Quote:
Originally Posted by burn_this_city
CNN has a video of the crash, the plane did a 360 cartwheel after impact.
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I just watched it, I still wouldn't call it a cartwheel in the sense of a gymnast doing a cartwheel. More like a top in he latter stages of its spin before it dies out, oscillating back and forth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stampsx2
I didn't think pilots landed planes anymore. I thought the ils system did it for them so how could it be pilot error. When they land in fog they don't see the runway at all.
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Nope and nope. You still need to be able to see the runway lights on an ILS approach at the decision height... if you can't see it you abort the approach. Only a cat 3c ILS has no decision and can be used for autoland with zero vis, but I'm not sure that's authorized anywhere yet.
That said... the ILS was down so it's irrelevant. At an airport like SFO, air traffic control use ILS approaches as little as possible because when visibility falls below what's required for visual approaches, the airports arrival rate takes a nose dive because the runways are not far enough apart to do this when it's cloudy:
These airplanes are 750 feet apart. This happens all day every day (in good weather) at SFO. I feel like pilots aren't given enough credit and people (in general) think they are no longer capable of hand flying their airplanes.
Here's an Air Canada 777-200 pilot hand flying and landing at Toronto. Listen at 0:40... "minimums!" to which the pilot not flying says "runway in sight" (obviously because it's a beautiful day) then the pilot flying says "landing". The minimums call is the point at which you must be able to see the runway lights.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Coke
Also the Pilot flying appears to be a pilot just transitioning from a smaller airplane (A320) to the bigger 777. So much more mass, and longer time for the engines to spool up. May have caught him off guard, as he had only 43 hours on type, which for long hauls equates to only 4 or 5 landings, with him being in control for half, so he may have had only 2 or 3 landings in the airplane.
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Kinda hoping that's not true. They're going to get sued into the ground.