Latest Details on Buffalo Crash - Q400 Pitched Up 31 Degrees Before Crash

Another thing. I do coastal sailing. By and large the forecast, and even supposed existing descriptions of present local conditions are junk. If it is nice and sunny with multi state highs, fine. Or a hurricane, fine. But in between? Forget it. Look around you and think of the worst. (Mind you think of my approach to a rock jetty harbor, under sail, with out going tide, some commercial traffic and an underpowered engine. I always think of a bailout option, and have often had to just hunker down with books for days. Grounded as it were.

Oddly, the only accident I ever had was in a brand new sportfish, in Ft. Lauderdale harbor because I was more or less intoxicated by the glass screen Radar/GPS/Chart reader and drifted out of channel onto coral. I wouldn’t of done that under eyeball navigation.)

The same United pilot gives me the FAA accident flyer. Lots of chilling stuff, and stupid stuff.

I once pickup towed a sailboat back from Chicago to Mass along the lakes. Took me a day to get to Chicago, and six to get back the lake effect weather was so bad. So I can only imagine the weather was bad, and unique.

I’ an old DC-3 pilot.. We flew into Detroit, Windsor and every flat spot between there and Toronto. We'd carry a baseball bat to knock the ice off the airplane after we landed, as for in flight, we had a limited amount of alcohol to deice the windshield, we'd wait for the middle marker and turn it on, in about 3 seconds it would have a hole about 6-8 inches around to look out of to see the runway..
The wings had pneumatic boots but the carburetor intakes didn't have any heat at all, you would wait for the manifold pressure to start to drop then use the mag switches to backfire the engine and blow the crap out.. Now them were THE SCARY days....

Modern autopilot systems, combined with modern instrument landing systems can fly the plane right down to the touchdown spot on the runway. There are basically three signals the instrument landing system send out. One indicates how well aligned the aircraft is on the center line of the runway. The other indicates if the flight path is above or below the desired altitude for a given spot on on the approach. There's a couple of other components that let the pilot know how far it is to the spot where they want to touch down.

There is a point, an altitude, on every instrument landing at which the pilot has to have the runway in sight or abandon the landing. Depending on the area, this can be quite low, like 300 feet or so. I have not been current for IFR for a lot of years now. I have no idea what that decision point is these days. Maybe someone who is current or knows will clue us in!

All instrument landing systems aren't of the same quality. Big airports have the most accurate and sensitive, expensive, systems. Others have less accurate systems. You would be amazed at how bad the weather conditions can be and permit operations at the big airports.

Actually approaches can be made to airports with no on-site ILS at all. The system in the aircraft uses navigation devices at remote locations and then has an on-board computer do the the math to make the aircraft appear to be following a signal from the airport itself. Pretty clever.

As for the autopilot, if you find yourself in big trouble, like in the clouds and very disoriented the quickest fix is to engage the autopilot. This is true even if the aircraft is out of control. Modern autopilots are much better at interpreting the info coming from the various instruments, and doing it much faster, than a confused pilot can.

Again, I am not currently qualified to fly in IFR conditions and it could that a lurker can provide corrections for anything I've missed!

re: policy and FAA rules

For the record there is a huge difference between the two. And the differences are not subtle.

Had the pilot landing on the Hudson been doing so at night, in a mix of rain and snow plus known icing conditions, the outcome might have been totally different. Certainly not to detract from the absolutely outstanding job he did he had absolutely perfect conditions for what he had to do. And by the same token it could turn out that there was nothing the pilot of the twin-turbine could have done to avoid the crash.

Do you know offhand if activation of the stick shaker would have also disengaged the autopilot?

I have to think that something other than just the icing conditions must have been involved. Similar aircraft make the same flight in icing conditions without the problem. Seems like the pilot would have had made enough flights on autopilot to notice the system was having to work pretty hard to overcome the icing. Even though the autopilot is handling the flying it’s second nature to an experienced pilot to be attune to a myriad of clues as to how it’s going.

Seems if the icing was enough to cause a stall/spin that the pilot would have been aware that engine power was being constantly upped.

Thankfully, albeit sadly, there’s probably enough info to figure out exactly what went wrong. These things are frequently as simple or straightforward as they seem as first. The legal standard is “innocent until proved guilty”, the MSM aviation standard is “Pilot error until proved otherwise”.

re: The true miracle is that there are not more crashes

With all due respect to your opinion, it’s not a miracle at all. If they operated with such wanton abandon for the rules and regs there would be crashes all the time. There were other flights in the vicinity encountering the very same conditions but they didn’t ice up and crash.

There are a million take offs and landings every year. This was the first fatal accident of a scheduled flight in over two years. If things were as dangerous, and the flight crews as careless, as you describe there would be a lot more incidents.

The specs for an aircraft to be certified to operate in known icing conditions are very precise and demanding.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and I would not suggest you should be prevented from expressing it when and where you want. But please know there are other opinions, opinions held by very capable people like Capt. ‘Sully’.

Thanks!

You’re not too far off, I’m CFII rated but haven’t been current in about 15 years, and nav/com has changed dramatically in that time period.

What concerns me is the fact the autopilot was on, it is considered pretty basic that when you are flying in any icy conditions you put the plane in manual so you can ‘feel’ how the aircraft is responding and get a good sense of how serious the ice is. A good pilot who knows their aircraft well can tell when it’s time to activate full de-icing or to start looking for a place to land quickly before you reach that critical zone when you approach a stall.

The thing is it is still too early to tell because in the panic they might have accidentally set the autopilot, but from what I’ve read they hadn’t switched it off, so who knows. There is nothing unsafe about flying a plane in icy conditions when you have adequate systems to compensate for them, and you know when/how to use them to their premium. Like the DC-3 pilot earlier, there is ALWAYS a way to deal with it, although his was extreme (and quite innovative!) if you are on autopilot you simply wont have the time to compensate for the issue if you are at the breaking point.

I’ll be honest, and this is just personal and not a slam against all newer pilots, but it is well known that the ‘freshman’ pilots for the airlines get the smaller commuter runs, and in many cases thanks to the idiotic pilot’s union they are still flying these turboprops like this and the ATRs and SAABS (which are fine aircraft) instead of the mini-jets like the Fokkers which are far superior.

When I go home to Texas I have to fly on one of these (usually an ATR) and I’ve had a few questionable crosswind landings in Midland/Odessa where I thought the pilot didn’t have a good feel for the aircraft and that has always bothered me. Once when we took off from DFW we had to use the entire runway because the pilot didn’t have the flaps set properly before takeoff and that really freaked me out.

It’s still to early to speculate fully, and I just don’t trust the media anymore to give me full and accurate reporting. I’ll wait to read the NTSB report before I jump to any conclusions.

A million thanks for some interesting info!

I have always thought it to be bass-ackwards that the lesser experienced pilots were flying much less capable aircraft than the guys with 15,000 hours or more. The guys that fly the big planes don't have their skills challenged anywhere nearly as often as the poor bastard shooting non-precision approaches to the Okeechobees, Hilton Head Island, etc.

It's my impression that as soon as departure gives the flight a heading and altitude that they simply set the heading altitude bugs and engage the autopilot. Someone who knows what they're talking about hop in here and set me straight! How much of the average vfr approach to bigger airport is actually flown by the pilot? Same with a standard departure. Somehow I don't see Capt. “Sully” bothering to handle rolling out of climbing turn at exactly 9,000 feet on a perfect heading? Am I wrong?

I landed on a plane once where 3/4 of the passengers were in tears, we landed in an extremely strong cross wind and twice the plane dipped so far the wing nearly hit the ground, it's was extremely wreckless to try to the land that plane, on another flight, the escape shoots filled with air as we were taxying down the runway, 30 seconds later and we would have all died, I stopped flying, lots of stuff happens you never hear about, trust me.

Watch this, this is probably very much what our landing looked like, only we did land, there were folks that were absolutely hysterical on that plane afterwards

Video

Thought you’d like this....

Subject: Fw: Ode to the Reciprocating Engine

I don’t know who wrote this, but it is VERY well said!
DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE WHO FLEW BEHIND ROUND ENGINES
We gotta get rid of those turbines, they’re ruining aviation and our hearing...
A turbine is too simple minded, it has no mystery. The air travels through it in a straight line and doesn’t pick up any of the pungent fragrance of engine oil or pilot sweat.
Anybody can start a turbine. You just need to move a switch from “OFF” to “START” and then remember to move it bac k to “ON” after a while. My PC is harder to start.
Cranking a round engine requires skill, finesse and style. You have to seduce it into starting. It’s like waking up a horny mistress. On some planes, the pilots aren’t even allowed to do it...
Turbines start by whining for a while, then give a lady-like poof and start whining a little louder.
Round engines give a satisfying rattle-rattle, click-click, BANG, more rattles, another BANG, a big macho FART or two, more clicks, a lot more smoke and finally a serious low pitched roar. We like that. It’s a GUY thing...
When you start a round engine, your mind is engaged and you can concentrate on the flight ahead Starting a turbine is like flicking on a ceiling fan: Useful, but, hardly exciting.
When you have started his round engine successfully your Crew Chief looks up at you like he’d let you kiss his girl, too!
Turbines don’t break or catch fire often enough, which leads to aircrew boredom, complacency and inattention. A round engine at speed looks and sounds like it’s going to blow any minute. This helps concentrate the mind !
Turbines don’t have enough control levers or gauges to keep a pilot’s attention. There’s nothing to fiddle with during long flights.
Turbines smell like a Boy Scout camp full of Coleman Lamps. Round engines smell like God intended machines to smell.

Well I understand the seniority system that goes with airlines, and even though the big birds can practically ‘fly themselves’ it takes a great deal of experience and knowledge to be fully capable of handling one when things don’t go exactly as planned, as Sully himself demonstrated. Honestly I would MUCH rather be flying a Cessna 185 and lose all power than say a Boeing 737 because they are so much easier to ‘dead stick’ in landings.

When flying you have certain times that demand full attention and control, the two obvious are ascent (take-off) and descent. You don’t engage autopilot until you have reached your cruising altitude for reasons highlighted in the recent “miracle on the Hudson”, when things go south you have to be in full control to be able to respond accordingly.

Now I don’t know about this particular aircraft that crashed, but many Bombardiers have WAAS systems which do indeed ‘guide’ you in ILS landing approaches, but that isn’t considered ‘autopilot’. What I’m confused about is the locale of the crash, Clarence Center, isn’t far from the outer marker at the Buffalo airport so autopilot should have been disengaged well before they were there unless they had called for a guided landing, which they didn’t.

I’m not so sure that the press isn’t confusing ‘autopilot’ with the newer WAAS systems, again I just don’t trust them when it comes to modern day aviation reporting because of the wild speculation and lack of knowledge that abounds.

There are some excellent pilots out there who fly these ‘puddle jumpers’ as we used to call them, but again these are the stepping stone for pilots who are fairly new to commercial aviation and hence there will be some competency issues .0001 percent of the time. Honestly it’s probably wrong to single them out because I have certainly known some pilots who fly for a large airline based here in Atlanta that will go unnamed that shouldn’t be flying anymore.

It was the FAA person who referred to it as the autopilot, wasn’t it? Remember the airliner that lost engine thrust on final in Great Britain? They talked at great length about the fact their first indication of trouble was when the throttles didn’t respond to the autopilot’s command for more power?

It’s my understanding that use of the autopilot is pretty common on ILS approaches. It’s referred to as a coupled approach and most of the references I came across talked about using it down to 200 feet. I can easily see where they might have put the plane on autopilot while the discussed the icing and what to do about it.

Still though, I know from 40 plus, actually nearer 50, years of aviation fascination that these early reports frequently are misleading. As a pilot I prefer to give the cockpit crew full benefit of the doubt until the full report is available. I really don’t think it’s a simple as a lazy PIC leaving his charge on autopilot despite obvious icing, etc. Even on autopilot he would have been aware of other cues that there was a problem. Just the sound of the slipstream as the autopilot adjusted for the increased drag/weight would have gotten his attention. My heart really goes out to him.

Interesting info! Thanks for sharing.

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