Air Canada Incident

[ypph]

Big lesson: KEEP YA F CKING SEATBELTS ON WHEN SEATED AS INSTRUCTED

[jjj]

Sorry AC you guys are getting totally fucked by the media on this one.

Was at work today at WS end of the terminal and my co-workers were not happy with how the media was treating this incident. Some WS emplyees were also defending AC today to some pax who were falling for the media hype and doing a little Air Canada bashing.

Shit media like this hurts us all.

Our last media shit storm took a full week to blow over.


JJJ

[jjj]

I just Googled Direct Law.

Without getting into the gee whiz stuff, it sounds that Direct Law on an Airbus is a lot like hand flying a Boeing?

[husky]

There were no airmets, sigmets, or pireps all day after this incident. If it was at all attributable to turbulence, you'd think they would have issued something...

[Etienne]

For those of us uninitiated in Airbus-speak/Big-plane speak; "Direct Law" -- is that some kind of fail-safe mode, or pilot override of the usual systems?

A nice simple explanation about all the laws and their effects:
http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm

[Sulako]

Are the CADORS written by people with an aviation background?

I'm just wondering because it says the plane did a roll. Is that correct? That would be pretty wild view from the cockpit...or from the cabin. Can you imagine being the poor guy who was in the washroom when this happened? Hopefully it wasn't for #2 because that could have gotten real messy...

[Redwine]

I wonder what the Experts on future "Pilot-less" aircraft have to say about this one....

[co-joe]

Are the CADORS written by people with an aviation background?

I'm just wondering because it says the plane did a roll. Is that correct? That would be pretty wild view from the cockpit...or from the cabin. Can you imagine being the poor guy who was in the washroom when this happened? Hopefully it wasn't for #2 because that could have gotten real messy...

Apparently the Lavs were all occupied at the time of the incident. If the forces were enough to put a 300# food cart against the ceilling imagine what other ... um shit went flying...

[kitin]

Big lesson: KEEP YA F CKING SEATBELTS ON WHEN SEATED AS INSTRUCTED

Agree...we should know what things we need to obey for our own safety...

[Hedley]

the forces were enough to put a 300# food cart against the ceilling

um ... it wouldn't matter if the foot cart was 3 pounds
or 3,000 pounds it would have risen the same distance
inside the fuselage, from the point of view of the pax.

From an outside frame of reference, the objects in
the fuselage stayed in the same location while the
fuselage was vertically displaced.

Negative G is a bit of acquired taste, I know ... and while
you may never quite get to enjoy it, after a while it's not
really so bad.

[Rockie]

Turbulence no doubt started this whole thing, but what transpired afterward will need to be dissected and analyzed because it sounds a lot less straight forward than it should have been. The flight controls can degrade to direct law through other means than failure of flight control computers and in direct law it can be challenging to fly, more so at high altitude. That combined with the fact that when something goes wrong with that plane the PNF's workload increases tremendously I think they did a pretty damn good job.

Good on them.

[swede]

I wonder what the Experts on future "Pilot-less" aircraft have to say about this one....

What do they care, my guess would be the "experts" would never set foot in a pilot-less aircraft anyways, the drones will be reserved for the peons and people who are too stupid to know any better. Probably offer up some real cheap fares too .

[Rockie]

Not exactly right Hedley. The objects in the airplane would have been falling at a rate of 33 feet/sec/sec. For it to rise to the ceiling the airplane would have had to fall faster than that. But a rapid displacement of only a few feet would feel pretty uncomfortable when you're sipping your wine and watching Die Hard.

[YWG gearcleaner]

I'm really dissapointed in Mr. F L, of pro VFR. For a chap who has very limited gliding and light aircraft experience, he made a very strong point of saying he didn't think turbulence caused this. Why make these assumptions, especially when you can't relate to the incident at hand.

Great job to the crew, a lesson learned for all.

[ei ei owe]

Why make these assumptions, especially when you can't relate to the incident at hand.

Can you???

[cjet]

Hey Guys,

I was on AC 190 yesterday. I just wanted to say that from my point of view the crew did a awesome job. Two of the Three flight attendants were injured and continued to assist the passengers and prepare the cabin for landing. The Pilots kept us informed as to what happened and what we were doing. All I know is that we were in smooth air in cruise when the plane rolled abruptly to the left followed by a roll reversal to the right. There were then about 3 more roll reversal that were getting small in intensity. It seemed to me that after the first roll upset the crew was getting the Plane back under control. The first roll reversal was a very rapid movement. It was nothing that I have ever experienced before. It was a very violent disruption. As you can imagine anything that was not strapped down was airborne. I was lucky that my neither I nor my family was hurt. After the crew had the Plane back under control the Captain
made a PA and said that then had had a computer malfunction and that the problem had been isolated and that they were manually flying the Plane. The rest of the flight was smooth with a nice landing in YYC. I just wanted to say thank you to the crew for getting us on the ground safely.
B757 FO

[sidestick stirrer]

Thank you, Sean, for first-hand, knowledgeable, and unbiased news for all of us here.
Your experience would seem to pretty much rule out CAT. I was going to ask if there was any FSS-types on here who could look up Lethbridge's surface winds for the incident timeframe, but it was pretty early in the day for any strong, outflow winds to appear.

[co-joe]

Son of ..? Good to hear you and the fam are alright. Thanks for the first hand account. Our flight medics responded to the call and from what they said it could have been a lot worse. No serious injuries all were "yellow".

[justplanecrazy]

Sean glad to hear you're ok. It's funny when you have the inside story, to watch the media scramble through so many scenarios before figuring out the truth. I often wonder how much AC, or the company involved, pays the "experts" to keep stating that it has nothing to do with them, just an act of God. If they can suffer the initial storm, then there'll be no new info for a year until the report is released and by then its not news worthy. It's funny when people are so certain about what happened, despite not having any factual info on the incident. Look back 5 posts from your own and someone already looks really silly.

[Check Pilot]

Link.

Note the mention of AEF.

http://othernews.ca.myway.com/article// ... 75018.html

[wirez]

LOL get a load of this.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/293123

The article starts off saying "...as Air Canada Flight 190 plunged thousands of metres through the sky during 15 seconds of terror..."

Gotta love it when journalists talk about aviation.

[Rockie]

There's more to this than me or any of the other speculators here know. No single computer failure whether its an ELAC, SEC, IRS or ADC should cause this kind of thing because of the redundancies and electronic validations built into the systems. Something upset this airplane initially and if it wasn't turbulence then it had to be some other very strange, very sudden combination of failures. There is nothing in any Airbus manual or training situation that suggests this could happen with any system failure. In fact jet upset for Airbus pilots wasn't even done until recently. I think this one will go in the books as something new.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

Reading some of the descriptions of the roll rate that that bus alledgedly performed got me to thinking about how the machine responded to a quick sideways movement of the controller....in any of the law modes I don't recall it reacting like a Pits Special to a quick full aileron application, so what could have produced such a fast roll rate?

[viccoastdog]

Not exactly right Hedley. The objects in the airplane would have been falling at a rate of 33 feet/sec/sec. For it to rise to the ceiling the airplane would have had to fall faster than that. But a rapid displacement of only a few feet would feel pretty uncomfortable when you're sipping your wine and watching Die Hard.

Not quite exactly either...The objects would be accelerating at a rate of about 32 feet/sec/sec (or about 9.8m/sec2), near the earth's surface and with no regard for the resistance offered by air. So eventually the accelerating object (food service cart) would catch up to an aircraft decending at a constant, if very high, rate...assuming the ground isn't too close.

[Rockie]

In normal law roll rate is limited to 15 degree/sec roll. Some external force like turbulence could easily exceed that, plus it doesn't sound like it was in normal law anyway. Even with full stick deflection giving aileron and spoilers it's not unheard of to run out of lateral control in really gusty conditions. Also it's hard to determine the roll rate based on eye witness accounts even from experienced pilots sitting in the back. I'm sure the FDR will reveal all though.