This story could make a good anecdote to remember when considering human factors, user interface, and checklist design.
> Investigators said that because the pilots flew the second circuit at 1500ft, the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitor (ECAM) had not reset on the second approach and it did not display a landing memo at 950ft.
“The absence of the landing memo should have prompted the flight crew to perform the items of the landing checklist as a ‘read-and-do’ checklist,” it said.
Like the lock icon in a browser’s address bar, it is not effective to rely on the user to notice the absence of an indicator.
This was a situation where the automation normally prompted the pilots to check the gear. The automation failed to do this in a timely manner so that they had to go around.
The distraction argument didn't really make any sense at all to me. They were not distracted, they were flying the aircraft.
The UX moral here is that if you have a system that always prompts the user then you have to live with the fact that failing to prompt will almost always result in failure to act.
The history of flight is so interesting. Did you know that early flights were mostly postal runs? The mortality rate was something absurd. You pretty much got into the profession because you loved being a bird more than being alive.
One of the earliest telemetry systems was a beacon where you can only tell how far away you are from it. Like, you know you're X miles away, and you can see X increase or decrease. But you had no indication what direction it was in, or any of the miracles we take for granted today. So they would set up a path of these beacons, and you would fly from one to the next, and that's how you'd know where you were going. I want to say "at night", but honestly I am probably misremembering some of the fascinating details. But the point was, you were often navigating using primitive instruments that gave you very little data about how not to die within the next N minutes.
From the title, I thought the plane had accidentally landed with the gear up. But no, a master warning kicked in and the worst that happened was... they pulled up and went around. Woo.
but it really is woo. It's so fucking cool that humanity as a whole went from no flight to safe flight in one human lifespan. One old guy's worth of life! Modern civilization is only a few thousand generations old, and we're going from ground to air to air-but-safe in the blink of a slice of a microsecond of human evolution, relatively speaking.
I wish I'll be around to see it happen for space travel. SpaceX is coming tantalizingly close, yet space-but-safe is a different matter entirely. I think it will take a few generations for us to work out those problems.
This is why there are checklists for everything. Even the best pilots omit things when checklists are not used.
It is a major accomplishment of modern commercial aviation that now, a gear-down error + missed approach qualifies as a noteworthy safety catch. Aviation safety has come so far in 50 years.
I have read that the frequency of major safety incidents is so rare now that detection and diagnosis of errors has had to go farther and farther "upstream" towards monitoring and detecting the potential contributors to eventual safety problems. There just are almost no more accidents to study each year. A non-stabilized approaches is itself now cause for study. Truly admirable.
ATSB investigation https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2...
Which points out that the incorrect configuration was on their second go around
As a somewhat related aside, Jetstar pilots are currently pursuing industrial action with relation to poor working conditions.
Sounds like it's the sort of thing being discussed in this video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iigjodCiK0g
Early, setting the thesis of the video, "...these [loss of control] accidents always follow a pattern. The pattern is: an event occurs, the event causes distraction, distraction causes loss of control."
While not exactly loss of control, it certainly sounds similar and seems to follow that central thesis.
> The captain elected to remain at Flaps 3, which investigators described as permissible and safe but not Jetstar’s standard configuration for a visual circuit.
This surprised me (I’m a naive non-pilot). I guess I assumed that things like this would be decided by manufacturers and regulatory agencies, with (as happened here) pilots making on the spot decisions. I had not realized different companies might make different safety protocols. Is that common?
Interesting timing that this gets released 2 days before they are due to take industrial action/strike... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-11/jetstar-flights-cance...
Could they do something like an obnoxious alert if the flaps are out but the wheels aren't down?
The world is full of airplane incidents. Check this out: https://avherald.com/
Shouldn't some of the landing procedure, such as lowering of wheels, be instigated automatically?
Time to remove meat bags from control of aircraft
You have to love the ECAM. On the Boeings, pre 787 at least, we were trained to configure first, look and make sure the flaps, slats, and gear actually extended, then pilot flying calls for the checklist. Do-and-read.
Of course, if you have malfunctions or you've got too much shit going on (non-normals, traffic, wx, you're sleepy and screwing up, one or both pilots are not performing well), it would be smart to slow the situation down and revert to read-and-do.
It sure is nice to have an obnoxious horn and also GPWS that will start screaming "Too low, gear!!" if the pilots press on without the wheels down.
Other times this has happened:
Qantas https://forums.jetphotos.com/forum/general-discussion-forums...
El Al https://www.timesofisrael.com/el-al-pilots-nearly-try-landin...
IAF https://indianexpress.com/article/india/chandigarh/when-an-a...
Jetstar, 2012 (!) http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/323319
Once this 737 MAX stuff dies down, we'll probably stop seeing every pilot fart or hiccup reaching the front page. Pilots make mistakes, they always have and always will, we just haven't seen them reported as much. Commercial aircraft are still as safe as they ever were.