What's the power hierachy between ATC and a pilot? ATC were clearly of the view that the approach was too high and too fast so gave him a vector to do a loop and come in lower but the pilot said no I'm fine. Why did ATC back down and not say no go round a loop and refuse or rescind permission to land?
I just don't get it.
I'm assuming refusal to obey a clear ATC instruction is a sackable offence so they should exercise their power when they see something wrong.
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Clearance from ATC is not an obligation, while an order to maintain separation is. What level of instruction was given will be one of the matters to investigate when the CVR is found - but ATC has their own record which hopefully is already being examined.
ATs is a service provider. You work together as a team but it only works if you communicate.
The Captain has the ultimate authority to refuse any ATS clearance and ultimately force a direction of travel. And even if it means separation is compromised you still don't have to comply. YOu better have a good reason why you haven't complied but its not a problem if you do have a good reason.
This Captains veto is used extremely rarely and usually involves wx avoidance. Normally a "request heading xxx due weather" is granted and then ATC processes kick in to start limit the amount of traffic in an area to give them more 3D volume to work with and keep everyone separated.
ATS as sparweb says they ensures separation and economic safe flow and in certain areas terrain seperation. Everything apart from that is up to the pilots. Profile planning, distance etc etc. But some things you share responsibility at certain times but the ultimately its always the pilot in commands responsibility. Some countries it escalates more than others due local conditions. Eg China your extremely restricted to do anything away from your flight plan but even there issuing a "mayday" will get you what you want but you have to justify it afterwards which is no big deal to be honest. Going into Schiphol and it never gets that far and questions are asked about CB positions and fuel state and everything works well. Some ATC units are much more switched on than others. And like pilots some ATCO's are more switched on than others.
ATC can and do spot if your off the normal profile and will ask if everything is OK. Turbo prop drivers tend to get it more than Jets who all pretty much require the same profile and they set things up for that profile. It normally occurs when you have huge approach transitions onto final and they want to give you a sporty direct. Or the pilot screws up their decent planning. Again normally its is no big deal and they give you extra track miles and nothing more is said about it. Or with the TP if we can do it, we say we can do it and stick the RPM up and go for it. And there is sometimes some none standard RT given at the swap over to tower about eg I have just lost money on that approach working good effort. But then again if we need to reduce speed because things are tight you just say "reducing speed 210 knots until 8, 180 until 6 160 to 4" and I have never yet been given any poo about it. In fact its usually responded to by "Ok, heavy today, thanks for the info, break break emirates reduce speed 210knts call me reducing" "210knits, wilco emirates". These contracts and communications will happen hundreds of times per normal pre=virus day in Europe never mind world.
I heard nothing strange from the ATC side of things in this case.
Edstainless is correct that the profile is so far from a false glide profile and away from 6 deg that I really doubt it's that. My personal view is they flew the whole thing struggling to get the speed under control with the gear up when they thought it was down. Quite why they pushed a "weird approach" I have no clue apart from the human factors given already.
OK, so ATC is just "advisory" in these instances. Not sure I like the sound of that, but if that's how it works then so be it.
The gear down lever is just a fancy switch on the A320 apparently, but surely there are gear down and locked lights or are they out of normal viewing range? Maybe the vague reports about having trouble with the gear was that they couldn't work out why the gear wasn't coming down even thought the lever was.
Is this action to raise the gear lever then put it down again a "memory item" if you try it too fast and need to reset?
It's the taking off once you've scraped it on the runway ( three times!) that is also key. Maybe the result of this will be if you put it down without gear keep it down?? At the very least it's on the airfield so you're going to get fire trucks in what? 90 seconds?
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
It all centre's round having one and only one person responsible for the whole flight. And that's the Captain of the ship.
I don't know or have flown an Airbus even in the sim.
There are usually multiple different ways of seeing if the gear is down by lights in the cockpit. The pre FBW days we used to have lights which there was two bulbs in each socket. Then we had a back up panel which also used to have lights that was linked to a separate set of micro switches and on a different bus bar.
FBW we again have multiple sensors all feeding back into the landing gear and steering computers. Note the S there is more than 1. This then displays in all sorts of places and you never loose until the very last screen die's including all the radio controllers. And even if all the screens die which is something like 7th twig in the failure tree the alternative gear extension will still work off the direct battery bus. All of them its just a switch to a computer. in fact in this case if they had gone for the alternate it would have come down I suspect.
But fundamentally your bum and the aircraft performance knows if its come down or not. Single leg unsecure is a bit of a bitch. But all up not moving when you have selected down you should know about. You feel the up locks coming out, you feel the drag while in transit, you see the airspeed drop, you then feel the down locks engage, you feel the doors close and the aircraft speeds up again. Having 2 legs down V 3 makes a huge difference to how the aircraft flies due lack of drag.
The memory item is don't put the gear down above the max extension speed. Nobody has a clue what they did
The taking off again has actually worked multiple times over the years with other types, even props. And they did a circuit and landed with there pride, aircraft and runway broken.
With these engines and the placement of the fadec and permag alternator to power the fadec it is definitely better to stay on the ground.
As you can see on this pic of a NEO engine you have a whole load of fan to scrap away before you get near anything else.
The FDR and CVR data has been downloaded and is intact apparently in France.
If there are urgent changes required to aircraft systems which I doubt are required to be honest they will appear for the type on FAA, EASA etc websites.
I think you all know the time scales involved after the MAX crash but to recap there will be a basic report with the bare facts come out in 2-3 months and then a update in 1 years time and the final report some time after that. My gut feel is that it won't be a dragged out affair. They did the pod scraping and flame out before with the Tallinn smartlynx. And with FDR intact then they can relatively easily see what the profile is. Again the flaws with the warning system will be easily identified. So we might get the full report at the end of the year.
Its pretty standard in some parts of the world. Basically its bum covering.
Western world things are a lot more behind doors until the final report is out. And criminal proceedings which do sometimes happen (they have in the UK) will only start after the final report is out.
Each countries legal system is different and information released differs.
Being told to Go around and not complying is not optional unless under a mayday.
Without going too far here, the recordings I've heard / details which may not be the complete version went something like
After confirming rather high and rather fast
PIA 8303 - Turn left heading 180
Pilot - or co pilot - We are "comfortable" and have ILS for runway 25L ( with various alarms going off in the back ground)
Errr OK, cleared to land.
If the recordings are true there is a complete lack of urgency in any of the voices, be it pilot or ATC and very little information.
So there wasn't, AFAIK, a clear "go around" command from the ATC more giving the pilot somewhere to go if they wanted / needed it to be able to slow down and come in on the correct glide path.
So absolutely no one is covered in glory here as far as I can see, but hopefully we get some insight later on (maybe much later on) to answer the various questions going around as to what exactly happened and what the conversations / state of mind / body were.
I did see on a report that the pilots family had been on to say he could refer to more junior members of the crew as "son / daughter" and as the senior pilot by some distance the whole CRM and PF / PM co pilot interaction will I think be crucial to see how close the co pilot came to calling it off or not.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
Not much about the FO about. And there are unconfirmed reports the Captain was fasting at work during Ramadan from his family. I would have thought though that adrenaline would have kicked in by that point and raised blood sugar. Dehydration though the body can't do anything about. We will just have to wait and see.
There is various things coming up about corruption in the region and various medical reports on the Captain. If they are true I have no clue.
The whole decent is none normal from the current data and nothing indicates the gear at any point was down. They would have lifted the handle during go around on positive climb which would have reset it if it was locked out due trying to extend it at 260+
Airbus have just sent out a letter to all operators saying there is no specific issues with the A320 from the data recovered.
To note I didn't know much about PIA when all this kicked off. From what I have seen which is not very pleasant reading. Its got multiple issues across a full range of areas internally. Its pretty obvious why I have never flown with anyone that's worked for them.
Just a pity people have to die to highlight these sort of things.
Well all that really says is that the airplane did what it was supposed to do and that was not try and land doing 200+ kts.
If the GPWS or gear not down warnings doesn't work/ become active above a certain air speed then that might come as a surprise to some pilots. But then I guess most wouldn't try doing what this pilot did either.
There does seem to be an idea out there that PIA is riven with issues and that the pilot was indeed fasting.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
So the aviation minister somehow knows that 40% of the pilots faked their exams and were not appointed on merit.
These pilots ignored just about every warning under the sun being thrown at them, ignored ATC instructions to go round to loose height and speed, even tried apparently to slow down using engine thrust when bouncing down the runway then still took off again, nobody on the airport thought to tell the pilots their aircraft had touched down on their engines. So it looks like many of the theories above were not correct.
Why at 5 miles out would anyone raise the undercarriage? Especially as they were steaming in so a bit more drag would have been rather useful.
Yup, the no fly rule would seem to be a good one.
No mention of fasting or Ramadan, just conversation about Covid 19. Nothing suspicious there then.
But it does like they nearly made it back. Another 400m and they would have made the airfield at least.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
I expect they pulled the gear up because their descent pushed them over the speed limit for the gear doors, so an alarm went off and they looked and said, "Oh, the gear down over-speed alarm" and pulled the gear back up. This is just a guess; we'll see from the full FDR readout what was going on at the time.
Essentially, some people just do the minimum to cancel an alarm rather than acting according to what the alarm is for. The old phrase is "put a penny in the fuse box."
