757 A/T failure

CoffeeIcePapers said:
I guess it depends on your perspective. It wasn’t a picture of him flexing in the gym, it was a post about how he went from the ramp to 75/76 CA in 5 years. It’s really impressive. Yes, he got lucky, but it’s clear he busted his ass, too.

I view it as a post to inspire people who think it isn’t possible.
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No. It was timing and luck. And for him to portray that as “something you can do, if you thought isn’t possible” is not going to happen in that timnefrsme. Be honest, how long before a newhire at Delta hired today Oct 2024 before he can hold 75/76 Captain? His timing was literally once in a lifetime.


“This industry will throw you around like a shaken baby.”

Words he speaks that are not backed up by anything he experienced. He rode the best time in aviation since 1903. Those days, for now, are over in 2024/5.

Imagine the privilege position to go to Breeze, quit after 6 months. Go to Spirit, quit after 4 months. How much you wanna bet the “where do you see yourself in 5 yrs?” question was answered dishonestly numerous times?

Sure, he had a drive. But the outcome was a result of the economy and the hiring environment he faced.

His 121 career is mostly collecting type rides and burning bridges leaving sub 3-6 months for the next best trying. Same at Delta, start and then start bidding Capt in the biggest plane he can find, QOL be damned. That is not impressive.


To show his story as a “this is what you can do!” is not going to be accurate from the timeline perspective. The way that post reads is “look at what I did in the catlike quickness I did it.”

And (maybe not this guy) but one of these sub 6 yr 767 Capts did pose in front of a hotel mirror, the same guy I think who was in a hammock with his Delta Captain hat.

*barf*
 
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Kingairer said:
At AA a fatigue call is a call to sked. "I am fatigued." Their only SOP response is "When will you be rested and back available"? You tell them whatever time you want or think. You fill out a form sometime in the next 24 (48?) hours and its reviewed by a committee to see if you are pay protected. Thats it.

I remember at my last company youd be forwarded over to a chief pilot if you called in sick on a holiday. "Are they going to make me feel better"?
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That’s how it goes here too. But calling in that “I’m fatigued” while flying an airplane is obviously going to get a much stranger response, and rightfully so.
 
tcco94 said:
That’s how it goes here too. But calling in that “I’m fatigued” while flying an airplane is obviously going to get a much stranger response, and rightfully so.
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(We don’t deal with duty pilot for this)

“Are you tired, dense, or both….sir”?
 
CoffeeIcePapers said:
Seems odd to crap on a random dude who seized an opportunity.
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Jealousy is never a good look, it’s kind of surprising how many people can’t keep theirs inside on a public setting. Everyone who talks crap about guys like this either would have or did take the first upgrade opportunity at a regional. Which I will argue is objectively a way harder job than captain at a major. I’m still amazed by how much bigger and better of a support network there is for getting the job done at a major vs a regional. It seems lime the difference between having a sous chef and a kitchen staff versus trying to make a four course meal at home by yourself.
This dude clearly worked his ass off and got incredibly lucky with timing. Nothing he said seemed too full of himself and I agree with him, sometimes you have to seek or discomfort to keep climbing the ladder. I had to have many discussions with the wife over “I know I have a good job that pays pretty well right now, but would you support me starting over elsewhere?”
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
No. It was timing and luck. And for him to portray that as “something you can do, if you thought isn’t possible” is not going to happen in that timnefrsme. Be honest, how long before a newhire at Delta hired today Oct 2024 before he can hold 75/76 Captain? His timing was literally once in a lifetime.


“This industry will throw you around like a shaken baby.”

Words he speaks that are not backed up by anything he experienced. He rode the best time in aviation since 1903. Those days, for now, are over in 2024/5.

Imagine the privilege position to go to Breeze, quit after 6 months. Go to Spirit, quit after 4 months. How much you wanna bet the “where do you see yourself in 5 yrs?” question was answered dishonestly numerous times?

Sure, he had a drive. But the outcome was a result of the economy and the hiring environment he faced.

His 121 career is mostly collecting type rides and burning bridges leaving sub 3-6 months for the next best trying. Same at Delta, start and then start bidding Capt in the biggest plane he can find, QOL be damned. That is not impressive.


To show his story as a “this is what you can do!” is not going to be accurate from the timeline perspective. The way that post reads is “look at what I did in the catlike quickness I did it.”

And (maybe not this guy) but one of these sub 6 yr 767 Capts did pose in front of a hotel mirror, the same guy I think who was in a hammock with his Delta Captain hat.

*barf*
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You sound triggered. Reddit isnt social media?
 
I, for one, am thankful for the ability to watch this from the sidelines and ask, “how would I have handled something like this ?”. And I’ll be honest, it took me a few minutes (at zero airspeed and altitude)…

That’s all I’m gonna say about thayat…
 
Kingairer said:
(We don’t deal with duty pilot for this)

“Are you tired, dense, or both….sir”?
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I actually prefer the way we do it. The duty pilot call for fatigue is so easy and fast vs scheduling which could be a 30 minute hold thing. Especially if you’re out on the line, I don’t want to be talking to scheduling. Ringing up the duty pilot, getting fatigue on my schedule and my rest worked on in a matter of minutes is really nice.

But for a case like this yeah, it’s bizarre. I mean you don’t call your dispatcher to say you’re fatigued anyways. I doubt any airline runs that way where dispatchers want to be fielding calls for fatigue. Not really their job. But also calling airborne to use the big F word while commanding an airplane seems like a mess. Don’t want to Monday morning QB the scenario here but I agree with what the crew did. I just think they were a bit timid to say “hey let’s return for XYZ and then talk about this on the ground with the duty pilot etc.” and instead wanted to get some clarity from the company. Which obviously they were like hey from our end this doesn’t seem like an issue but whatever you feel is safest. Then the F word started getting tossed around and I think that’s when the call went south.

that Atlanta radio call was way longer than it needed to be. This is actually a really good video to watch for us Captains in my opinion. Again I don’t think they did anything wrong, they made a decision based on safety but maybe while flying there was a shorter more round about way of achieving the end goal here. Definitely a lesson learned for everyone I think and a good safety decision was made.

Another great tool in my toolbox from this too is Avgeeks monitoring Atlanta radio for YouTube now makes me rethink a lot of conversations and words I’d use on that phone call. So that’s interesting thing to find out.
 
I’ll admit I didn’t listen to the whole video, don’t know the experience level of the Capt or crew, nor do I know about any additional mechanical issues or problems the crew may have been dealing with prior to the flight or soon after. But, it appears they were simply dealing with an autothrottle inop situation? Does that about cover it?

I flew 5 different fleet types during my 34 yrs at UPS. 4 had auto throttles (B727 didn’t). I flew the 4 equipped with auto throttles..without them either by MEL’ed or they simply stopped working at some point. Yea, you have to pay attention and do some of that basic pilot stuff, the naps are shorter and not as restful but it’s more of an annoyance than a full blown emergency. Backside of the clock flying was considered normal ops on the freight side. Yea, not ideal obviously, didn’t have the rules protection in place that crews have nowadays, but it was the nature of the beast. After running checklists and such….about the only call would’ve been to dispatch with a conversation about whether or not we can legally land at the destination without auto throttles due to autoland capabilities etc…not, I’m too tired to manipulate the throttles.

A fatigue call is something you do before the flight and preferably before reporting for duty…no shame in that. Once you report for duty for your normally schedule flight and it departs, assuming on time, you can’t cry foul simply because you lost your auto throttles and now have to do pilot stuff on a 5 hr flight. I wouldn’t want to be at the end of that table doing a rug dance trying to defend that decision. There’s a difference between an inflight system emergency and a simple annoyance.

BTW…the B757 (also true for the A300 and MD11) without auto throttles (not talking about an inop thrust management computer where you have to reference manuals for thrust settings since they’re not be displayed) should be a non event even for the average crew regardless of time of day. This is a failure of the training center and/or lack of knowledge/experience specifically with the Capt of the flight. One good thing this crew did was get multiple people involved to “problem solve”. At UPS we could talk to Mx after block out but always had to contact Dispatch first and they would connect us to Mx while they listened to the problem. The dispatcher is just as responsible for the safety of flight so I never had an issue with that. Many times I used the SatCom over VHF simply because it was a clearer connection and more private if warranted.

Also, in closing, I’ve never been a fan of these zero to hero posts and social media stories of folks getting to the left seat in as few years as possible. While it gets the requisite “likes and follows” and constant stream of selfies to show mom, experience does account for some things in life and aviation is one of those. It’s what you fall back on when you run out of luck and options at the same time. I feel all these uber quick upgrades is resulting in a severe lack of “situational experience” when things go bump in the night…
 
MX’s mind set is a plane in the ground in a hangar or at the gate. Most nearly all of what they do involve ground-based tests, resets, and fixes.


In the air? All bets are off, except the QRH. That should be the primary source. If you have a XXX yellow light, and QRH has no CB reset for that XXX light, we don’t touch them. It doesn’t matter if MX on the ground says why don’t you try resetting (insert CB). Nope, not allowed, and not gonna do it.
 
A300Capt said:
I’ll admit I didn’t listen to the whole video, don’t know the experience level of the Capt or crew, nor do I know about any additional mechanical issues or problems the crew may have been dealing with prior to the flight or soon after. But, it appears they were simply dealing with an autothrottle inop situation? Does that about cover it?

I flew 5 different fleet types during my 34 yrs at UPS. 4 had auto throttles (B727 didn’t). I flew the 4 equipped with auto throttles..without them either by MEL’ed or they simply stopped working at some point. Yea, you have to pay attention and do some of that basic pilot stuff, the naps are shorter and not as restful but it’s more of an annoyance than a full blown emergency. Backside of the clock flying was considered normal ops on the freight side. Yea, not ideal obviously, didn’t have the rules protection in place that crews have nowadays, but it was the nature of the beast. After running checklists and such….about the only call would’ve been to dispatch with a conversation about whether or not we can legally land at the destination without auto throttles due to autoland capabilities etc…not, I’m too tired to manipulate the throttles.

A fatigue call is something you do before the flight and preferably before reporting for duty…no shame in that. Once you report for duty for your normally schedule flight and it departs, assuming on time, you can’t cry foul simply because you lost your auto throttles and now have to do pilot stuff on a 5 hr flight. I wouldn’t want to be at the end of that table doing a rug dance trying to defend that decision. There’s a difference between an inflight system emergency and a simple annoyance.

BTW…the B757 (also true for the A300 and MD11) without auto throttles (not talking about an inop thrust management computer where you have to reference manuals for thrust settings since they’re not be displayed) should be a non event even for the average crew regardless of time of day. This is a failure of the training center and/or lack of knowledge/experience specifically with the Capt of the flight. One good thing this crew did was get multiple people involved to “problem solve”. At UPS we could talk to Mx after block out but always had to contact Dispatch first and they would connect us to Mx while they listened to the problem. The dispatcher is just as responsible for the safety of flight so I never had an issue with that. Many times I used the SatCom over VHF simply because it was a clearer connection and more private if warranted.

Also, in closing, I’ve never been a fan of these zero to hero posts and social media stories of folks getting to the left seat in as few years as possible. While it gets the requisite “likes and follows” and constant stream of selfies to show mom, experience does account for some things in life and aviation is one of those. It’s what you fall back on when you run out of luck and options at the same time. I feel all these uber quick upgrades is resulting in a severe lack of “situational experience” when things go bump in the night…
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Yeah I’ve flown a 75 with no auto throttles. Not a huge deal to me. But the crew said they took a long delay on the ground. Not sure what that was and I’m guessing they were on the edge, then this happened and it must have felt like the final domino to fall. I guess if you discuss and feel it’s unsafe, they made the right decision. They were saying an EPR was out as well I think because then the issue was discussed about icing conditions. So I’m not sure what the problem fully was.
 
BobDDuck said:
TI've certainly seen MX push to go down the wrong path before (both on the ground and in the air) but despite that, I still like actually being able to talk to somebody with an A&P after their name instead of playing a game of telephone through dispatch. Especially when the outcome decides whether you are going to keep going or going to end up dodging birds on the way into Midway at 3 in the morning.
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An A&P is going to think about the whole issue differently. Sometimes they might be helpful in being able to get a reset or something, other times they might go chasing troubleshooting procedures when what is really needed is input on the preferred divert destination. As with several other airlines that have been mentioned here your new evil overlords don’t connect a crew in flight directly to mx, that kind of call would go through the flight ops duty officer. From my understanding anyway.
 
tcco94 said:
Yeah I’ve flown a 75 with no auto throttles. Not a huge deal to me. But the crew said they took a long delay on the ground. Not sure what that was and I’m guessing they were on the edge, then this happened and it must have felt like the final domino to fall. I guess if you discuss and feel it’s unsafe, they made the right decision. They were saying an EPR was out as well I think because then the issue was discussed about icing conditions. So I’m not sure what the problem fully was.
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What I thought I read was that there was a TAT probe failure which takes out the autothrottle. In addition, I heard one type rated JCer say that it most likely would take out LNAV/VNAV which if true I certainly would think twice about driving VOR to VOR across the country when that’s not something I’d done recently. At very least you’d probably have to have dispatch come up with a new route and at that point things are really starting to pile up.
 
Roger Roger said:
What I thought I read was that there was a TAT probe failure which takes out the autothrottle. In addition, I heard one type rated JCer say that it most likely would take out LNAV/VNAV which if true I certainly would think twice about driving VOR to VOR across the country when that’s not something I’d done recently. At very least you’d probably have to have dispatch come up with a new route and at that point things are really starting to pile up.
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Ah makes sense. I have been in training on the 220 so I don’t even have the documents anymore for the 757. Funnily enough my next LOFT sim on Friday is…auto throttle failure 👀
 
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