On Jun 8, 10:32*am, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
On Jun 8, 9:51*am, Clark wrote:

Most SOPs I am familiar with for heavy aircraft tell you to keep
flying if a Master Caution illuminates on takeoff AFTER 80-100 knots.
After 80-100 knots, hi speed aborts are done for Fires, Engine
Failures, Windshear and if the PIC believes the airplane will not
fly.

Hmm....I think this sends the wrong signal to aspiring pilots (no pun
intended).

When I was reading the Risk Management section of my Jeppesen book, it
specifically states that one of the major reasons that accidents
happens is that pilots choose to ignore the warning signs.

If you are saying that a high-speed abort would have done more damage
(to the aircraft) than to continue to fly, that's one thing. *But if
you are saying that it is ok for $1.4 billion machine to continue to
takeoff simple becase it is more convenient than aborting...???

That is exactly the point. The pilots had a Caution, not a Warning.
They did not ignore it but prioritized that Aviating was the primary
task at hand, vs digging out a checklist rolling down the runway for a
Yellow Caution light. This was an ambiguous cue when you look back at
it with 20/20 hindsight. If they had decided in the design process
that this could cause loss of life and/or property, it would have been
a big, fat red Warning light with associated non-normal procedures and
Warning notes. If you do some rooting around on google you will find
the ends of runways littered with the hulls of airplanes that have
aborted at high speed and high weight.


I am sure that if I were to go to my flight instructor, and tell him
that, from now on, if any warning lights come on in his sub-$400,000
aircraft, I will use my own judgement during an abortable take off to
decide whether the warning is serious enough to abort, he'd shriek.


Warning yes, Caution no. In a multi-engine aircraft, say, 757 on short
runway with a engine fire light, better to go flying and fight fire
airborne with suppression system than end up at bottom of ravine
broken in two. Every aircraft plus every takeoff is diffeent, your
instructor will help build your
Assessment=Behavior=Consequence=Decision skills. Systems do not always
fail in ways that designers envisioned. i had a hydraulic Caution
light on a Huey once. The problem wasactually with the Master Caution
and Warning system (erroneous indication), not the Hydraulics system.
I had enough systems knowledge and supporting information to make an
assessment, which was to land normally. The emrgency checklist would
have had me doing a high-speed run-on landing, not so difficult but I
would have toasted the skids.
Your instructor will also spend some time going over the difference
between Notes, Cautions and Warnings. Plus the fact that you can
deviate from procedures if, in your estimation as Pilot In Command,
the situation warrants. That's also in the US FARs.

This crew had no idications to warrant an abort. After a certain
threshold they are biased to continue and that is what they did,
similar to Comair 5191. Blaming the pilots does not "un-crash" this
aircraft. There are system issues to be corrected here. I'm glad they
survived.

Blame has to be placed somewhere, or shared, right? If blame is not
placed, it starts to give the impression that no one is at fault, at
least not the pilots.

There are deficiencies in the system that can be improved. Blame is a
culture issue and litigous society, and it makes some people feel
better. Things I would look at here are why did ejection seats injure
crew and the fact that moisture in the system started this whole
sequence. The crew were the ufortunate ones to discover the
deficiency. And is in most cases through history, the messenger gets
shot.

Let's look at it another way. *Let us suppose that no warnings existed
at all in the B-2 Spirit, that everything looked normal right before
ejection. There would be a thorough investigation, meeting rooms
filled with technologists and top brass, and once the cause were
found, someone would suggest...

"How hard is it to add a warning light so that if moisture clogs the
system, the computer at least tells the pilots that something is
wrong? *Can you do that?" They engineers would probably say yes.
"Would you pilots find that useful?" Again, the pilots would probably
say yes.

For a very good read on time compressed decision making and concurrent
task management, get a copy of "The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking
Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents" by Dismukes, Berman
and Loukopouloshttp://www.amazon.com/Limits-Expertise-Rethinking-Airline-Accidents/d...

Fly Smart

By managing risk better?

One way to look at is...if they had aborted, the plane would still be
here, and some engineer would have figured out the error in true vs
indicated speed, and noted that pilots would have attempted rotation
at a speed that might have resulted in a crash, and pilots would have
been lauded for their attitude toward risk management...in the $1.4
billion aircraft.

The pilots had all of the clues needed to rotate, just as they had
done thousands of times.

Also, given that it's a B-2, and not a $40,000 Tomahawk, I would think
one would have a slightly higher expectation of pilot's attitude
toward risk management...or not.

If it seems that I am nit-picking at this topic, I am. *The more I
read, the more I am discovering that vast majority of crashes, if one
looks only at the facts, has to do with some erroneous decision that
human made somewhere, not the machine itself. *A year ago, before I
started all this, I would have expected it to be entirely the other
way around, the idea being that, the pilot would know that if they do
something really stupid, death is a possibility. Some of the errors
that pilots make are....ahem...plane silly.

Humans design airplanes and sensors. Is that a Human Factor or
Material Factor. Trick question. All mishaps are caused by Human
Factors.

Making mistakes is ok, as no one is perfect. The problem, I think,
becomes systemic when the community as a whole develops tendency to
reject blame. That is what I, a student pilot, see each time I open a
magazine, or read online material.

So maybe there is something behind that, if you are seeing it
everywhere? WE are trying o fix things and make families happy, not
make lawyers happy

-Le Chaud Lapin-