ATR 72 Crash in Brazil

mightynimbus said:
Checks on their way to be cancelled?
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Apophis said:
You’d think the ATR was an absolute death trap given its accident history. In truth it’s just a mid, boring, large turboprop.

Funnily enough, at my old company, we frequently flew them into places like Minot, Bismarck and Duluth during the winter. Still do in fact. Almost 3 decades of operating ATRs in these places with nary an incident.
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I hate to take the conversation and thread down this direction but I am going to do it anyway. I think the accident history is largely due to the airplane being fine when everything is good, but less forgiving when there might be an issue or situation that exposes a lack of training, lack of experience, lack of CRM, etc.

We have seen several ATR crashes where the wrong engine was feathered, props were brought back instead of flaps, etc. It makes me wonder if the ATR and similar are just less forgiving to bad piloting than other airplanes. 737 comes to mind over the Airbus. Airbus you can kick the autopilot on at 100 feet and autoland it at the destination. The 737 is much more manual and hands-on and I think that really does trip up airlines and countries that lack the training and experience that other countries have.
 
Inverted said:
I hate to take the conversation and thread down this direction but I am going to do it anyway. I think the accident history is largely due to the airplane being fine when everything is good, but less forgiving when there might be an issue or situation that exposes a lack of training, lack of experience, lack of CRM, etc.

We have seen several ATR crashes where the wrong engine was feathered, props were brought back instead of flaps, etc. It makes me wonder if the ATR and similar are just less forgiving to bad piloting than other airplanes. 737 comes to mind over the Airbus. Airbus you can kick the autopilot on at 100 feet and autoland it at the destination. The 737 is much more manual and hands-on and I think that really does trip up airlines and countries that lack the training and experience that other countries have.
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I wasn’t going to, but I’m glad you made that point for me. The ATR is mostly flown in countries outside the US now. And most of these accidents reek of incompetence and/or poor training.

The ATR is definitely less forgiving of stupidity than a lot of types, especially in icing…..but you know, that’s where training and doing “pilot stuff” comes in. The TransAsia crash wouldn’t have happened if the ATPCS system was operating correctly, as that system controls autofeather. But you can still manually set RTO power and feather the failed prop without ATPCS…. I did several no-uptrim, no-auto feather V1 cuts in the sim over the years, and it wasn’t anything a proficient crew should be overwhelmed by, though definitely more busy than if everything is working.

The Yeti crash in Nepal was a mistake so stupid I still struggle to understand how it occurred.
 
knot4u said:
Thank you, I hadn't considered that. What's the procedure when you're all iced up in an airplane like that, is there one? Is it firewall everything, drop the nose and hope for warmer air?
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Depends (you know, the longer one flies, the more one sounds like a lawyer)... Is it a tail icing event, or is it a wing icing event? Very different recoveries. Same rule, though. If you're in an aircraft that sucks in ice, don't enter ice. If you happen to, get the hell out ASAP!!! (not "when you can, or when it's convenient, but RIGHT NOW!!)
 
derg said:
Especially cross-control and cross-control stalls.

When that nose drops to one side, you know you want to yank that yoke in the opposite direction or go a little overly dramatic with the rudder. “Wwwwweeeeeeeee!”
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Maybe I'm misreading you here, but... Uhh... forget the yoke! No yoke. Don't touch the yoke. For 98.6% of pilots, any yoke response will be incorrect.

When the nose goes one way in a stall or spin situation, push the RUDDER the opposite way while using your hands to do nothing or pull back on your throttle(s).
 
Richman said:
You may do a lot of things in your life, but you will never, under any circumstance, be that cool.
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No doubt about that sir. Wooden wings and open cockpits, true pioneers.

Years ago my wife and I stopped at one of the still functional lighted airway beacons west of Helena, MT. Amazing that your red tailed ancestors used those things all across the North.

I’m not sure if the Montana State aviation department still keeps those active or not, I know as of a few years ago they were still working.

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I used to believe that too until the American A300 lost the tail over New York. Now, whenever we do unusual attitude recoveries in the sim, one of the debrief items is how much force you applied to the rudder pedals - to determine if you're likely to worsen the issue by exceeding limit load on that surface.
 
///AMG said:
We had a pretty infamous civilian T-45 sim instructor in Meridian, who had spent many years while still in the flight suit instructing in the T-2, and previously, had been part of the initial spin testing of the F/A-18A in pax. His one liner, as he kicked off our "Out of Control Flight" ground school class, was "I've got more hours spinning jets than any of you have total". Which was probably right. He was big and loud, and still flew a civilian T-2 on the side in the airshow world. In spite of his gruff, retired Marine facade, he turned out to be awesome once you could get him to laugh a few times. Spinning multiple types of airplanes (namely the T-34 and F/A-18) was a real important foundational experience for me. From that background, it is hard to imagine how someone gets into this situation, as is any of our part 121 "upset training", but when I think about how most folks have never done a tail slide or been upside down or in a spin in a high performance aircraft (rightly so, given what most folks spent a lot of hours flying), it makes sense. The first time I ever spun a plane, I had a lot of training leading up to that, and it was essentially rote memorization and mechanics coming out. With none of that? Good luck. Fully developed spin in a transport category aircraft without a spin recovery procedure? Who knows. I can think of wildly different procedures between the F-5, F-16 and F/A-18 alone (airplanes I've either flown or heard people recite their specific recovery procedures many times in a mass brief). I think I know enough of a diverse set of "tricks" among different airplanes, that I could try to have a fighting chance, but realistically, recovery might not have been aerodynamically possible by this point.....to your point. Man that was a lot of rambling thoughts :)
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More to your comment of “how does a 121 jet get into this position…” I would’ve tended tk agree until about 3 weeks ago.

Launched out of ORD in a fairly heavy 737-800 behind a FedEx 767. I was expecting the wake, but being heavy we rotated around their same spot. At 800 agl we hit it, and it was when I got to full aileron deflection I had a slow motion thought of “oh, this could get really bad if this doesn’t stop rolling…” I think we only got to 30 degrees of bank, but yeah, my guess is wake upsets especially at the flight levels.
 
ozziecat35 said:
More to your comment of “how does a 121 jet get into this position…” I would’ve tended tk agree until about 3 weeks ago.

Launched out of ORD in a fairly heavy 737-800 behind a FedEx 767. I was expecting the wake, but being heavy we rotated around their same spot. At 800 agl we hit it, and it was when I got to full aileron deflection I had a slow motion thought of “oh, this could get really bad if this doesn’t stop rolling…” I think we only got to 30 degrees of bank, but yeah, my guess is wake upsets especially at the flight levels.
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500 hour pilot question. Don't taze me. But aren't you supposed to take off before or after a heavy jet t/o point, to avoid that? I know that you said that you were heavy, but could you have ran the numbers to takeoff at a higher thrust output, to take off before their rotation and fly above the 767's wake?
 
Maximilian_Jenius said:
500 hour pilot question. Don't taze me. But aren't you supposed to take off before or after a heavy jet t/o point, to avoid that? I know that you said that you were heavy, but could you have ran the numbers to takeoff at a higher thrust output, to take off before their rotation and fly above the 767's wake?
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...or turn slightly and fly to the side of the turbulence while still maintaining assigned heading-ish.
 
Maximilian_Jenius said:
500 hour pilot question. Don't taze me. But aren't you supposed to take off before or after a heavy jet t/o point, to avoid that? I know that you said that you were heavy, but could you have ran the numbers to takeoff at a higher thrust output, to take off before their rotation and fly above the 767's wake?
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Ozzie will answer on his own, but your airplane doesn't know anything about the airplane in front of it, and you don't know - when you're running numbers - what the W/B (and perf numbers are) of the airplane in front of you.

Towers are supposed to give a specific amount of separation between different weight classes/types, but it happens.

On the other side of it, I've been clobbered by the wake of a 767 freighter going into JFK because we had to keep the speed up but he was slowing down and they were keeping us at the minimum of separation. After the second...impact...I decided to ask for forgiveness instead of permission and started slowing down anyway, and about 2 seconds after I spun the speed knob we got cleared for the approach without a speed restriction.
 
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