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Based on preliminary reports, the Asiana 214 crash may end up being partially attributed to confusion regarding to what extent the autopilot was managing the airplane and what the human crew still had responsibility for (notably in the management of the thrust levers).

As flight instructors one thing that we stress, starting with the very first lesson, is a positive exchange of flight controls. This is particularly important in helicopters due to their lack of stability. There shouldn’t be any confusion about who is responsible for the aircraft attitude.

Here’s how it works with humans:

1. instructor or pilot1: you have the controls
2. student or pilot2: I have the controls (puts hands on yoke, stick, or cyclic)
3. instructor or pilot1: you have the controls (after seeing student’s hands on controls, removes his or her hands)

When sharing responsibility, here’s an example exchange:

1. instructor or pilot1: you have the pedals and collective
2. student or pilot2: I have the pedals and collective
3. instructor or pilot1: you have the pedals and collective; I have the cyclic

When an autopilot trips off due to a failure of some kind or simply due to disconnection via a switch there is typically a fairly loud alarm that the pilot(s) would have a hard time missing. But when changing modes there is nothing like the positive control exchange described above. The autopilot may switch from flying a heading, for example, to tracking a course over the ground and the only indication is some text changing at the top of the “primary flight display” (PFD). A pilot whose attention is focused on some other task may very likely miss the change.

The popular conception of the autopilot is that it does everything or it does nothing. Push the autopilot button and the airplane will land itself at the destination. Disconnect the autopilot and you’re hand-flying like a 1920s barnstormer. In fact the autopilot has a dozen or more modes, even on a simple four-seat airplane. The autopilot could be set, for example, in any of the following ways:

• hold altitude, letting speed and heading vary (the autopilot will adjust pitch (airspeed) to hold altitude, regardless of throttle setting, and the result may be slowing down all the way to an aerodynamic stall)
• descend at 500 feet-per-minute, letting speed be determined by the pilot’s throttle setting, until the airplane hits the ground (or the autopilot is given new instructions)
• climb at 200 knots until the airplane reaches 31,000′ (climb rate will be determined by the throttle/thrust setting)
• track a multi-leg course over the ground that has been programmed into the GPS, getting the aircraft almost all the way to the destination
• track a radial off a VOR (radio beacon on the ground) until the pilot changes the VOR frequency in the navigation radio
• keep the wings level and don’t worry if the heading drifts
• keep the pitch constant and don’t worry if the altitude drifts
• track the localizer (left-right) beam of the ILS but hold present altitude; do not descend to follow the glide slope
• track both localizer and glide slope of an ILS down to the ground (or until disconnection), letting the airspeed be determined by the pilot adjusting the throttle
• track both localizer and glide slope of an ILS but adjust the thrust levers (“autothrottle”) to hold a set-by-the-pilot airspeed

Managing the autopilot is actually more complex than hand-flying the airplane (there are only three mid-air controls (elevator, aileron, and throttle) and each control can be moved in just two directions, giving a total of six possible choices for control inputs at any time).

The little lights and indications that distinguish one autopilot mode from another are subtle. Of course, as pilots it is our job to pay attention to subtle lights and indications, but in practice humans have demonstrated inconsistency at this task. Is it prudent to assume that somehow human pilots are going to get better at something that they’ve never done well in the past?

Considered as a human applicant for an FAA certificate, the autopilot would fail every checkride due to a failure to participate in a positive exchange of flight controls. Here’s the relevant passage from the FAA Practical Test Standards for a Private certificate (the very first step on the path to the left seat of a B777):

During flight training, there must always be a clear understanding between students and flight instructors of who has control of the aircraft. Prior to flight, a briefing should be conducted that includes the procedure for the exchange of flight controls. A positive three-step process in the exchange of flight controls between pilots is a proven procedure and one that is strongly recommended.

When the instructor wishes the student to take control of the aircraft, he or she will say, “You have the flight controls.” The student acknowledges immediately by saying, “I have the flight controls.” The flight instructor again says, “You have the flight controls.” When control is returned to the instructor, follow the same procedure. A visual check is recommended to verify that the exchange has occurred. There should never be any doubt as to who is flying the aircraft.

[A similar passage is contained within the Airline Transport Pilot PTS, but it says “between the pilots” instead of “between students and flight instructors”.]

Potentially a significant improvement in safety could be obtained for $100,000 in engineering cost (and another $100 million in FAA regulatory paperwork, if going to be installed in a transport jet!). The autopilot would feed voice announcements into the pilots’ audio panel and these announcements would occur after every change of mode and also upon big changes in aircraft speed, attitude, heading, or vertical speed. Here are some examples:

• Upon leveling off at a preset altitude: “I have leveled off at sixteen thousand feet. I am tracking a GPS course. You have the throttle.”
• Upon switching legs: “I have switched legs to fly to the Carmel VOR. I have the throttles and am holding present altitude and airspeed.”
• Upon intercepting a glide slope: “We have intercepted the glide slope. I am descending to follow it and track the localizer as well. You have the throttles and airspeed.”
• After a big thrust lever chop: “We are in flight level change mode, planning to level off at FL240 [about 24,000′ above sea level]. I am holding 300 knots. Vertical speed has increased to 4000 feet per minute. You have the throttles.”

Thoughts from fellow pilots and human factors folks?

[Separately, it is worth noting that the autopilot is over 100 years old. See Wikipedia for Lawrence Sperry’s early success with this technology.]

I’m going to close my Asiana 214-inspired series on the real world of airline flying and visual approaches with one more story from my Comair days.

Generally my life at Comair was antiheroic. For example, we were stuck at the gate in Cincinnati because we had just three seat belt extenders on board and five morbidly obese passengers (out of 50 total seats) who required belt extensions. As this was our home base I called Maintenance on the radio and they drove out in a little truck to deliver the items required to meet federal regulations. Pulling in towards our parking spot at JFK, the captain said to the relaxed ramp workers, without keying the microphone, “Now put down the crack pipe and pick up the wands.” The airline’s fee-for-every-bag policy combined with the design characteristics of the CRJ meant that we were often not legal to fly with the small number of checked bags in the baggage compartment. The only way to restore weight-and-balance was to put sand bags back there but at JFK they would always run out and we’d be delayed while the ramp workers prepared new ones.

On my last day based at CVG I was done at around noon, having flown a simple out-and-back. This was ideal because I needed to drive my car and all of my stuff to New York City, to take up a new base at JFK starting the following day. A woman whom I’d been seeing had flown out as a “non-rev” passenger to join me for the trip.

Scheduling called me to say “We need to you fly one more trip today. It is just out and back to Grand Rapids, Michigan and it leaves in 20 minutes.” For the captain, however, this was to be the start of a three-leg day. He would end up in a Hilton Garden Inn somewhere in the Midwest, rather than comfortably at home with the wife and kids. Captains at Comair were wily 20-year union veterans with bitter memories of the spring 2001 strike that shut down the airline, happy memories of the fat pay deal that followed, and raging anger against heartless corporate owner Delta Airlines whose 2003 bankruptcy resulted in some scaling back of their pay (see “Unions and Airlines”). As far as the senior pilots at the airline were concerned, Delta had filed Chapter 11 purely in order to piss them off. They would take it out on the company in a variety of ways. One captain refused to allow me to use thrust reversers after landing. He wanted to burn up the company’s brake pads (no doubt rather costly parts on a $28 million airplane!). Even when we landed on a wet runway following a thunderstorm I was forbidden to use reverse thrust (the brakes worked fine, thanks to the fact that nearly all American runways are grooved, which prevents hydroplaning).

My captain for the trip to Grand Rapids wasn’t angry but he didn’t want to spend the night in a crummy hotel either. After I finished preflighting the airplane I discovered the captain talking with our flight attendant, an equable woman in her mid-50s. She had related that a friend’s husband had died recently and she was sad about it. The captain declared that she was obviously too upset to work the short trip that we had planned and instructed her to go home. Scheduling, the natural enemy of all pilots, then had to come up with another flight attendant. Flight attendant salaries are low but health insurance costs are so high in the U.S. that airlines tend to run slightly understaffed. They don’t have a room full of spare people waiting to step in. So it took about six hours for a replacement flight attendant to arrive, fresh off a plane from JFK. The captain had correctly figured that by the time a new flight attendant was found, the CVG-GRR-CVG trip would be delayed so long that he wouldn’t be legally able to fly the third leg.

Though I was anxious to begin the 11-hour drive to New York City there was nothing that I could do but wait. One of the ways that I killed time was to have a long dinner in the terminal with my female companion. Finally, however, it was time to go. I left her in the terminal and go into the plane to GRR.

By the time we got to Michigan it was pitch black outside. The airport was in the throes of a major construction project. The first 2000′ of the runway to which we were assigned was closed. The instrument landing system (electronic glide slope) and the PAPI (red/white lights that provide visual glide slope information) were shut down because they guide pilots to touch down roughly 1000′ down the runway, i.e., on a closed portion. So I had no electronic glide slope (just like the Asiana 214 pilots) and no visual glide slope (Asiana 214 had an operating PAPI prior to the accident; the wreck of the airplane destroyed the lights) and nothing to see out the window except the lights along the edges of the runway.

Making matters worse was the fact that I was sitting in the right seat of the airplane and, given the direction that we were flying in from, we’d been assigned to fly a traffic pattern involving left turns. I would have to look across the Captain and out the window to see the runway at all. This is challenging because, to save electricity, the runway lights are designed for best visibility when one is looking from a position that is aligned with the runway. It is also challenging because a Canadair Regional Jet is crammed full of switches and dials. The windows don’t provide nearly the angles of view that the windows of a light airplane or helicopter do. Heavy jets are designed to be flown by reference to instruments so the instruments are more prominent than the visual world.

If there are no red and white PAPI lights and no green needles in the airplane to indicate “too high” or “too low” how is it possible to land at all? The outline of the runway lights is critical. If the runway looks like a rectangle with 90-degree corners you’re flying right over top of it. If the runway looks like a little squashed trapezoid you’re probably grazing the treetops a couple of miles back. Somewhere in between these two sight pictures is what it should look like when on a 3-degree glide path. Unless one is completely familiar with the airport it is generally best to treat night landings as instrument landings and rely more on the PAPI and ILS than on one’s perceptions. But there was no PAPI, no ILS, and I’d never been to Grand Rapids before. It wouldn’t have been legal or practical to use the autopilot for the important parts of the approach.

Nobody was more surprised than I when the airplane touched down in the first third of the runway, the automatic ground spoilers popped up, and we turned off about two-thirds of the way down the runway and the captain took over for the taxi to the terminal (there is only one “tiller” on the airplane for making tight turns on the ground and it is on the captain’s side).

I was headed into the terminal to pick up our dispatch release (weather, flight plan, recommended fuel load, etc.) for the next flight, my mind fully occupied in congratulating myself on a job well done and reflecting on how lucky everyone was to be alive after an 80-hour jet pilot had done a visual approach at night to the kind of runway (flat pavement with edge lights) that normally only a local pilot in a Cessna 172 would use. My reverie was interrupted when a passenger pointed at me and started shouting to the gate agent and all the exhausted travelers getting off our plane and those who’d been waiting in the GRR terminal for six hours. “That’s the pilot who made our flight late. He wanted to have dinner with his girlfriend so we had to wait in Cincinnati for hours. I saw him in the restaurant and he wasn’t even hurrying.”

Related:

• My visual approach, and Asiana’s
• Asiana 214: Training with passengers in the back?
• Asiana crash thought: Positive exchange of flight controls between autopilot and human crew

Friends have asked me how it is possible that the fare-paying passengers on Asiana 214 were unwitting participants in a training flight. I explained that this is standard procedure.

At the Delta subsidiary where I flew we received about 60 hours of simulator training, only half of which was time on the controls and/or autopilot (the other half as “pilot monitoring” running the checklists, radios, switches, etc.). Then we took a checkride with an FAA-designated examiner (a senior pilot at the same airline) and were released into “initial operating experience” (IOE), the same phase of training that Asiana 214’s pilot was in. In the old days, a pilot had to do at least three takeoffs and landings in an empty airplane before being allowed to fly with passengers but that rule was relaxed due to faith in the fancy full-motion (Level D) sims and the staggering cost of operating empty jets. Unfortunately the sims are least faithful when it comes to visual approaches and the actual landing.

About half of my class at Comair failed a stage check and received additional sim training, but I got only the bare minimum. My checkride was not too stressful either. The oral exam, which can last 2-3 hours and can include any item of minute knowledge involving regulations, the aircraft’s systems, or almost anything else aviation-related, must by regulation precede the actual flying and it tends to set the tone. The examiner to whom I was assigned was accustomed to humiliating applicants with an opening oral question that none had ever been able to answer satisfactorily. After they realized how ignorant and worthless they were he beat them down for an additional three hours before getting into the sim with the demoralized young pilot.

What was the question? “Why does the Canadair Regional Jet have both an alternating current (AC) electrical system and a direct current (DC) system as well?” As it happened, I had wondered the same thing myself just a couple of weeks earlier. I’d carefully studied the electrical diagrams for the airplane and had a one-hour phone discussion with a friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley. Without giving the guy any hint as to my non-aviation background or the fact that I’d discussed this with a physicist, I went up to the whiteboard and gave a 5-minute talk about how Maxwell’s equations explained that a time-varying magnetic field, like you would get from using engine power to rotate permanent magnets, generates a time-varying electric field, i.e., alternating voltage potential. This AC power is ideal for driving the heaviest load on the airplane, the hydraulic pumps for the flight controls (a spinning motor having more or less the same structure as a generator). Having AC power at a high voltage also makes it easy to have lighter wires to move the power around the airplane and then transform down to lower voltage for radios, etc. A transformer will pass AC voltage but not DC.

He said “Your oral is complete. We’re getting into the sim now.” As my sim partner had been pulled back for some remedial training I flew with a line captain (he actually screwed up executing the published missed off one of the approaches; that’s how rare it is in real life to be assigned a published missed!) and I was done after about 1.5 hours. I had a type rating on my pilot certificate and virtually no ability to fly the airplane. (Experienced pilots say that it takes about a year to master a new airplane, perhaps less if transitioning from one big heavy jet to another, though perhaps not if the Asiana 214 accident is anything to go by.)

The newbie pilot is allowed to fly only with “check airmen” at the airline for the first 50-100 hours (a minimum of 50 hours in any case) until one of these check airmen signs off the pilot as having completed IOE.

My first flight was CVG to TYS (Knoxville, Tennessee), a distance of 197 nautical miles. We conducted the 30-minute trip at an altitude that would have been practical for some piston-engine airplanes and began the descent checklist as soon as we leveled off. The radios and PA system belong to the first officer during the taxi phase of the flight. It probably would have been only fair to tell the 50 folks in the back “I really appreciate your confidence in me because almost all of my flying experience has been in four-seat aircraft that weigh 3000 lbs. or less. This will be my first time flying a anything with more than 8 seats and I hope that it goes well. If you don’t want to be part of my training maybe you’d like to wait for the next flight.”

When we got down on the ground I was incredibly proud of myself. The heaviest plane that I had any real experience flying was a friend’s Twin Commander 1000, with a gross weight of 11,200 lbs. Most of my time was in a 3000 lb. Cirrus or a 2400 lb. Robinson R44 helicopter and yet I had executed a nearly perfect flight in a 50-seat 53,000 lb. jet. Apparently the landing was not quite as smooth as I thought, however, because the flight attendant got on the PA and said “As you can feel, we’ve landed in Knoxville.”

I was signed off from IOE at the minimum of 50 flight hours. I still didn’t know how to fly the airplane and now, instead of being paired with the airline’s best captains (the check airmen) I would be paired with the least senior ones (due to union seniority rules). The smartest captain that I encountered flatly refused to fly with me. He had just been upgraded to captain and had about 75 hours of experience as captain. I told him that I had about 100 hours in the airplane. He recognized the situation as a disaster in the making and told the airline to find him a different first officer.

On week after I completed IOE I was assigned to fly with a young recently upgraded captain to Toronto. I had about 75 hours of experience at this point during one month of flying the CRJ. The Tower cleared us to land on runway 33R. I had the plane set up perfectly. We were 3-4 miles from the runway and descending in a stable configuration. Then the Tower controller changed his mind: “Cancel landing clearance. You’re now cleared to land Runway 33L.” This is a shorter runway that starts about 2000′ farther away than 33R and also requires a horizontal sidestep of about 3500′. I would have to add some power and maneuver the airplane to line up with the other runway.

A good CRJ pilot would have added exactly the right amount of thrust so that it wouldn’t be necessary to touch the levers again until 50′ above the ground when it was time to pull them back to idle. How did I handle the situation? I added too much power. Then I took some back out. Then I had to add some back in. Then I finally got us stabilized close to the 500′ above-the-ground minimum altitude that our company rules called for (if not stable at 500′ in visual conditions, go around; if not stable at 1000′ in instrument conditions, go around). After we’d pulled off the runway and cleaned up the plane I said “That was so embarrassing. I feel like I should mail my ATP certificate back to the FAA.” The captain replied with one of the wisest and kindest things that anyone has ever said to me: “Nobody was born knowing how to fly a 53,000 lb. jet.”

[I think of that Toronto flight and this captain often. When my daughter Greta was two and half years old I bought her a bicycle with 12″ wheels and training wheels. She had trouble pedaling and said “It’s hard to do.” I responded with “Just keep practicing, Greta. Nobody was born knowing how to ride a bicycle.”]

A friend works at a big company that traditionally has offered Blackberries to its workers. Employees can, however, select a Windows Phone. One would think that this would work wonderfully as the company is heavily dependent on Microsoft server-side products. How does it work in practice? “I know only one person who chose a Windows Phone. Whenever I go to her office there is someone there from IT trying to get the phone to connect to company email. It works fine to make and receive calls, but it can’t get on the company network.”

Anyone out there have a Windows Phone? What is the real-world experience like?

Related: my review of Windows 8

The remarkably successful evacuation of Asiana 214 compels me to write a post in appreciation of flight attendants who have the toughest job at the airline.

Pilots enjoy the fun and challenge of handling the fancy machine. By the time we get into an airliner we are very familiar with the environment of airports, air traffic control, etc. In the Canadair Regional Jet that I flew we enjoyed about half of the fresh cold air produced by the “packs” while the 51 folks in the back sweated. We had comfortable chairs and our own escape if we decided that we needed to leave those chairs in a hurry. Unruly passengers in the back? We could just lock the door and clutch our weapons (crash axe that came with the airplane; federally issued 10mm pistol that most of the captains seemed to carry (our airline was founded and based in Northern Kentucky so carrying a gun was as natural to most of these guys as carrying a phone)).

How about the flight attendants? They suffered from the same sleep deprivation and crummy hotels that we did but weren’t logging multi-engine turbojet time. With up to 50 passengers on each flight there was always a chance that someone would be upset. I remember a day when a few thunderstorms had resulted in three-hour delays at JFK. A passenger was grousing that JetBlue wouldn’t be stuck in the long line that we were in (had he been able to see through the windshield he would have seen a JetBlue Airbus right in front of us). One one flight we heard a woman shrieking through the locked door. After landing we learned what the trouble was. The flight attendant had started serving snacks from the back of the airplane. As we were a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta (based in Georgia) the two choices naturally included a bag of peanuts. So about 20 of these bags had been opened by the time the 23-year-old flight attendant reached the front row. The shrieking was from a mother traveling with her two boys who were, in her opinion, so allergic to peanuts that the vapors from the previously opened bags would likely kill them. The flight attendant tried to explain that folks with peanut allergies were supposed to call ahead and the airline would wipe down three rows of seats with alcohol and not serve peanuts during that particular flight, but a stream of abuse continued to issue from the mother.

[The boys walked off the plane, by the way, without showing any ill effects from the peanut-suffused environment.]

The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice. So this posting is my thank-you note to flight attendants everywhere and to the Asiana 214 cabin crew in particular.

Friends visiting from California invited me to the Westin near Copley Square for breakfast. A girl who seemed to be 2-3 years old was playing with her mom. She spilled some of the mom’s coffee and, while the mom went to get napkins to wipe it up, ran and hid behind my chair, a huge smile on her face. The mom came back and called for her child, working herself into a loud state of panic within about 15 seconds after the first call. I finally caught her eye and gestured that the girl was hiding behind me. The mom was relieved and lightly scolded the girl. The lobby of the Westin is on the second floor of a big tower. If the girl did not get on an escalator she could not have gotten very far. I asked the mother what she had been afraid of. She replied “A stranger taking her.” I asked “How long do you think you’d have to leave a child unattended before there was a 50 percent chance that she would be abducted by a stranger?” The mom’s answer was “5 minutes.”

This got me wondering what the real answer might be. http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/MC19.pdf is a U.S. Department of Justice report that says that there are about 115 “stereotypical” child kidnappings in the U.S. each year and that teenagers are most at risk. We parents of young kids think that our children are the most precious things in the world, but it seems that, at least statistically, few other adults want them. There were about 72 million children in the U.S. during the 1999 year that the Feds made their survey. So a child has a 1 in 626,000 chance of being kidnapped in any given year and most of those are teenagers who are left unattended for at least 2-3 hours per day. If we take a one hour/day figure (averaging in young children, who are seldom unattended for long), that’s 26 billion unattended-child-hours nationwide during which 115 kidnappings occur (assume that no kidnappings occur when a child is watched by an adult). That’s approximately one kidnapping every 228 million hours or one every 26,000 years of continuous time left alone.

I can’t think of a good way to get a more precise number for toddlers. The government says that they are much less likely to be kidnapped than teenagers, but on the other hand toddlers are also typically fairly closely monitored by an adult (at least looking through a kitchen window into a backyard).

Anybody find an error in the above calculations? And what do we do with the result? Will knowing the statistics make it less likely that we will panic when a child falls momentarily out of sight? Can we follow our heads or must we be slaves to our (jumpy) hearts?

My friend Avni, who works tirelessly and without pay on behalf of Kids on Computers (http://www.kidsoncomputers.org), a 501(c)(3) non-profit, asked me if I had any more laptops to donate to her organization. If you’ve been dreaming of upgrading to Windows 8, this is your big chance/excuse. [Sadly, the children who get these machines will not be able to enjoy using Windows 8; the machines are wiped and installed with Linux.]

Here’s what Avni says…

Kids on Computers is seeking laptops for an elementary school in Molcaxac, Puebla, Mexico. The laptops must have 512MB RAM, include a power adaptor and be in working condition. We’d like to have the laptops by July 14th as we have a group of students from Mexico visiting the US leaving to go back at that time and they can transport them back.

I’m listening to Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness in my car. The authors describe a survey of MBA students in which just 5 percent predicted that they would turn out to be in the bottom 50 percent of the class. Fifty percent of the students predicted that they would fall into the top 20 percent when the semester was over. How about their professors? A university-wide survey (not just the B-school) found that 94 percent of professors imagined themselves to be above average in competence.

[I wonder if the more elite the group the greater the overconfidence. A math professor told me about her days as a graduate student teaching calculus at Florida State: “A third of the students were jocks who didn’t do any homework. They expected not to learn anything and to fail the class, which they did.” She was fortunate to land a job as an assistant professor at an expensive elite private university. “It was the same situation there. About a third of the students didn’t do any work and didn’t learn any calculus so I gave them Fs, just like at Florida State. A few days later every dean at the university converged on my office to explain that my students were not failures and could not possibly receive Fs. I had to change all of the grades to Cs.”]

A friend of mine is in the mathematics department at a large state university. I asked him what he was going to teach for the upcoming semester and he replied “I told the head of my department that I would teach anything except our classes for education majors.” What’s wrong with those classes? “Remember that the weakest students at the university are the ones who are going to become teachers. The curriculum of the ed school is not about content, so the students aren’t expected to learn any math. The ed school tries to lower the bar as much as possible so that they can crank out as many teachers are possible.” What does the ed school want their majors to learn about math then? “They want us to teach them how to draw a vertical line on the blackboard, how to develop a lesson plan. We’re always having fights with the ed school professors because we try to put some math into a course with a title such as ‘Math for Elementary School Teachers.’ I tried teaching the class once but it was a disaster. The textbook is almost content-free. You’re trying to teach Euclidean geometry without mentioning anything about proofs.”

Friends have been asking me how it is possible that the Asiana 777 landed short of the runway at SFO.

It turns out that the instrument landing system (ILS) glide slope was out of service. So the pilots were likely conducting a “visual approach”, i.e., looking out the window to see if the airplane was properly positioned to land. There are synthetic glide slopes available from WAAS-enhanced GPS receivers and there is a RNAV 28L approach at SFO that provides LPV minimums for such units. These cost about $500 to install in an experimental (uncertified) airplane, but regulation adds $10,000 to that cost when the gear goes into a certified airplane such as a four-seat Cirrus SR20. Touching even one screw on an airliner, after it leaves the factory, costs closer to $1 million. So it seems unlikely that Asiana had retrofitted their B777 with the latest WAAS GPS gear.

How hard it is to fly a visual approach? That’s how all approaches are flown in light piston-powered airplanes during training. Things move both a little faster with jets and a little slower. The speeds are faster, e.g., 120-145 knots on final approach instead of 60-70. What is slower is the response of the aircraft to power adjustments. Some of this is due to simple inertia. The airliner weighs a lot more. Some of this is due to the fact that jet engines, once “spooled down”, can’t provide instant power.

Here’s a story from my second month of flying regional jets for Comair, a Delta Airlines subsidiary. I am leaving the original language but adding notes in brackets because this was written for my pilot friends.

Today was a beautiful clear and calm day for flying. I took the CRJ [Canadair Regional Jet, a 50-passenger 53,000 lb. airliner] from RDU up to LaGuardia. The ATIS [canned weather broadcast, updated hourly] said that we could expect the ILS 22 at LGA. Our clearance was to descend and maintain 4000′, head for the Verrazano Bridge, then fly up the Hudson River. We were high and close to the airport, restricted to a minimum speed of 180 knots, when New York Approach cleared us for the “visual 22”. These are the toughest maneuvers for newbies because one has much less time to get stabilized than with a full ILS procedure and it is almost impossible to use the autopilot, which won’t intercept the radio beams at extreme angles.

The airline encourages us to fly 5 knots faster than “Vref” [around 145 knots in a CRJ with all seats filled] during training, in order to have a margin for error in case of wind gusts or incompetence. When a runway is short, however, the extra energy is difficult to dissipate and tends to result in significant float. The runway at LGA is 7000′. A test pilot demonstrated the ability to get the airplane stopped in about 3000′, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been consistent and it certainly would not have been comfortable for passengers. The minimum runway length that people regularly use for the CRJ is 6000′.

My approach was slightly fast and slightly high. I was reluctant to adjust the thrust in the last 300′ or so because we had been fairly stable on glide slope and on airspeed. In previous approaches I had tended to overcontrol. I started the round-out at the 1000′ markers, and touched down about 2500′ down the runway, applying moderate brakes and thrust reversers and turning off at Charlie, having chewed up almost 5000′ of runway (out of 7000′). Passengers complimented me on the smoothness of the landing, saying “It is usually rough here at LaGuardia” (of course it is usually rough because pilots more skilled than I are trying to get the plane on the ground, have the spoilers deploy, and stop the plane before it runs into a swamp).

Captain Mark said “That landing sucked. I’ve got 13,000 hours in this airplane. I’m going to show you how it is done on the next leg.” He then asked “Are you flying the airplane or is the airplane flying you?” When I asked for specific tips Captain Mark replied that I was an instructor and ought to be able to figure out what I was doing wrong. He grudgingly confirmed that I had left too much thrust in for too long.

We approached Charlotte, North Carolina in near perfect conditions. The weather was smooth and, due to some clouds at 2500′, we were given vectors for the full ILS 23 approach. [The controllers vectored us so that we were lined up with the runway approximately 10 miles from touchdown.] Captain Mark let the autopilot do most of the work, concentrating on getting the thrust exactly right for a stabilized approach. At about 200′ above the ground, Captain Mark disconnected the autopilot and transitioned to hand-flying. Somehow he ended up a little fast and also flared a bit too high. The CRJ is a very efficient glider and spooled down jet engines don’t supply the kind of drag that props would. The CRJ entered a shockingly efficient glide in ground effect at 10-15′ above the runway. We weren’t descending. We weren’t slowing down. The 7500′ runway was slipping away beneath us.

It is unclear how one would fix a situation like this. [In a piston airplane the best and easiest fix is to add power, retract the flaps, and climb away from the runway in order to try again; this can’t be done in an airliner due to the long spool-up time of the engines.] In a piston airplane you’d add a touch of power and pull back for a slower and less efficient airspeed. The airplane would sink due to loss of efficiency and the power would slow the vertical speed. In the jet, once the thrust levers are back it takes 3 or more seconds to get any significant power from the engine. Nosing the airplane forward would result in hitting the nose gear, which isn’t any better on a jet than on a piston four-seater.

After we had sailed over approximately half the runway, the airplane finally started to settle towards the surface. We touched with about 3000′ remaining [i.e., 4500′ down the runway, 2000′ more float than I experienced at LGA]. Captain Mark slammed hard on the brakes, to the point where the passengers probably would have said “ouch!”, and applied full reverse thrust. Tower called and asked “Are you going to be able to make Foxtrot?” This was the second-to-last taxiway and only about 500′ from the end of the runway. In fact, we did make Foxtrot, but only barely. We used just about a full 7000′ of runway. [I.e., at LGA we would have been nose-to-nose with the boats.]

What did I learn from watching a very capable guy with 13,000 hours of CRJ experience? That landing a CRJ consistently requires more than 13,000 hours of experience…

————— end of story from 2008

Additional background: The CRJ is an adapted business jet and, lacking leading edge devices or “slats”, lands much faster than a standard airliner such as a Boeing 737. In addition to the challenge of speed the pilot must, in the last 40-50 vertical feet of the flight, pull the airplane from its 3-degrees nose-down attitude to a standard nose-up landing attitude of about +9 degrees. (This lead one FlightSafety instructor to refer to every landing in a CRJ as a “controlled crash”. The procedure is different enough than in a Boeing or Airbus that the plane comes with a special briefing card for jump-seating pilots of conventional airliners so that they don’t start screaming in the last 30 seconds of the flight.)

Follow-up: Folks to whom I emailed the story asked me how the rest of the trip with this pilot went. My reply: “Captain Mark found fault with everything that I did for the next three days. I hadn’t ironed my shirts properly. I left my bags next to the airstair door while doing a preflight inspection, thinking that it would give the captain and flight attendant more space and freedom to put away their bags. Captain Mark admonished me “You have to go up into the airplane, put your stuff away, and then go back outside to do the preflight.”

Punchline: About six months later, US Airways 1549 was flying the same route (LGA to CLT) and went down in the Hudson River. Asked my opinion about the heroes Captain Sully and Jeffrey Skiles I said “Hey, Captain Mark and I took 50 passengers from LGA to CLT. We got them to the gate at Charlotte, on time, warm and dry, and nobody called us heroes.”