Medellin Plane Crash: How many other Carriers cut it so fine?

[fountainhall]

i was merely responding to the fact that gerefan made a blatantly racist posting.

Yet another attempt to weasel out of your own words. Nowhere in your post was there any quote from gerefan whose posts were not even on the same page! And your post was immediately after my post discussing corruption in FIFA in its final paragraph. So you can't wriggle out of that non-sequitur so easily, Sexually Deviant Latin.

Besides, your earlier comments failed to take into account any realisation that the pilot of the jet which crashed was guilty of mass murder. He played Russian roulette by filing a flight plan that had as the distance precisely the absolute maximum range of the aircraft - assuming no headwinds, weather diversions etc. He was effectively playing Russian roulette with the lives of his crew and his passengers. But this criminal had loaded the entire chamber of his gun with bullets - bar one. It has been reported he'd flown the route a couple of times before in similar circumstances and the gun did not go off. This time it did - with disastrous consequences.

[fountainhall]

Any aircraft accident is caused by a multile number of factors lining up ( known as the Swiss cheese theory) and it's certainly true here from what information is available.

I don't believe the Swiss Cheese theory was anything like obvious on December 2nd. It is certainly totally debunked now. This was one pilot, co-owner of his airline which had just one functioning aircraft. He filed a flight plan showing length of flight and maximum range of the fuelled aircraft as identical - 4 hrs 22 mins. Despite the airport at his scheduled refuelling point being closed by the time he got there, he could have landed for fuel at Bogota with ease. He didn't. He gambled with the innocent lives of all those on board believing he could just be on the ground before his fuel tanks were totally empty. Factually, he might have been able to do so but for being asked to stack for 7 minutes to permit the other aircraft with an emergency to land. Even when told to stack, he never mentioned lack of fuel reserves. Had he done so, that would have given him absolute priority and he probably could have landed safely. But not carrying enough fuel would have landed him in jail for a considerable number of years and ended his career as a pilot. He panicked, declared electrical failures and only towards the end did he mention fuel. But by then it was all too late.

[gerefan2]

The Swiss Chees is well and still alive in this case. It has come to light that this guy has completed similar flights in the past, where presumably the Swiss Chees was avoided.
On the surface it appears he was held, not in itself unusual but the other aircraft had an emergency of some sort, so somewhat unusual. He was flying with a very, very junior First Officer allegedly on her first flight with this outfit.
These two factors alone add up ...had he held before whilst so short of fuel...had he held for an emergency before whist short.. had he flown before with an extremely junior F.O. who may have been very unassertive flying with the airline owner...all whilst so short of fuel.
Lastly, if you are still listening Latinpox,what do you think of the latest accident today in Pakistan (with reference to my previous quote from Flight International) post #7 ?

[gerefan2]

[QUOTE=gerefan2;211964]The Swiss Chees is well and still alive in this case. It has come to light that this guy has completed similar flights in the past, where presumably the Swiss Chees was avoided.
On the surface it appears he was held, not in itself unusual but the other aircraft had an emergency of some sort, so somewhat unusual. He was flying with a very, very junior First Officer allegedly on her first flight with this outfit.
These two factors alone add up ...had he held before whilst so short of fuel...had he held for an emergency before whist short.. had he flown before with an extremely junior F.O. who may have been very unassertive flying with the airline owner...all whilst so short of fuel..

[fountainhall]

The Swiss Chees is well and still alive in this case.

There really is no Swiss Cheese analogy in the Medellin crash - sadly. The plane's pilot, a man who had gambled with the lives of his passengers on previous flights of roughly similar length and managed to get his plane safely to the ground, was wholly responsible here. This is wikipedia's definition of the Swiss Cheese effect -

It likens human systems to multiple slices of swiss cheese, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by the differing layers and types of defenses which are "layered" behind each other. Therefore, in theory, lapses and weaknesses in one defense do not allow a risk to materialize, since other defenses also exist, to prevent a single point of weakness

In other words, a series of things have to go wrong/systems fail for the accident to happen. In this case nothing points to anything other than the captain being solely responsible - in the same way that the co-pilot of the German Wings flight was solely responsible for flying his aircraft into the Alps. Yes, he seems to have broken all the rules in previous flights of similar length and had still been able to land. Fate was then on his side. In this case, he could have refuelled at Bogota - and elected not to. Leaked reports of the black box recordings show he was aware he was running out of fuel as he was getting close to Medellin. When asked to stack, he knew he had virtually no fuel - and elected not to advise Medellin air traffic control. Why did he have his landing gear down when circling at over 20,000 ft (unusually high for any landing) when this would only increase drag and use up more fuel? Even when lack of fuel resulted in his electrical systems failing, he could still have announced the fuel emergency and been given absolute landing priority. Yet he still did not do so, because he knew the deep shit this would land him and the airline in. And when you read the pprune.org posts, it seems there would still have been a chance he could have glided that aircraft to the ground but his panic and lack of experience resulted in the plane falling from the sky.

The pilot also would have known that an emergency landing with zero fuel would have seen him and his crew grounded perhaps for weeks, the aircraft impounded, massive fines and suspension of the airline's operating licence. With his company having no other usable aircraft and, according to more recent media reports, no insurance for international flights, his mind must have been awash with dire foreboding as his plane was about to crash.

I do agree that the late arrival of the commercial flight made it impossible to refuel as scheduled on Cobija. But Bogota was listed as an official refuel stop if required. Even if Cobija had still been open, would he actually have bothered with that take-off and landing, given that he had not bothered with refuelling several times before and still chose to overfly Bogota? And yes, the issue of massive FIFA corruption and the possibility that soccer teams were "encouraged" to use that one aircraft airline - its two other aircraft were impounded due to faulty maintenance - probably did play a role.

But going back to Swiss Cheese, here's what one poster wrote on pprune.org -

The Swiss cheese model does not work when there's criminal negligence involved. If there's one guy not playing by the rules, then the system breaks down very easily. (Post #687)

Let's also consider the closing paragraph of the Economist article I refer to in a previous post -

Sometimes, as with sports clubs and business delegtions, large groups must travel together. Commercial airlines cannot always provide that service. Yet chartered and private flights are substantially more likely to crash, with pilot error being the cause in nearly 90% of cases. A Bloomberg News review last year found that private crews are overworked and demands from hurried passengers to land on time can encourage reckless decision-making. Lamia Airlines flight 2933 is another reminder of the horrible costs that people risk by cutting corners in the air.

[fountainhall]

The Swiss cheese analogy just took another hit with the revelation that the pilot in command did not have enough hours training to qualify for a commercial pilot's licence. As bad, the co-pilot was aware of this glaring error but did not tell the authorities in order to protect the airline's reputation!

http://www.airlineratings.com/news/9...football-crash