeaning labor (Korean society judges a person a lot by their occupation if it's not a traditionally Confucius approved position like scholar, professor, lawyer, doctor, prosecutor). You are responsible for hundreds of peoples lives and you can't even land the fucking plane on a flight simulator via visual approach because you are afraid of screwing up or looking bad in front of your superior officer? You can't even say that the emperor is naked because someone above you says he isn't?

And why the hell did that Korean American pilot for Asiana or KAL get arrested and JAILED, for starting a union? Was he suspected of being a communist for wanting to be paid by the flight hour time?

Is the mistake that they made here that they used the flight level change mode for final approach where they shouldn't have done that to begin with? Or what is the mistake they made they caused them to turn off autopilot?

My second question is the one I originally had when reading the article:

The pilot flying responded by disconnecting the autopilot and manually retarding the throttles to idle. In this configuration, the autopilot was not commanding the airplane, although the system made inputs to the flight directors because it was still in flight level change mode.

I don't understand this. What does it mean to turn off autopilot but still have the plane give input due to the AP mode? Is what the article saying that the pilot simply turned off the AP voice warnings but left the AP input on? - if so, I don't understand why that should even be possible.

What are the scenarios where you would want to leave the AP inputs on but switch off the audio warnings other than the pilot "finding them annoying" (!!) ?

Sounds unlikely in this day and age, but 20 years ago other air crashes from Korean airlines were apparently due to the same thing with junior pilots not wanting to overrule or speak up against a senior pilot who had made a mistake or overlooked something, so who knows...

Do pilots transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing get put through an intensive simulator training to '(re)acclimatise' them to the Boeing.

By intensive I mean going through a whole host of failure modes.

For instance, I picked a random link to a flight school that offers a B777 type rating course[2] - which takes 14 days of ground-work and 9 days of flight training (36 hours in the simulator in this case; often for big airliners it's going to be too expensive or impractical to perform a type-rating in a real aircraft).

Additionally, having attained the type rating, you're required to maintain "currency" in that type by flying it frequently; if you let type currency lapse by going too long without flying it, you need to undergo a kind of mini "refresher" training/assessment to regain currency again. This is the case for Private/GA Pilots in NZ at least, I'm not so familiar with other jurisdictions or license categories.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating

[2] http://www.balticaa.com/en/aviation-training-courses-/type-r...

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...

Key excerpt from halfway through:

"Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error."

Really tragic.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...