Thread: Air Malaysia missing.

Originally Posted by V8Ian

Strewth, those kids must have been pedaling!!!

Silly buggers. I'd have headed for the scrub, not down the runway.
Amazing effort to slow the plane down before landing.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing; youth, shock and panic can screw with decision making.
A remarkable manoeuvre that could have easily gone wrong, but they had nothing to lose.

Originally Posted by V8Ian

A remarkable manoeuvre that could have easily gone wrong, but they had nothing to lose.

And due to the skill of the pilot, they lost nothing.
Most of the time they're glorified bus drivers but when the **** hits the fan, they more than earn their pay and my respect.

And that skill was totally due to his hobby of recreational gliding, not professional training.

Originally Posted by V8Ian

And that skill was totally due to his hobby of recreational gliding, not professional training.

i am not sure how that works. Past hobbies may be. slipping in light aircraft is common thing to do. more so with tail draggers or deepening on your style crosswind landings.

but as a commercial pilot the company basically owns your flying hours. ie you are limited to how many hours you can fly a month etc. a bit like a truck driver. so personal flying takes from the hours you can fly for the company. or that’s how i understand it?

Originally Posted by 85 county

i am not sure how that works. Past hobbies may be. slipping in light aircraft is common thing to do. more so with tail draggers or deepening on your style crosswind landings.

but as a commercial pilot the company basically owns your flying hours. ie you are limited to how many hours you can fly a month etc. a bit like a truck driver. so personal flying takes from the hours you can fly for the company. or that’s how i understand it?

That maybe true but Ian was retelling fairly accurately what was said in the program "Air Crash Investigations". The pilot had never done it whilst gliding but knew how to do it. It had never been known to be done with a passenger jet aircraft before. The pilot took a risk and saved lives.

I was talking to my best mate about this very thing on the weekend. He has been a commercial pilot for 30+ years and always has sage advice, given he has had several flying incidents over the years working for different operators, including engine failures, bad fuel leaks, etc.

He reminded me that in the era of the Gimli landing (early 1980's), most pilots still manually controlled the aircraft a lot of the time, so had a better feel for it. Over the last decade or more, airlines have been trying to save money by short-cutting the training syllabus by cramming in systems training and having minimal hand-on training. Many pilots going through this intense training regime had little in the way of flying experience before being thrust into large multi-crew aircraft where they had a really steep learning curve ahead of them.

Some of the guys he knew who had been through this pressure cooker training regime often lacked basic airmanship - but could recite the systems and checklists backwards! Whenever he flies with someone new he asks a throwaway question to gauge their level - like, what is the best single engine climb speed of this aircraft? (pretty important if an engine fails!). Many had no idea.

These were the pilots he wouldn't yet trust in an emergency, especially if the checklist didn't cover the problem. Apparently, the pilot's forums often talk about how many more serious crashes it will take before these training trends get spoken about openly and hopefully amended. Scary!

The QF32 incident is probably the best example of a complete crew in the modern era of jets. Knowing the system is so important, even these days of automation. They worked through the problems and got the aircraft systems stable, then the hands on airmanship came out, seeing what it would do with what was left.
It's a shame modern operational techniques preclude the hands on element. I work in general aviation and I will often hand fly to keep those skills, airlines don't allow that option. That being said, I have flown with more experienced people that had no idea what the intricate bits did, and didn't want to know. If a red light came on they would do whatever the checklist said and tell the engineers it was broken. That stuff can save your life though. There needs to be a balance of both types of knowledge, hard work to get admittedly