Human error

Quote: Nareed

It's worth noting that after the FUBAR fuel situation, the pilots at least kept their focus on flying their crippled jet effectively. They were thinking then.

Following Air Canada's internal investigation, Captain Pearson was demoted for six months, and First Officer Quintal was suspended for two weeks. Three maintenance workers were also suspended.

From what I read, the flight crew (especially the Captain) performed their duties in a spectacular manner. It seems the runway they landed on was decommissioned and it was full of families, cars and campers and go karts. The maneuvers that Captain Pearson used were based on his experience as a glider pilot, as nothing in the manuals covered an aircraft running out of fuel. As it was the plane had to glide 80 miles to land at the old Air Force base, and they were still 50 miles from the nearest commercial airport at Winnipeg.The fact that they landed the plane without hurting anyone on board or a single person on the ground was a miracle.

It also took great courage to head for gimli which they knew could not provide any crash, rescue or fire services. Heading for winnepeg with its long runways and hordes of trucks and ability to foam a runway is temping but they soon determined they would not reach it.

demoting the crew was terrible, but when heads have to fall, its never going to be the airline officials who accepted a politically correct, ie, metric plane without a full shakedown allowance.

Quote: Fleastiff

...demoting the crew was terrible, but when heads have to fall, its never going to be the airline officials who accepted a politically correct, ie, metric plane without a full shakedown allowance.

I think these "stupid" errors happen all the time.

I don't know if you are familiar with towed arrays, but they are for surveying the ocean acoustically.


An oft used force in nautical history is the friction force of a cable wrapped around a drum. Here is an old fashioned capstan and the crew is bringing something onboard attached to a cable.


Anyway with towed arrays you simply can't unwind them far enough or they will slip away into the ocean and you lose millions of dollars in equipment. This involves something really high tech like a guy standing there and counting the spin of the drum, and saying stop when you get to some arbitrary number.

We had a guy onboard the ship lose count. None of the tech crew would say anything, they all swore they had no idea how the equipment could have fallen away into the ocean. But in our case nobody got fired.

someone failed. Losing some super secret and super expensive towed array sonar system? Heck you put a great big leather strap on the spool so things come to a halt.

Its like speaking to a helmsman, or approaching the engineer at a mine. the engineer had to count how far down the elevator was going, if he dropped it, he would walk off right then for having killed everyone who was on it, but if someone tried to talk to him, they would be off the work site immediately.

Quote: Pacomartin

I think these "stupid" errors happen all the time.

I don't know if you are familiar with towed arrays, but they are for surveying the ocean acoustically.


An oft used force in nautical history is the friction force of a cable wrapped around a drum. Here is an old fashioned capstan and the crew is bringing something onboard attached to a cable.


Anyway with towed arrays you simply can't unwind them far enough or they will slip away into the ocean and you lose millions of dollars in equipment. This involves something really high tech like a guy standing there and counting the spin of the drum, and saying stop when you get to some arbitrary number.

We had a guy onboard the ship lose count. None of the tech crew would say anything, they all swore they had no idea how the equipment could have fallen away into the ocean. But in our case nobody got fired.

Our rule was to always leave 6 wraps on winch drums. Having used many a capstan, 4 wraps will hold an amazing amount.

Quote: Fleastiff

someone failed. Losing some super secret and super expensive towed array sonar system? Heck you put a great big leather strap on the spool so things come to a halt.

You may need to do as many as a hundred legitimate spins to offload the array before you get to the critical portion. There were some fancy patents on winch systems

Quote: Fleastiff

Its like speaking to a helmsman, or approaching the engineer at a mine. the engineer had to count how far down the elevator was going, if he dropped it, he would walk off right then for having killed everyone who was on it, but if someone tried to talk to him, they would be off the work site immediately.

The FAA passed sterile cockpit rules in 1981.

Quote: Pacomartin

An oft used force in nautical history is the friction force of a cable wrapped around a drum. Here is an old fashioned capstan and the crew is bringing something onboard attached to a cable.

I may have the physics wrong but I think they are unwinding the capstan in that picture!

Quote: TheCesspit

Quote: Pacomartin

An oft used force in nautical history is the friction force of a cable wrapped around a drum. Here is an old fashioned capstan and the crew is bringing something onboard attached to a cable.

I may have the physics wrong but I think they are unwinding the capstan in that picture!

Pushing on a good strong hemp rope? Is that Paco's crew?

Quote: TheCesspit

I may have the physics wrong but I think they are unwinding the capstan in that picture!

I didn't notice that. But my point was that you could design the winch with a slip ring and try and develop a complex locking mechanism. But the designer simply figured there was more than enough force from the friction around the drum. All the crew had to do was to keep enough wraps on the roll.

Everything goes along fine until someone loses count, and all the equipment slides off and drops to the bottom.

It's like the airplane. The overwhelming amount of time the fuel gages work properly. If they don't you can manually enter in the amount of fuel that you put on the plane, and it will keep track of how much you burn. The designers never considered the dual failure of both the fuel gages failing, and the crew manually entering the incorrect amount of fuel because of stupid metric conversion error.

As the plane went out of fuel, and the hydraulic surfaces that steer the plane couldn't be controlled without power, the crew frantically looked for emergency procedures. There were none because no one could envision this scenario.

Quote: Pacomartin

As the plane went out of fuel, and the hydraulic surfaces that steer the plane couldn't be controlled without power, the crew frantically looked for emergency procedures. There were none because no one could envision this scenario.

Oh, but they do!

For one thing airplanes can glide. That is, they can convert altitude to speed at a known rate. They don't just simply fall down. But the other thing is aircraft carry an electric generator connected to a propeller about as large as that on a single-engine Cessna. Its sore din the fuselage, but pops out automatically if all other power fails. It's called a Ram Air Turbine.

So CA 143 could be controlled. Not as well as when at least one engine worked, but much better than happened with the United DC-10 which crash-landed at Sioux City, Iowa a few years later. That one had two working engines, but the lines to the hydraulics were cut when the center engine blew. They had power, but no means to activate the control surfaces.