I personally don’t understand your glee with the unfortunate situation this crew now finds itself in. You must admit that they obviously only came to occupy those seats after many years (in the case of the captain, certainly) of hard won experience and after careful vetting by quite a selective hiring board at Emirates.
They must have demonstrated more than ample aptitude and delivered many years of safe, professional service under varying and occasionally trying conditions in probably a slew of different types before their takeoff that day in Melbourne.
That normally competent and conscientious crews can still somehow manage to sometimes “screw the pooch” so badly as to endanger lives should be a source of puzzlement, sure, or lead to calls for the circumstances to be thoroughly studied to find any possible systemic contributions, if any, to the errors–yes, these are appropriate reactions to a detremination of “pilot error” (and who expected any other verdict, really?). But to mock these men who’ve had years of good work cast aside to be branded by this one incident to the point their careers are essntially at an end (I certainly hope not) is terribly uncouth and classless.
Especially when many on this forum are probably never exposed to anywhere near the level of continuous professional scrutiny in their own fileds that the gentlemen they diegn to denigrate endure (with a fair measure of professional pride, I can attest).
Sorry, this has touched a nerve with me. These guys made an honest mistake but, unlike most other professions, they will probably not be allowed to profit, learn and grow from thier experience and continue to earn their keep. It is sad to add insult to this terrible injury.
Very well said, unfortunately this event further proves the unchallenged thoery that so long as there is human intervention there will be mistakes, all the technology in the world cannot iron this out.
What I can’t understand is why onboard systems didn’t detect the error.
To my mind, and in it’s simplest form, a zero fuel weight is the aircraft weight + payload . To this you add your fuel load to give you your Take-off weight. In this instance, the F/O entered a Take-off weight which was 100 tons less than it should have been.
Now, the onboard software knew the zero fuel weight. It also knew the fuel load. How come it didn’t detect that the Take-off weight was way below the correct figure.
Standing by to be corrected.
jethro, you’ve answered your own question, it didn’t detect it because it didn’t know, the FMS (or FMGC for pedants) is only as good as the person operating it, i.e. you put sh** in, you get sh** out, all computers are the same.
What was missing was the couple of opportunities to cross check the information put in, and the information is was spilling out. One of these would have been a cross check with the load sheet. One other would have been a cross check with each crew member.
If I remember correctly the FMS will calculate a ZFW, and will know what fuel you have on board, but it won’t know the Traffic Load, this will be entered in manually. So it was pretty obvious this was loaded in and not crosschecked somehow.
Hmm… To quote the article linked above:
“Emirates head pilot Capt Alan Stealey said both the pilot and first officer of the damaged jet had said they were “well rested” before takeoff, after a 38-hour layover.”
38 hours sounds like a long enough rest to me, change of time zones or not.
Paul
No Paul it isn’t, fatigue, and/or tireness is cumulative. When they arrived in MEL this would have been on the back of a schedule that could have lasted 6 days. 1½ day’s rest after 5-6 days working and travelling through different time zones is not enough rest, period.
My pattern is generally 5-2-5-2-6-3. This does not include time zone changes as we are back at base every day. But having to get up at 03:30, or getting home at 00:30 during this week will build up tiredness, by the time my 2 days off arrive I am absolutely knacked. These guys have to fly for long periods at a time which is mind numbingly dull at the best of times, this coupled with irregular sleep patterns probably including late nights & early mornings, then having 1½ days to get over it? Sorry, it isn’t black & white.
Dean
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