The Controls DONT WORK!! Airbus Computer Nightmare

becoming a pilot is for many people a lifelong dream to be able to touch the clouds and feel that awesome raw power of the engin searching through you on a daily basis is something that they just have to achieve but what happens when the Pinnacle the crowning of your pilot training turns into an absolute nightmare stay tuned on the 28th of February 2018 a group of eager typ rating students are getting ready for one of the biggest highlights of their career so far as they met out outside talin airport in Estonia they had just completed a grueling two month of theoretical and practical simulator training on the Airbus A320 and it was now time for them to finally fly the real aircraft you see in order to become a commercial pilot and fly with passengers in Europe a pilot student must first go through initial training this includes flying in smaller single engine aircraft up until they complete a skill test for the commercial pilot license and that normally takes around 200 hours of flight time plus loads of theoretical exams now once that's gone the student also needs to get certified to fly multi-engine aircraft in instrumental conditions and once those skills have also been verified it's time for something known as a multic crew coordination or MCC course in the MCC course this students will be instructed in the skills of flying in a multi-pilot cockpit which is radically different than flying by yourself but even after that course is done the training journey is still far from over the last step is to do what's known as a typ rating which is where the students learn the specific technical knowledge handling characteristics and procedures of the aircraft type that they will actually fly in their new company it's by the way in this part of the training that they would get into contact with me as I'm a typewriting instructor and examiner and me and my colleagues will then prepare the students for the job that they will be expected to master in their coming careers the type rating training is started by a technical course followed by procedure instruction in a fixed space meaning a non-moving simulator and then the handling and emergency training is completed in a Level D full flight simulator which acts extremely similar to the real aircraft but once the typ rating skill test is completed there's still one more step that needs to be done and this is known as a base check or base training so what is that then well before the first flight with passengers every typew rating student needs to have done at least six approved Landings and takeoffs in the real aircraft with a typ rating examiner so this is what this group of four students were now about to do the crowning of their typew rating and the first real step in their professional pilot career they've agreeded at the tal airport by the 63-year-old typewriting instructor and examiner who was going to conduct a training with them and together with him they walked into the crew room to start planning for the flights inside of the crew room there were already two more people waiting for them a 34-year-old first officer who was going to act as safety pilot in case something would happen to the captain and a CAA representative who was going to follow along to observe the training process the instructor captain in charge was a very EXP experienced pilot with over 24,000 hours of Total time and 13,500 flown on the Airbus A320 the safety pilot who was going to support him had around 3,000 hours in total which was enough for the role that he was being scheduled for now as for the students well they were completely new with only around 220 hours of Total experience now I know that a lot of my American colleagues out there would be shocked when they hear this but in Europe it is quite common for low hour Cadet that to go straight from their flight schools into the right seat of an airliner say we don't have the, 1500 hour requirement over here now obviously this base check is not the end of the training for these students it will just enable them to continue their line training with qualified training captains but after a successful base check the type rating will be added to their license and they're officially allowed to operate with passengers on board anyway the instructor started the preparation with going through the weather for the day making sure sure that it was good enough for the exercises he was planning a base check is a series of touch and go Landings meaning that the aircraft would be flying circuits around the airport and The Landings tend to be done with different flap settings to make sure that the students understand the different handling characteristics in the case of smart links the minimum requirement for each student was five touch and goals followed by one go around and then one full stop Landing before it was time to switch over to the next student the weather was okay with some scattered clouds at 1,100 ft good visibility and a wind of 070° 9 gting 15 knots and a temperature of -13° C so it was a bit crispy the runway in Talon is oriented in an almost straight East Westerly Direction so the wind was acceptable as it would only cause a few knots of crosswind the aircraft that they were going to use was one of smart links's regular Airbus a322 200 which had been taken out of production on this day to enable the base check to take place it was 18 years old and in full working condition at least as far as the crew could see from its technical log book now the fact that this aircraft had to be taken out of service to facilitate this training obviously came with some quite significant cost to the airline and on top of that the weather had to be good enough and the schedule had to fit the instructor so once this check was underway it is likely that the instructor felt a little bit of pressure to make sure that this was fully completed anyway once the weather briefing was completed the instructor proceeded with briefing the students about the patterns that they were going to fly I will not go through the whole circuit profile here but what is going to be really important for this story are the actions that the pilots have to do from Final Approach and once the aircraft is on the runway since a touch and go landing is very different from a normal Landing according to the air boss flight crew training manual the procedure looks like this once the aircraft is turning final The Landing flaps must be selected and the captain would run through the landing checklist he would then remind the students to not apply brakes and reverses as doing that would lead to a Full Stop Landing the aircraft would then need to be fully stabilized from at least 500 ft above the runway and then flown to a hopefully successful nice landing once the aircraft touches down the trainee would make sure to nicely land the nose wheel and the captain would then disarm the spoilers and call stand them up the Trane would then move the trust levels up to about mid position to avoid the engine spooling down whilst concentrating on also tracking the center line meanwhile the captain would select flaps two reset the rodder trim if needed check forward movement of the stabilizer pitch trim and then call go when that order is given the trainee would move move the trust levels into the toga Dent then what that's done the captain would verify it and call Trust set and then rotate once the speed accelerates past the approach speed bug this will then be followed by a normal rotation and once Airborne the gear will be retracted and after this the aircraft would be climbed to between 1500 and 2,000 ft for the next touch and goal now as you can see this is a hugely intensive exercise but it's also close to about as much fun as you can have in a commercial airliner and I still get goosebumps just thinking about my own base check in my case back in the day we actually used to not have to do the full full stop so we changed over whilst the aircraft was still airborne and on downwind now I still remember that cockpit door opening up me being called in strapping into the seat and then looking out over my right shoulder and for the first time seeing that massive Wing instead of a black simulator wall absolutely fantastic but absolutely fantastic is pretty far from what these students are about to experience and I will tell you all about it after this now base training might well be fantastic and so is making these videos but they require an enormous amount of work to complete in order to get to the level of detail as I do here in my videos I have to sift through not only the final reports but also newspaper articles and sometimes even blog posts during the production of one of my upcoming videos I won't tell you which one yet I came across a roadblock when the final report was Geo blocked and not available for my location and that's when I turn to the sponsor of this episode nordvpn you see Nord is an invaluable tool for breaking through digital borders and seamlessly connect to service worldwide at an impressive speed but they're not just about gaining access they've also developed Advanced cyber security tools to help you keep safe from hackers malware and pishing attempts so whether you're like me researching or aiming for secure and Anonymous web surfing or just want to access your favorite content away from home nordvpn has your back so if this sounds promising use the link here in the description below which is nordvpn.com pilot to get four free months when you sign up for the 2-year plan and if you're not happy you have a full 30-day money back guarantee thank you Nord now let's see what happens here now what's about to happen in this story is among the most technically complicated things that I've ever attempted to explain so you're going to have to bear with me through a couple of system descriptions but before we reach that remember what I just told you about what the trainee and the instructor had to do during the circuit well that description was taken from the Airbus Flight Training manual but smart links had not included that exact profile in their own flight crew training techniques manual specifically there was no mentioning about arming or disarming the spoilers in the company specific version and that will soon have some wild consequences once the briefing was complete all seven crew members walked together out to the aircraft now this was the first time that the typew rting students had a chance to see and touch the actual aircraft in real life and the instructor started by doing a full walk around with all of the students to highlight important things that would be hard to have time to expl plane during The Hectic line training that would soon follow meanwhile the safety pilot went into the cockpit and started setting it up to a limited extent so that when the captain arrived with the first trainee they would have saved some time once the exterior inspection was finally completed everyone boarded the aircraft and the first trainee sat down in the right seat with the instructor Captain to the left the safety pilot was seated in the left jump seat behind the captain and the CAA representative in the right the pre-light procedures were completed according to standard operating procedures and at time 10:02 the trainee first officers asked talin ground for startup clearance and a few minutes later they started taxing out for takeoff once the before takeoff checklist was completed the captain lined the aircraft up and Runway 08 and gave some final instructions to the first officer for the first takeoff once that was completed the first officer took over the controls moved the trust levels forward into the toga dent and that caused the almost empty aircraft to quickly start accelerating down the runway they took off normally retracted the gear and climbed up to about 1500 ft before turning right for the first circuit everything was working normally at this point and the captain concentrated on following the procedures whil also instructing the first officer on what to think about during the first landing like I mentioned before this was the first time that the traine would have ever been in control of such a large aircraft outside of the simulator and in those situations it's easy to get slightly emotional which can obviously affect the outcome anyway before we continue any further there are a few things that you need to understand about the Airbus A320 for this story to make any kind of sense let's first start with the fact that this is a fully flyby wire aircraft meaning that all flight control inputs the pilots are making will be routed through several computers before the commands are translated into actual movements of the flight control surfaces now this is is generally an excellent system which both saves a lot of weight and it also adds significant safety features to the aircraft and that is because the computers will not allow the pilots to exceed certain limit values or overstress the airframe under normal circumstances but as anyone who's ever owned the computer knows they sometimes fail and in order for a simple or even double computer failure to not affect the safety of the aircraft robust redundancies have also been buil into the system I'll give you one example when the pilot wants to move the aircraft nose up or down around the pitch axis the aircraft uses the trimmable horizontal stabilizer and the elevators in the aircraft tail to achieve this if the pilot moves the pitch trim or the side stick to tell the aircraft to pitch these signals are then in Flight sent to a computer known as the elevator Aeron control or elac 2 which will then send the signals onward to one of the three electrical trim Motors and two of the hydraulic motors controlling the stabilizer jack screw and elevators all of the flight control computers have both a command Channel which is executing the Pilot's command and a monitoring Channel which is monitoring the outputs to make sure that everything is working correctly now if a failure of any sort would affect the elac 2 computer the the system will automatically shift controls over to EAC one which will do the same job like the previous computer but using different electrical motors to do it making sure that everything still works but the redundancy doesn't stop there if AAC one would also become faulty the commands are then shifted over to another computer known as the spoiler elevator computer or sec2 and if that one would also get busted it finally shifts over to sec1 for the pilots in the cockpit the only thing that they would notice if flight control computers would shift over is a small jerk in the controls but if multiple computers would start failing at the same time something known as a degradation in control laws might also happen if for example both AAC would fail simultaneously the system would go from normal law over to something known as alternate law and if further failures would then continue the system would finally degrade into direct law so what does that mean then well in normal law the Airbus avails of all of its pre-programmed protections that I mentioned before the pilots can control the aircraft with their side sticks and the flight control surfaces will position the aircraft proportionally to the stick inputs irrespectively of speed if the system will then regress back to alternate law certain protections will be lost like the max roll protections for example but the aircraft will still behave largely in the same way as in normal law but if the aircraft would go into direct law the AO trim function will be lost meaning that the pilots would need to trim the aircraft just like we do when the Boeing and on top of that the flight controls will start to move exactly like the pilots indicate without any protections now if the aircraft would degrade into a lower law it will always let the pilots know about it through a single chime in the cockpits together with a master caution light and ecam messages on their screens explaining the problem and what the pilot needs to do but these cautions were programmed to only activate above 1,500 ft to avoid distracting the pilots at lower altitudes and that's worth keeping in mind I know I've mentioned these laws in many of my previous videos but in this case we will soon get to see a part of this system which very few of you have ever heard about and it's quite terrifying but I'll get to that later what's also worth knowing about the system is that it will transition between something known as inlight mode flare mode and ground mode during a normal landing and it will start transitioning to ground mode about 5 seconds after the aircraft senses touchdown once the ground mode is activated the outter trim system will start moving the trimmable horizontal stabilizer to 0° in order to prepare for the next flight and this is something that we don't wanted to do when we were practicing touch and goal Landings it's super important that the trim is set at more or less the correct value when we rotate for the next takeoff and in order to make sure that that was the case the captain was planning to grab the trim wheel with his hand as it was being moved forward by doing so he would activate an override mechanism in connection with the trim wheel which would stop the resetting and leave the trim set correctly for the coming rotation and this will also become important so the aircraft was now entering downwind for the first touch and goal the captain completed the after take of check checklist activated the coming approach in the FMC and completed the approach checklist all whilst the traine was handling the aircraft manually the captain then turned off the flight directors and activated an indicator known as the flight path Vector to help give the students some guidance and then briefed him about the landing that was coming up once the aircraft passed the touchdown point they started timing for 3 seconds for every 100 ft they were about the ground meaning about 54 seconds from 8 00 ft minus 1 second for each knots of Tailwind since this was a touch and goal maneuver the aircraft had been left in flaps one configuration so once the timing was out flaps 2 was then selected together with gear down and eventually flaps 3 as the aircraft started sending now here the Airbus manual also stipulated that the spoilers should be armed for landing but like I mentioned earlier this was not in the smart links manual so the captain decided to keep the spoilers down since they would only need to be lowered immediately off Landing anyway now this might seem like a logical thing to do but the spoilers actually play an important role in all Landings and that is to spoil the lift from the wings on touchdown to keep the aircraft from bouncing and in normal conditions also to bring more weight onto the brakes anyway the aircraft continued towards the final and as the trainee was making the final turn the captain selected full flaps completed a landing checklist and reminded the trainee to not select brakes or reverses of the landing the first officer replied that he had understood this and then they just continued descending the first landing was nicely executed and once the north wheel was safely down the captain continued according to plan by calling stand them up moving the flaps to two and then grabbing onto the trim wheel as it was approaching one unit Noth up and completely unbounce to the pilots now something really strange happened as the captain grabbed the tri trim wheel the override mechanism started moving to stop the trimming but the Piston That was supposed to activate the associated micro switches was not moving as quickly as it should this sent unreliable signals to the flight control computer AAC 2 that was currently in charge triggering a switch over to the backup computer but since the backup AAC one also received the same signals this computer now also failed and that sent the system down another notch activating SC c 2 and Alternate law now the pilots had no idea that this was happening at this point since the caution would only appear later as they passed 1500 ft climbing anyway the trainee pushed the trust level into the toga detent again and soon the aircraft had accelerated past the approach bug and the captain called rotate the rest of the maneuver continued just like the first takeoff and when the trainee leveled at about 1500 ft the master caution warning went off together with a single ch time and the information about the failure popped up on the ecam displays that information shown said elac one and two pitch fa and informed the pilots that they were operating in alternate law the captain took up the quick reference handbook and read through the procedures which simply instructed a computer reset of each of the elac computers something that was relatively easy and quick to do so once this was done the aircraft functioned just like normal again so the captain decided just to continue with the exercises the second touch and go landing went out without any issues and warnings but after the third Landing once the aircraft was back up at circuit altitude the same warnings appeared again now after the captain had again reset the computers he tried looking for any guidance or limitations to the number of resets that were allowed but couldn't find any in the Airbus manuals if this would have been a normal line flight he would have likely asked engineering for guidance but since there was no specific guidance in the minimum equipment list the aircraft was working perfectly fine and this was not the revenue flight he instead again decided to continue the rest of the training session with the first trainee was completely uneventful and after the last Landing they did a full stop and tax It Off The Runway to change over to the next student the second traine then climbed into the right seat and the exercise had started all over again for the second student there were less issues only once did the elok one failure occur and since this was only a singular failure there was no lower aversion and no cautions just an ecam message letting the crew know that it had happened the captain reset the system a third time and then just continued so what was actually going on here well it was later noticed that the reason that the override piston inside of the trim mechanism wasn't moving correctly was because of presence of a non-approved oil inside of the C lender this oil had a viscosity almost twice as high as the correct oil would had which impeded the Piston from correctly activating the micro switches but remember the only time that this piston should have had to be used in normal circumstances would be during a runaway stabilizer event where the pilots would need to stop the incorrect movement of the stab trim manually and since that was such a rare event and it really really is this system was hardly ever used nor was it tested during routine maintenance checks so we will actually really never know when this faulty oil was introduced to the system or by whom now had it only been for this small system issue this would not have become such a serious incident but soon some additional things were going to happen in such a bizarre way that I couldn't really believe it when I first read it when the second student had finished all of his Landings the third student to place in the cockpit and it is in his session that the first really important mistakes will occur that will ultimately lead to this accident the session started normally with a takeoff climb to 2,000 ft and then a right turn to start the exercises after the first landing the same problem reoccurred as the captain was setting the stabilizer trim meaning that once again the elac one failure appeared downwind the captain reset the computers as he was getting quite used to doing at this point but since these failures Contin Contin to pop up at altitude he never really connected them with his use of the stabilizer trim override mechanism which only happened on the ground anyway the second Landing went very well without any failures but on the third Landing again it appeared but this time it was also associated with a single chime for some reason the investigators were never able to find out why this chime activated since it was still only a single AAC failure but in any case the computer was again reset and the exercises continued after the fourth Landing the same airac one failure appeared this time without that single chime that had happened before but curiously this time the computer was never reset it is highly likely that whoever started working on the ecam message this time accidentally pressed the clear key instead of doing the reset and since this was not the critical fault the message would then be hidden until someone pressed the recall button for at least three seconds something that would normally only happen according to standard operating procedures as part of a full pre-flight for the next full flight this meant that the aircraft now continued to fly in normal LA but with one ack already in operative and without that being shown to the pilots during the fourth Landing AAC 2 again became inoperative and since AAC 1 was already down this meant that the control dropped down to the SEC computers and the aircraft went into alternate law again that triggered the master caution the chime and the ecam but this time the failure of elac one stayed hidden so that when the captain reset aak 2 the aircraft reverted to normal law but with aak one still inoperative the third student finished his session successfully and it was now time for the fourth and last student and as everyone has probably already figured out by now this is where the accident will finally happen the fourth traine took over the controls and got ready for his first takeoff completely unaware that one of the flight control computers was now already in operative the students had all been sitting in the passenger seats in the cabin during the sessions of the others so none of them had seen These Warnings before at 1425 UT see the trust levels were again moved into the toga dent and the aircraft started rolling down the runway the first circuit went fine but during the second touch and goal the elac 2 failure were again triggered for for the same reason as before when they reach circuit altitude the warning went off and the captain reset the computer but again without resetting elac one now remember how I said before that I would reveal a new function connected with the Airbus control loss well it turns out that direct law is not actually the lowest law available in case of some truly catastrophic conditions like the loss of five flight control computers after a complete power failure for example the aircraft could revert into something known as mechanical backup in mechanical backup the aircraft can still be controlled in Pitch but only through the use of stabilizer trim and Trust lever movements and if it would also be activated in Roll by the use of rouer pedals in this condition the elevators will be moved into a neutral position and the pilot side stick becomes completely useless if this would happen there would be a more serious cricked warning going going off together with a master warning and ecam mes but nothing would actually state mechanical backup instead a man pitch trim only message will appear on the primary flight displays in front of the pilots as well as a man pitch trim on the ecam screens this would obviously be a very bad situation to be in and the possibility of this happening had been deemed so remote that Pilots only had to practice it whilst in the cruise in the simulator after a complete loss of generators and never with any maneuvering needed and definitely not any takeoff and landings so with that in mind let's now go into the fourth touch and goal for the last traine as the aircraft entered the Final Approach everything looked completely normal but during the last few tens of feet before landing The Descent rate went up just a little bit higher than on the previous approaches this meant that as the aircraft touched down it did so a little bit harder than before and since the captain had deactivated in the spoilers this led to a slight bounce that lasted just over 1 second starting at 1504 and 55 seconds now remember how I said that the flight control computers were divided into a commanding and monitoring Channel well it turns out that the internal clocks in those two channels weren't completely in sync with each other and that was by design by airboss but the insane problem that now occurred was that since the bounce lasted for just about 1 second and the input signals that the weight and wheel switches on the main landing gear sents to the SEC computers updated every 1.02 seconds this meant that the command Channel now still felt that the aircraft was airborne and the monitoring Channel sensed that it was on the ground this would have been completely impossible if the bounce was any longer or any shorter but now it meant that one computer channel was measuring Sid stick inputs as if the aircra was in the air and the other expected them to be on the ground mode where the inputs were much smaller and since both SEC computers were fed the same information both of them noticed the discrepancy and simply shut down this meant that the scene was now set for the accident but it was still not set in stone for that to happen it required the captain to again stop the stabilizer trim manually for the intermittent piston fall to again appear and deactivate aak 2 which was now the only remaining flight control computer and of course this is exactly what happened that time 1505 and 10 seconds at that time the captain had already given the order to the first officer to go which meant that the toga trust had now been set and they were therefore completely committed to the takeoff as elac 2 shut down the warning crickets and lights came on just as the captain called rotate and because all flight control computers had now stopped working the aircraft had gone into mechanical backup in Pitch what this meant was that the poor trainee now tried to pull back on his side stick to rotate the aircraft but this made no difference at all since the elevators was moving to neutral making the side stick completely useless in Pitch the stabilizer which had been moving towards zero had at this point a slight positive angle of 3.5 de but with a speed of 130 knots this was still not enough to get the aircraft Airborne the captain saw that the speed was increasing and nothing was happening but he had obviously not yet understood what was happening to his aircraft he called out rotate rotate to which the trainee desperately responded that he was the aircraft continued to accelerate to 152 knots and when the horizontal stabilizer finally stopped moving it had a nose up angle of 1. 5° which was just enough to get the aircraft Airborne they now slowly started climbing with the first officer Sid stick in the almost full off position but making no difference whatsoever 2 seconds into the flight the captain started moving his own side stick which triggered a dual input warning and he then pushed the priority button and called out I have controls remember this was still only a few seconds into this event and by taking over the controls the captain was responding correctly but now he was faced with a situation that he had never seen before nor had he been trained for his aircraft which had up until this point worked almost perfectly was now completely impossible to control using normal means and he just couldn't figure out why like I said the decision to reject or continue that aov had already been taken when the fault appeared and they were now Airborne it is likely that this sudden increase in workload and stress was what caused the Captain to now take a few rapid bad decisions which would make this situation truly catastrophic because about 4 seconds after he had taken control the trust levers were momentarily moved back to the idle position before being pushed back up again and as that was happening the flaps were also moved from position two to one possibly in a futle attempt to try to affect the pitch but when that happened the aircraft was at 19 ft slightly climbing with a pitch of 2.8 de no up but this sudden decrease in trust and flaps meant that the aircraft now started reducing the pitch and after it had reached a maximum altitude of 48 ft it now started descending at the same time as the captain asked for gear up the trainee first officer responded obviously completely overwhelmed by the situation so he simply did what he was told and selected the gear level up causing the gear to start transitioning about 4 seconds later the aircraft impacted the ground about 200 M away from the runway end with the gear still partially extended it touched down with 2.85 G which is a pretty hard impact and this combined with the partially retracted gear caused both of the engine Nels to slam into the asphalt but since the nose gear was still out at this point the impact caused a bounce movement of the nose that pushed it back up into the air the Eng were both now back in toga producing full trust and since the speed had been around 190 knots when the impact occurred this forced the airline and back into the air with a terrifying climb rate of around 6,000 ft per minute now things started to look really really bad neither the captain nor the first officer had at this point managed to figure out what was going on and none of them had seen the manual pitch trim only message on their primary flight displays the aircraft was now pitching up with 19° with a speed of 207 knots when suddenly the flaps also locked up on top of that the impact of the number two engine had ruptured internal components and the Sparks created from the impact had started an engine fire which triggered all of the associated warnings inside of the cockpit this was clearly heading towards a disaster but thankfully now the safety pilot was sitting behind the captain started speaking up he called out manual pitch trim only manual pitch trim only and that got the captain back into the loop and he now started moving the trim wheel forward he also brought the trust levers back and the combined effect of both of those actions meant that the pitch now finally started decreasing and getting back under some type of relative control but obviously this was far from over at time 1505 and 53 seconds less than a minute into this emergency the aircraft reached its highest altitude of 1, 1590 ft from then on it started pitching down again and it was soon in a 7,200 ft per minute descent the captain moved the trust to toga again was moving the trim wheel in the opposite direction and remember flying an aircraft with trim only is not easy as there's always a delay to the effect and this was not something that they had been trained for doing the aircraft's ground proximity warning system was now calling out syn rate pull up terrain terrain too low terrain and on top of that all of the cricket warnings and lights associated with the Blazing engine fire was still sounding this was an absolutely crazy situation and to think that the captain was now sharing the cockpit with a poor brand new Cadet during his first ever flight in the aircraft makes this absolutely heartbreaking the lowest point that the aircraft reached during this massive dive was around 600 ft before the captain again regained control and got the aircraft climbing back up to about 12200 ft the status of his aircraft at this point was that both engines were severely damaged with engine two still on fire pitch control was in mechanical backup and roll in direct law and on top of that the flaps were locked in position not a great day the captain tried to send out a Mayday call but failed to get it to transmit during the commotion but the safety pilot now started reading out the eam warnings and this seemed to have a calming effect on the crew often when faced with complete chaos it's a great idea to return back to basics and continue to follow familiar procedures and that's because the human mind is just not equipped to process this much information at once but it can allow to follow familiar tasks at time 1506 and 58 seconds 2 minutes into this emergency the captain again tried to send out an emergency call but now the safety pet instead asked to take over the communication letting the captain concentrate on just flying and after he had taken over he finally managed to transmit that first Mayday call into air traffic control he advised them that they had flight control fail and the captain told him to ask if they could make a right turn straight back to land on the opposite Runway Instead This was immediately approved by the Tower and the captain now started visually turning right to align with the final at the same time he also asked the student to change seat with a safety pilot and the student quickly debuck his seat belt stood up and together with the ca inspector moved back into the cabin and strapped in now it was up to the two remaining Pilots to try and get this stricken bird down on the ground in one piece the safety pilot started by pushing the master fire warning button which got rid of the visual warnings as well as the cricket this would have made the cockpit environment much more bearable and with that greatly reduced the stress the captain asked what the runway heading was for Runway 26 and the safety pilot responded 262° whilst he also set that up into the flight management computer he then continued by informing Air Traffic Control about the engine fire so that they could alert the fire brigade and he also told the controllers that they were definitely going to try and land on Runway 26 now came the time to try and deal with the problem so the safety pilot suggested to the captain that they should reduce power on the still burning engine number two but here the high experience of the captain really started to shine through because he now told the safety pilot that he would prefer to use the two engines he had for as long as possible and hopefully have them available for landing rather than shutting one of them down now not dealing with an engine fire would feel very counterintuitive for any pilot but the golden motto aviate navigate communicate always takes precedings and in this case the engines were not only needed in order to provide propulsion but also for pitch control so this decision makes complete sense at time 1509 the captain asked for gear down as he started his descent down towards the runway but only 19 seconds later engine number two finally gave up and failed as the fire had now completely destroyed several of its vital components the safety pilot informed the captain that engine number two has failed which the captain acknowledged was just continuing to aim for the runway as best as he could the loss of one of the engines would have made the pitch control even more difficult a few seconds later the captain confirmed gear is down and asked for flaps tree the safety pilot moved the flaps to tree but it's unclear from the report if the flaps actually started moving or not but what we do know is that 7 seconds after this engine number one the only remaining engine also failed due to the auxiliary gearbox ceasing up and this cut off all power to several of the aircraft systems including the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder in theory this loss of both engines should have also removed all power from the hydraulic motors moving the horizontal stabilizer which was now the only remaining means of pitch control but somehow this didn't happen it is possible that engine number two continued to Windmill and that but this was enough to maintain minimum hydraulic power the ram air turbine or rat deployed after a few seconds which meant that some systems came back and when they did the first officer stated gear is down we don't have engines and then he started reading out the air speed 150 130 120 and at time 15 10 and 12 seconds the aircraft finally touched down hard just about 150 M short to Runway 26 the touchdown was so hard that all main tires immediately burst but the aircraft still reached the runway in one piece where it started decelerating and then finally bearded off to the left where it came to a stop just a few meters to the side of the runway everyone was alive and a true Miracle had just happened the investigation quickly haed in on the fact that there were little guidance of available in the smart links training manual regarding the continuation of training with reoccurring faults and since there was no limitation from Airbus on the number of times that the computers could be reset there was no real reason for the captain to discontinue the training the fact that the captain decided to disarm the spoilers for each approach was what led to that small bounce that triggered the last couple of faults but again this was not specifically forbidden in the manual Airbus has after this incident introduced numerous software improvements and they have forbidden the reset of any elac computer in Flight the smart links manuals have also been updated to reflect much clearer guidance for base training and also for General dispatch and if you want to see all of the recommendations and safety improvements that came out of this accident then please visit Mentor pilot.com using the link that we have here below where you can always get the best Aviation newes as well as downloading my app consider supporting our work by sending a super thank using the dollar button here below May me buy some merch or join my fantastic patreon crew to help me create these videos have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,551,797

Keywords: true crime, storytelling, mentour pilot, aviation stories, trending, viral, mentour, full episode, estonia, accident, training, airbus, a320, smartlynx, pilot training, direct law, alternate law, mechanical law, students, elac 2, elac 1, trend, airbus logic, eetn, tallinn, touch and go, takeoff, landing, circuit, crime stories, mentour pilot crash, Airbus problems, Boeing 737 MAX, aircrash investigations

Id: 04M63B1sv_Y

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024