Runaway AIRCRAFT! This Aircraft Flew TWO HOURS Without CONTROLS!

picture the craziest wildest rollercoaster ride in the entire world and now imagine yourself being stuck on that ride against your wheel for close to two hours that's what happened to the crew and passengers of this embraer 190 and how that could happen and how the story actually ended is what i'm going to cover in this video so stay tuned a huge thank you to manscaped for sponsoring this video the disturbing story of aristona flight 1388 actually started about a month prior to the accident flight where the operator air astana had flown the embraer 190-100 lr into a maintenance base in portugal called alverca de repatejo in there they had contracted a portuguese maintenance firm called ogma that industria aeronautical the portugal to actually do the maintenance check and this is not unusual when airlines don't have their own maintenance organizations they contract in external organizations so that happens quite a lot the aircraft was scheduled to do some quite heavy maintenance it included a normal c2 check which is kind of a reoccurring check that the aircraft has to go through at a certain number of cycles or hours but it also included a couple of service bulletins now service bulletins is when the aircraft manufacturer sends out an instruction to the airlines to upgrade their aircraft and in this case they needed to upgrade part of the routing of the cables that led to the ailerons but they also needed to change the alarm cables completely from stainless steel cables to carbon steel cables and that meant that the maintenance personnel would have to completely remove the old cables in order to fit the new ones the maintenance work was supposed to take about half a month to complete but the workers ran into some complications because when they started to try to replace the aileron cables they found the instructions quite hard to read they found them very very confusing and there was a lack of graphic material to show exactly how the cables were supposed to be connected so the work took a little bit longer than expected and once they had completed the work they had to test it this is something that you obviously have to do after any type of heavy maintenance to make sure that you haven't done something wrong but when they power the aircraft up they received an a cast message that said flight controls no dispatch this is obviously an omnius sign when you've been working with the flight controls and you get this so the engineers and the mechanics now started to troubleshoot this issue and they did several systems tests both of the flight control modules which is part of the computer system of the embraer and also the actual physical connections but even though they did all of these tests it seems like no one actually checked what the ailerons were doing when the yoke was moved in the cockpit before we continue it's really important that you guys understand how an aircraft moves along its roll axis there are basically two different systems that controls this you have the ailerons which are the rudders that are situated on the you know outermost part of the wing they tend to move upwards on the part of the wing that is going down and downwards on the other so that forces the aircraft to roll but there's another system as well and that's the flight spoilers so the way that flight spoilers works is that when you tell the aircraft to turn one wing down well then these spoilers will come up on that wing we'll actually as the name suggests spoil the lift on that wing which will make the aircraft roll and these two systems they work together to achieve the same thing where one will mark a little bit more in lower speed and another one will work a little bit more in the higher speed regime something that's going to become really important in this story is the fact that the embraer 190 is kind of like a hybrid aircraft in that some of the flight controls are fly by wire which means that the pilot does something in the cockpit and that's then changed into electronic signals that goes out to an activation unit by that rudder the flight spoilers are fly-by-wire but it's also conventional kind of wires connected to the flight controls in the case of the aileron so you have two systems that's working together here as the maintenance dragged on the pressure on the maintenance organization to get the job done became bigger and bigger so they started reaching out to embraer to get some help on this flight control no dispatch issue and eventually by switching out some flight control modules in the kind of guidance computer they managed to clear the message okay the message did not come back so that meant that the aircraft was now ready to be given back to the customer so that they could fly it back to their home base on the 11th of october 2018 the pilots who were supposed to fly aristotle flight 1388 reported to the airfield the flight was expected to go from portugal to minsk in belarus initially for a refueling stop and then proceed towards alamati and kazakhstan now the crew that had been scheduled to do this flight was a normal flight crew and i say that because generally speaking after heavy maintenance most airlines tends to have pilots that are specifically trained to do acceptance flights but aristotle didn't do it that way it was just a normal flight crew that consisted of three pilots the captain was 40 years old and had 6009 hours of total time and together with him was a first officer who was 32 years old and had 2 692 hours of total time the third pilot in the cockpit was actually a slightly more experienced first officer he was 26 years old and had 3 3514 hours and the role of this third pilot is actually going to become really important as this proceeds onboard the flight there was also three passengers and all three of them worked for arastona mainly in maintenance roles when the pilots and the passengers arrived at the aircrafts the weather outside was really bad right it was visibility varying between 2000 meters and 3000 meters in heavy rain it was low clouds and that's pretty important because when we do acceptance flights after heavy maintenance especially if there's been maintenance done on the flight controls you want to have fairly good weather the reason for that is that you want to be able to in case something goes wrong to stay in visual metrological conditions so that you can easily do a visual return back to the airport of departure but this was definitely not the case on this day the crew now started to do their pre-flight setup and they almost immediately recognized that there was one problem with the ventilation to one of the avionics bays and one of the hydraulic systems was also at a fairly low quantity level so they called the engineering team back and they said we're not going to accept the aircraft like this got off the aircrafts the maintenance team sorted these things out and two hours later the aircraft was finally ready for departure when the crew came back for the second time they started again to set the aircraft up now this time they received no warnings and they started the aircraft up and started taxing out for departure runway city four during the taxi out the crew did their pre-flight checks and that includes a check of the rudder surfaces on the embraer 190 the way that you check your flight controls is that as you're moving the yoke around you're also supposed to verify that the rudder surfaces are moving correctly on a screen there seem to have been something missed here because if the pilots would have looked down on the screen they would have seen a really really strange indication and that would have been as they moved the aileron to turn left what they should have seen was the aileron coming up on the left hand side but in this case it actually went down and it came up on the right hand side however the flight spoilers were moving the way they should at time 1330 aristona flight 1338 took off runway 04 in alberta and the first 30 seconds seems to be fairly normal but after that as the pilot flying which was the captain in this case tried to engage the autopilot the other pilot would not engage and he started noticing as he was flying the aircraft manually that he had almost no control over the aircraft and you can imagine why because as he was trying to turn the aircraft for example to the left you would have had the aircraft wanting to turn to the right using the ailerons and to the left using the flight spoilers this renders the aircraft completely unflyable and within a minute they called the first may they called into alverika tower and that coincided with the first real upset of the flight and it was going to be many many more to come what is about to happen to this flight crew and these passengers are among the most terrifying things that i've ever read from a flight data recorder as they're now trying to control the aircraft and they're calling to air traffic control with the mayday call the aircraft goes from plus 20 000 feet per minute to minus 16 000 feet per minute with g loads of plus four and a half g's to minus half a g these are immense forces that are being put on the airframe and the aircraft is turning over completely inverted and i can just try to imagine the feeling of the pilots who's trying to deal with an upset the way that they have been taught and learned in the simulator and from when they started flying now the flight controls are doing the complete opposite and sometimes completely inexplicable things and on top of that they don't get any fault indication they don't get any warnings except for the ground proximity warning system and the bank angle warnings and everything else screaming at them but there's nothing from what they can see on their instrumentation that explains to them why this is happening they're gonna have to try to figure that out by themselves there are air traffic control recordings that are being saved from this flight and once again i'm going to link to vast aviation's great video on this in the description of the video but it's really heart-wrenching to hear because the first few calls that you can hear from them the crew is just asking to please get radar vectors out towards the sea so that they can ditch the aircraft and try to increase their own chances of survival but most of all to try to avoid third-party casualties on the ground or and every time air traffic control give them a vector you can see on the radar screen how the aircraft is turned in the completely wrong way it's not doing at all what they wanted to do this situation where the aircraft went through these cycles of extreme climbs and descends and rolls and g loadings continued for more than one hour i get sick just by looking at the graph of what these guys went through and i just cannot imagine how the feeling would have been in the cockpit as this was happening but one thing that i really want to emphasize here and that really impressed me was that these guys never stopped troubleshooting okay they they never gave up they continued to try to figure out how to a control the aircraft aviate right get the aircraft under control because in between these extremes they actually managed to level the aircraft off which meant that they could kind of by trial and error figure out what to do to keep the aircraft more or less level and not only that they were also working and communicating really well between each other because remember how i said that the third pilot the guy that was sitting on the jump seat was going to be really important for the outcome well throughout these extreme maneuvers he keeps giving advice technical advice and shows really good technical knowledge of the aircraft to the captain and he also works as a relay between the cockpit and the passengers sitting in the back so to try to figure out why the aircraft is doing this and after a little while they start to realize that hmm this seems to be the ailerons that are the problem and they start this troubleshooting really early during the flight only about a minute after the first indication of the flight control problems we can see from the flight data recorder that the crew switches from normal law to direct law and what that means in the embraer is that in normal mode the input from the pilot goes through a flight control computer flight control module and it feels the configuration of the aircraft the speed of the aircraft and it modulates the outputs to the actual flight control surfaces but if you go to direct law then the input from the flight controls is directly translated through the flight control surfaces and the benefits here seems to have been that in direct law when the pilots put aileron input in there seems to have been a little bit of a dead band where only the ailerons were activated not the flight spoilers and even though the ailerons were now moving the opposite way it was still far far better that only the ailerons were moving than having opposite activation of ailerons and flight spoilers because with that the aircraft cannot be controlled so indirect law the crew eventually figured out that if they do teeny tiny inputs on aileron then yeah if you turn right the aircraft is going to kind of bank to the left but at least it does that continuously but if you put a little bit too much all of a sudden you lose control of the aircraft so they managed to figure this out after about an hour and 15 minutes and when they figured this out they were also intercepted by two f-16 fighters from the portuguese air force and that came with some additional problems for the crew i'll tell you all about what happened with that and how this terrifying flight concluded after this message from my new sponsor i am so happy to have manscaped as the sponsor of this video manscaped is a really high quality provider of grooming products for men and they've just released their latest trimmer the lawnmower 4.0 now the lawnmower is a really high precision grooming device i use it for example when i trim my beard but because it has some really sharp ceramic blades and skin safe technology you can also use it to trim other places the lawnmower is waterproof which means you can use it in the shower or you can just rinse it in water and it has this really cool led light which lights up the area that you're trimming and i find that really helpful if you go for the performance 4.0 package you'll also get the weed whacker nose and ear trimmer and some ball toner and ball deodorant for those special places if you think that sounds awesome or i should get that for my partner well then use the link here in the description below and the code mentor for a whopping 20 off the original price your balls will thank you after one hour and 15 minutes the crew have now started to get their aircraft under some sort of control they've also realized that if they keep the flaps at one that gives about seven degrees of trailing edge flaps and 15 degrees of slats it actually gives them a little bit more maneuver morgan now it is a bit risky to have the flaps extended when you know that the aircraft is going to be subjected to these type of g-loadings but it is obviously much more preferable to have the aircraft under control and potentially damage it than it is to lose control completely they are now maneuvering and trying to follow air traffic controls radar vectors that are vectoring down towards the south because down in the south in portugal on this day the weather was significantly better remember they departed into some really poor weather and that definitely didn't help them when they were trying to sort things out now as they're getting into more clear weather it's becoming much easier but at the same time the portuguese air defense have sent up two f-16 fighters to try to intercept the crew and help them to navigate the problem though is that as these two f-16s are approaching the aircraft they forget to turn off their tcas which means that the crew is now sitting there with full-on t-cap warnings as well so you can hear on the air traffic control recording how they're telling them to please turn off the tcas from this point onwards it's less about the crew wanting to ditch the aircraft and more about actually finding a suitable alternate to try to land the aircraft at initially they're thinking about diverting towards faro which is down south in portico where the weather is better but then air traffic control suggested them to go to a air defense base called becca and that's much closer so the crew starts to descend with the help of the fighter jet down towards becca and they decide that they're gonna try to fly a visual approach into runway one nine right which is the main runway in baja said and done the captain now starts aiming towards the runway you can see from the flight readouts how they're never really stabilized they're constantly moving left to right on the centerline and as they get closer it becomes really apparent that he is not going to be able to stabilize the pro so he's now going to have to go around with this slight control condition after that first go-around the first officer is so physically exhausted from the ordeal that they've just gone through that he just cannot continue so the captain who must be some kind of superman exchanges the uh the first officer for the first officer that was sitting on the jump seat so he now jumps in and they go in for a second visual approach the same thing happens they destabilize at the late part of the approach and they have to go around for a second time on the third approach the crew is still not able to get the aircraft in on the center line for runway one nine right but this time when the aircraft starts to drift towards the left the captain just realizes that they have runway one nine left there which is slightly narrower but he thinks that he will be able to get the aircraft down on that runway so he points at it and at time 1527 almost two hours after their initial takeoff the aircraft lands safely on runway one nine left in becca as soon as the aircraft comes to complete stop default message flight controlled no dispatch comes up on their acas display through the use of skills grit and great communication this crew has managed to get this aircraft down in one piece in baja which i think is a fantastic feat there's only one injury one of the passengers sprayed his ankle slightly and all of them are feeling queasy and completely exhausted of the experience but apart from that they're all fine the aircraft on the other hand is not okay when the maintenance team start looking at the aircraft they realize that pretty much all flight control surfaces and flaps and even the wings have been subjected to forces well outside of their design limits there are signs of wrinkling on the skin on the main body as well and when they're true examining it it's basically only the first third of the aircraft that is without damages and the aircraft is a complete write-off it has to be scrapped so why did this happen then well the air accident investigation team that was put on the case after they realized that the aircraft was severely damaged started looking into how the maintenance had been done and very quickly they found some serious deficiencies in how the portuguese maintenance organization had been working they found some deficiencies on an organizational scale where there wasn't enough just culture where people didn't really feel the the security to report problems upstairs and also there was just some general deficiencies in how the work has been done and how worked orders have been signed off on top of that they found that embraer needed to rewrite some of their maintenance manuals to make it more obvious how to actually connect the aileron cable so that they weren't crossed which is what happened here and also aristana needed to work out some kind of a acceptance program where pilots who were supposed to accept aircraft after heavy maintenance had special training and that there were weather limits in force also the pilots were partly blamed because they didn't properly check the flight controls before they took off if they would have they would have been able to stop this from happening but it was also clearly written in the final report what a fantastic job they had done once they got an airborne and how well they had communicated and worked together which is a really really good point to end with now check out this video about another instance where the flight controls didn't work the way they were designed but for a completely different reason and remember the acronym class

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,269,041

Keywords: air crash investigation, air crash investigation 2021, air crash investigation full episodes, air crash investigation 2020, air crashes, aviation accident investigations, aviation accidents explained, aviation accidents and incidents, air astana flight 1388, air astana embraer 190 portugal, air astana portugal emergency, Loss of control inflight, LOC I, Fear of flying, Pilot life, Hero Pilots, Nervous flyer, nervous flyer help, mentour pilot crash, Aviation youtuber

Id: 5ywaMkMTwWk

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021