Colgan 3407 afterthoughts

Blackhawk said:
As for write ups after heavy checks they will always be there due to the Waddington Effect. I saw this in the military where a perfectly good airplane would go into phase and come out a piece of junk.
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I used to hate going to Clarksburg at 1 in the morning to pick up airplanes.

Worst one was where they attached the rudder cables backwards to the FO's peddles. That was fun.
 
Lawman said:
Story of every Phase bird the ASB does or Theatre depot reset ever.


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But, but... depot makes it good as new.

I don't remember the name of the team that goes around checking airframes for cracks and corrosion, but they came to Bragg once and looked over some old UH-60As that use to belong to the 160th, but had just gone through Corpus and were "good as new". Almost all of them were found to have serious cracks.
 
Blackhawk said:
But, but... depot makes it good as new.

I don't remember the name of the team that goes around checking airframes for cracks and corrosion, but they came to Bragg once and looked over some old UH-60As that use to belong to the 160th, but had just gone through Corpus and were "good as new". Almost all of them were found to have serious cracks.
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Had an aircraft come back from
Theatre Depot after reset.

It flew for a few hours but had some issues and by dumb luck one of them made us open up the mast. When they did they found a wire that had been milling a grove into the rotating mast in an area that was completely unseen on preventative checks or preflight checks. When they estimated how long it was going to take based off depth of the groove for the hours it took it was going to have a critical failure before reaching the hours required to give us a reason or inspection that would have found it.

The rotor system was literally going to come off because somebody F'd up big.


I also saw a tail rotor installed backwards.... Not really sure how that happened since it would take more work putting that square peg through the round hole.


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Blackhawk said:
Vanity Fair? Seriously? That's where you go for information on aviation?
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Did you bother to read the article? What about the one they did with Air France?

Why don't you read those two articles and then get back to me. Both pieces are excellent journalistic works.
 
I've seen lots of screw ups caused by errors during mx that may not have been necessary (or that may not have needed to be done quite as invasively). I've also seen lots of unsafe crap that could have benefitted from more frequent mx invasiveness. It's not about doing lots of mx, or doing none at all, it's about optimizing individual task recurrence intervals. Sometimes that means more often, sometimes it means less often.

I used to be a diehard Busch fanboi but 6 years of working on airplanes has me realizing that just maybe things are a little different outside the comfortable little niche where the same pilot flies an airplane ~200 hours a year 2 2-hour legs at a time with a 12 point engine monitor. Also that was before he spoke against issuing an AD on ECI cylinders for the big bore contis. That soured me on him big time.
 
Lawman said:
I also saw a tail rotor installed backwards.... Not really sure how that happened since it would take more work putting that square peg through the round hole.
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The HH-60 we just got back from depot, one of the GAU-2 minigun mounts on one side of the helo......somehow spins the gun backwards..... o_O
 
Blackhawk said:
Vanity Fair? Seriously? That's where you go for information on aviation?
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Right? They're certainly not Aviation Week and Space Technology. Totally get that.

However -

To be fair, VF usually hires extremely-well-known (read: credible) writers for the feature pieces they do. Michael Lewis, among others, has penned a number of good pieces for them. Wolfgang Langwiesche jr. wrote their AF447 piece, I believe, if it's the same one referred earlier.

I normally don't have much use for them as a magazine, but when they do an in-depth feature, they tend to do it right. You have to kind of look at the magazine as a carrier and the article as the payload that counts, if that makes any sense.

(edited to add the "junior" since Langwiesche sr. died in 2002)
 
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Blackhawk said:
But, but... depot makes it good as new.

I don't remember the name of the team that goes around checking airframes for cracks and corrosion, but they came to Bragg once and looked over some old UH-60As that use to belong to the 160th, but had just gone through Corpus and were "good as new". Almost all of them were found to have serious cracks.
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ACE team.
 
rockman2343@aol.com said:
There won't be another accident like this one because the cause was so elementary. A pilot pulled back on the yoke at the first sign of the stick shaker, and then did it again three times. Who does that? Yes there were contributing factors, fatigue, chatter below ten etc. For all the analysis, and attention that this accident got, it comes down to one of the most fundamental aspects of flying, something we are exposed to in lesson one two or three, and have to be able to handle by our first solo.

The best thing that came out of this is now airlines take a closer look at failures, as this guy had multiple issues with aircraft handling throughout his flying career.
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I can tell you right now end of 2007 at a regional, for sim training, approach to stall in the landing configuration HEAVILY focused on "minimizing altitude loss." Which means we were taught to kinda "hold the yoke and ride the stick shaker" , max thrust / spoilers in , and even a *little* back pressure to ride the stick shaker and power out of the stall.

THAT is what the industry was teaching.

Absolutely insane, completely stupid, but you cooperate to graduate and do what they tell you.


At the first hint of a stick shaker, you need to do the max thrust / spoiler in (or whatever your callout is), but then reduce your angle of attack: push the damn nose down. #$%^ the altitude loss.

It doesn't matter if you're at 2,300 ft outside Buffalo or at FL350 northeast of Brazil over the Atlantic. You stall the wing, minimizing altitude loss doesn't mean jack when you fly a stalled wing all the way to the ground because airline training never emphasized nose down immediately.

It still gives me the chills to know I was taught in an airline environment to ride the stick shaker with slight back pressure and power my way out of a stall in a landing configuration.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
I can tell you right now end of 2007 at a regional, for sim training, approach to stall in the landing configuration HEAVILY focused on "minimizing altitude loss." Which means we were taught to kinda "hold the yoke and ride the stick shaker" , max thrust / spoilers in , and even a *little* back pressure to ride the stick shaker and power out of the stall.

THAT is what the industry was teaching.

Absolutely insane, completely stupid, but you cooperate to graduate and do what they tell you.


At the first hint of a stick shaker, you need to do the max thrust / spoiler in (or whatever your callout is), but then reduce your angle of attack: push the damn nose down. #$%^ the altitude loss.

It doesn't matter if you're at 2,300 ft outside Buffalo or at FL350 northeast of Brazil over the Atlantic. You stall the wing, minimizing altitude loss doesn't mean jack when you fly a stalled wing all the way to the ground because airline training never emphasized nose down immediately.

It still gives me the chills to know I was taught in an airline environment to ride the stick shaker with slight back pressure and power my way out of a stall in a landing configuration.
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That would be pretty hard to not get a secondary. In every checkride I've done a secondary stall is a fail.
 
Cruise said:
It's ironic...the FO from 3407 said that very thing to me during our ALPA organizing drive. She wasn't in favor of joining ALPA due to the fact she had amassed thousands of accident free hours and didn't see the need for a union...a few months later, that would no longer be the case, sadly.
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Is this true? Are you just saying this or did you know her?
 
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