Just making sense of the numbers to give a perspective:
While at 600 feet, the “newer” first officer inadvertently pushed forward on the control column for about 3 seconds. In the span of 3 seconds the plane dropped from 600 to 400 feet. Then the situation was corrected and the airplane climbed. So if the first officer had kept the same rate of descent for 6 more seconds, it would have crashed. The article quotes the rate of descent as 4000 feet/minutes.
Edit: for the curious here is the flight data: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... and the track log: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... you can see at around Thu 4/11 at 10:12:47 PM PDT the airplane made the rapid descent, then climbed back up quickly. However the ADS data shown by flightaware is too granular (one data point every 16-18 seconds) so we see the minimum altitude as 875 feet, but in reality the plane went lower. Apparently some other site (ADS-B Exchange) has more granular data, but I don't have access to it and am too lazy to create an account (is it free?)
Actually, higher speed makes it easier to pull up. You have more lift and more control authority. As long as you don't exceed the aircraft's structural limits, airspeed is your friend.
It's when you are low and slow and try to pull up with the elevator that you may stall the aircraft. You need to push the throttle to gain some airspeed.
I can see it being harder on a GA aeroplane (more airflow over control surfaces making them harder to deflect), but not sure the same applies on hydraulic controls.
Control surfaces work the same whether you are manipulating them with a direct mechanical connection or have hydraulic assistance.
It's not a question of whether you are strong enough to move the flight controls.
The only thing the hydraulics do for you is to reduce your effort in moving those controls.
Control surfaces don't magically make the plane go up or down, or left or right. The only way they work is by pushing against the air flowing over them.
If there is not enough airflow over the actual controls - ailerons, elevator, rudder - you won't be able to control the airplane.
And if there isn't enough airflow over the wings, they won't provide lift. That is when you stall and lose all control, until you find a way to increase your airspeed and get some air moving over the wings and flight controls, so they have something to push against.
Source: my basic pilot training where I practiced stalls and spins and all kinds of loss of control.
> It's not a question of whether you are strong enough to move the flight controls.
Anybody who flew a badly trimmed plane at high speed will disagree. Of course more airflow over the wings will mean your GA cessna 172 controls require more human strength to operate. They are also more effective as you say, but that's not what the previous poster meant.
This is not an uncommon mistake for pilots in training to make. It sounds strange, but you have to keep in mind that this maneuver is done with no outside visibility (that's the reason for the go around). So the pilot is only looking at his instruments.
The first officer had to do several things at the same time, and for a few seconds did not monitor the aircraft pitch attitude well enough.
In a jet the difference between a normal (about 600 to 700 ft/min) descend or this rapid descend is only something like 5 degrees. So it's easy to get this wrong if you look away from the instruments for just a few seconds. Especially if you're changing configuration (flaps) and power at the same time, because both have an effect on pitch.
The first officer made a mistake and the captain quickly corrected, per other articles on this. A lot of the headlines around this have been very click-baity, trying to imply that it is a Boeing or Max problem when it is just old-fashioned pilot error.
It's notable though that airlines have been probing trying to reduce flight crew sizes - if this incident occurred on a single pilot flight, the outcome could have been catastrophic.
Pretty funny that the railroads have also been trying for years to cut crew sizes to one. All this while building extremely long trains which require a lot more finesse to manage over complex terrain and in and out of railyards, many of which are not designed to accomodate trains of that length. Place all that responsibility on a single point of failure. Luckily the union was able to stifle that effort in their recent agreements.
There is a real danger when bean-counters with no practical experience run a company and look at every component, including the employees, as a cost center that can be trimmed as needed to tailor results for quarterly reports that guarantee that investors will remain engaged.
It would be cool if executives and large shareholders could literally just run a world where all us little peons only work reasonably hard but not so hard that we are mentally breaking and everything is falling apart and you still get to be extremely rich.
It would be even better if the C-level suites in the corporate world were staffed with people who had direct experience doing the work that those they are supposed to manage are doing so that there is no cultural disconnect between those doing the work and those who are getting paid to manage the company.
Shareholders can get in line behind employees as far as I'm concerned.
> Shareholders can get in line behind employees as far as I'm concerned.
I'd say even more, if a company is large enough they should get in line behind workers, and society at large.
For such amount of power there should be systemic mechanisms putting society's interests above shareholders. They can get their share of the pie after that, they definitely wouldn't starve if so.
The same phenomenon is visible at businesses that do not need quarterly reports, like the largest railroad business in the US, wholly owned for more than 14 years by the famously long term thinking investor Warren Buffett:
Berkshire is pretty well known for being led by executives that have very long term strategies. I doubt them having to show quarterly numbers affects that, at least as long as Buffett is in charge.
You almost sound like you think Buffett micromanages the businesses that he owns or those that he invests in.
I believe that you are mistaken. Everything that I have ever read indicates that he buys companies that are already well-managed with good long-term prospects and then he lets those proven managers operate without interfering.
I could be wrong. As far as BNSF goes, I know that when Matt Rose was running it after BH bought BNSF that he was highly regarded at BH. I think he was rumored to be in line to replace Buffett if Buffett decided to hand off his position to someone else. I don't think that happened but I know that Rose was a good person who was available to speak with anyone on the railroad if they wanted to talk directly to him.
Like I said, I believe that Buffett looks to make his money by owning profitable companies with strong leadership in markets where they can remain competitive for a long time.
Perhaps to you that means that quarterly reports, though required by the SEC, are not important to Buffett or BH since they obviously take a long view before buying the company in the first place. I don't think it means that BH controls the day-to-day operations of any of the companies that they own or invest in.
> I don't think it means that BH controls the day-to-day operations of any of the companies that they own or invest in.
I don’t think it does either.
> Like I said, I believe that Buffett looks to make his money by owning profitable companies with strong leadership in markets where they can remain competitive for a long time.
Presumably by employing people who make long term decisions. Why would Buffett keep leadership in place that he thinks are making short term decisions to boost quarterly numbers?
Thats the reputation, but there are a lot of recent short term actions in the businesses owned by that Berkshire that make me think that the values of empire are crumbling to shorter term outlooks
Your linked article is two years old. Many of the issues cited were handled in the trainmen's favor under the new collective bargaining agreement finalized last year.
> Luckily the union was able to stifle that effort in their recent agreements.
While most extreme of the measures were cut, railroads are still far away from operating safely. There is a John Oliver episode on Freight trains. You know things are bad, when he has an episode.
This is true but the conditions won in the recent bargaining made a huge quality of life difference for train crew members. My family has been railroading for 4 generations and I currently have a close relative working on the train crew for a huge US railroad.
Before the agreement, when it looked to all the trainmen like they were gonna get fucked again, there was a lot of anger and frustration with their near total absence of control of important things in their lives. They were literally meat to be shuffled like rolling stock up and down the tracks at the whim of their employer. As the terms of the agreements became more clear they realized that the railroads had to back off on their most destructive terms such that trainmen can now have a predictable work schedule, a higher rate of pay, better benefits, etc so it is definitely true that a lot of shit on railroads was broken and contributed to unsafe rolling stock and working conditions, some of that has been corrected simply by insuring that crews have sufficient manpower to manage the longer trains that are running and that the crews are more likely to be rested before they get on the trains. There has been a total attitude adjustment about employment conditions such that there are fewer trainmen looking to change jobs.
This whole collective bargaining exercise began with a majority of trainmen feeling like they had no opportunity to change anything and has resulted in a new-found respect for union leadership in effecting changes that benefit the people doing the work. The railroads, the FRA, the unions, and the administration sat down and worked through problems in a way that gave the employees tangible concessions and that was one thing that most employees would never have counted on happening since the unions had been nearly neutered since the previous collective bargaining agreements were signed around 20 years earlier.
Railroads are different though. You can always just stop in case of a problem. In an aircraft not so much..
That's why trains have a dead man's switch but planes don't. Though I guess at some point in the future they may. Cirrus already has a system that can be engaged by the passengers in case of a problem with the pilot and that will perform a completely autonomous landing. That's on tiny aircraft though.
Freight trains can require several miles to stop even at full brake application (which will also ruin the wheels). I agree that it's not the same as a plane, but they still definitely can't stop whenever they'd like or for free.
Yes, this is an issue. It hasn't been that long ago that DARPA ran the challenges that led to the proof of concept for self-driving, autonomously navigating robot vehicles. Some of the technology became the selling point for various automobiles with some of the promises still lacking in deliverable results. You have to test all this to know whether it will work and eventually some of the tests need to shift from a workstation to the real world. Like the Air Force and their recent conversion of some fighters to unpiloted planes, this will all happen and one day it will be the norm. If we're all lucky all the test failures will happen on a server somewhere instead of out here in real life.
The flight path for the missed approach is already in the flight management system, and the autopilot will fly it much more accurately than a human pilot. In this case it seems that either the missed approach was being flown by hand, or else the pilot's inadvertant push on the control column overrided the autopilot.
Anyway, the point is that if "the computers" had been flying, this would never have happened in the first place. Perhaps we just need one pilot to take over in case there is some emergency that can't be handled by the autopilot.
Yeah, this sounds like classic somatogravic illusion. When you experience forward acceleration with no outside visual references, your vestibular system produces the sensation of tumbling backwards. The natural response in an airplane, it you are not well trained, is to shove the stick forward. I've seen trainees do this in this exact situation (a go around in instrument conditions) and I've had to take over the airplane to keep us from auguring in (just like this captain did).
In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with the aircraft. This is a deficiency in the first officer's instrument flying.
I have not seen a single one that implied that it was as Boeing or Max problem. I've seen people making that assumption, but not a single headline that read as such.
To me, the headline is implies it's a Boeing issue by saying, "Southwest flight..." rather than, "Southwest pilot..." when it's fairly common knowledge that Southwest only flies Boeing 737s.
Yeah its a scary headline for a scary but quickly caught and corrected incident. Every flight I've ever been on has came within 400 feet of crashing! Even dozens of feet! Thankfully the pilots have all landed the plane on the runway instead of crashing into it.
On approach. I think that’s an important detail missing from the headline. Still a shocking near-miss, but it’s not like it dropped from 35,000 feet to 400 feet before correcting.
On approach, and dropped from 600 feet to 400 feet at a rate of 4000 feet per minute. So a 3 second drop. I don’t know much about what is normal here, but that seems like important framing.
1000-2000 fpm would be a typical climb/descent in most situations. 4000 fpm would raise an eyebrow or two but is not generally alarming (that is, it's well within the performance envelope of most aircraft).
However, at 600' any loss of altitude without a suitable runway beneath you and an aircraft ready to greet it is a very alarming prospect.
As for this incident, it sounds like a junior pilot accidentally hit the control column while going for another control. It's only notable for having occurred at the very moment you don't want such things to occur. I suggest a corrective action of briefing pilots not too hit the control column.
To be fair, most aircraft accidents are on or just after takeoff, or just before, during or after landing. Those are the most critical minutes when the most things can go wrong.
The approach chart shows an MDA (Minimum Descent Altitude) of 940'. You DO NOT DESCEND BELOW MDA unless the runway is in sight. Approach design standards provide some margins, but a 500-600' altitude bust blows past those margins. Luckily this was an over water approach. The GPWS alert seems to have caught this in time.
Busting MDA on a missed approach is a fail on your Instrument Rating flight test.
That said, a 737 is pitch sensitive. No mention is made of the flight mode.
TL;DR from the article is a newbie pushed the column forward by accident and corrected very quickly. Dropped from 600 feet to 400 feet at a rate of 4,000 feet per minute. That’s about three seconds of too-fast descent at a constant 4,000ft/minute, though it wouldn’t have been constant so it may have been a bit longer that that, mostly at lower rates of descent.
Not some huge plunge. Worth an investigation but the headline’s clickbaity.
> TL;DR from the article is a newbie pushed the column forward
that newbie has at least 1500 hours of flying in order to qualify as a first officer. not exactly new to flying. in europe(and used to be in the US before one accident that was not really related to their experience flying) it's something like 300 for FO but the captain is much more experienced.
> What happened in these 16 seconds is described in an internal memo circulating in Southwest Airlines stating, that during the go around due to weather conditions the first officer, pilot flying, inadvertently pushed the control column forward while monitoring the power settings causing the aircraft to descend to about 400 feet MSL before the aircraft started climbing again.
Why do articles like this get written? This is a minor hiccup that was pretty far away from disaster. Maybe a better title would be 'a worse than normal approach happened resulting in nothing of consequence'. This is stoking unreasonable fear to the detriment of the industry, passengers and journalism as a whole.
This incident occurred in April not now, and was pilot error in pushing the controls too far forward. Looking at the various news articles about this incident, I find the reporting is a bit deceptive in some of the other articles that lead with emphasis on the make and model of the plane (Boeing 737 Max), even though it is not relevant to the incident which is purely pilot error.
While at 600 feet, the “newer” first officer inadvertently pushed forward on the control column for about 3 seconds. In the span of 3 seconds the plane dropped from 600 to 400 feet. Then the situation was corrected and the airplane climbed. So if the first officer had kept the same rate of descent for 6 more seconds, it would have crashed. The article quotes the rate of descent as 4000 feet/minutes.
Some more details here: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/southwest-plane-plunged-within-4...
Edit: for the curious here is the flight data: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... and the track log: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... you can see at around Thu 4/11 at 10:12:47 PM PDT the airplane made the rapid descent, then climbed back up quickly. However the ADS data shown by flightaware is too granular (one data point every 16-18 seconds) so we see the minimum altitude as 875 feet, but in reality the plane went lower. Apparently some other site (ADS-B Exchange) has more granular data, but I don't have access to it and am too lazy to create an account (is it free?)