Toronto - Delta Airlines CRJ-900 upside down, Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) to Toronto

Lindberg said:
How did you determine there were no defective parts?
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There may have been, but the sink rate at touchdown was nearly double the certification requirements so there would have been no expectation that something would not have failed even if there were no defective parts.
 
Larry in TN said:
There may have been, but the sink rate at touchdown was nearly double the certification requirements so there would have been no expectation that something would not have failed even if there were no defective parts.
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How is the requirement computed? At the angle it came down it looks like the right main took all of the force at touchdown / impact.
 
Rene said:
How is the requirement computed? At the angle it came down it looks like the right main took all of the force at touchdown / impact.
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You'd have to look at the regulation for the details. The limit is 600fpm at max landing weight. 360fpm at max takeoff weight.
 
jordane93 said:
I disagree. Seniority is king and should be kept that way. Beef up training, make sim instructors fly the line more, more line checks, stricter limitations on repeat sim events, etc is what I think would be better.
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how does senority provide safety?
 
Bob Noel said:
how does senority provide safety?
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It doesn't necessarily. How ever it does prevent hiring off the street to displace more senior pilots at that company. One of the many things ALPA didn't get right. They should have had a national seniority number. That would have probably saved a few incidents over the years. Especially after some mergers.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Certainly that can't be the vertical speed at touchdown ...
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Those are the certification limits.

Bob Noel said:
how does senority provide safety?
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It doesn't. The regulations provide minimum stations for crew training, crew currency, and crew pairing. If those minimums are not met then the crew can not be paired and one of them must be replaced with someone who is qualified. Each contract would have provisions for how that would occur.

Crew schedulers do not know anything about proficiency. They make legal assignments. That's all.

I'm not sure what people think should be required. The F/O wasn't green. She had close to 500 hours in the airplane and had been flying it for a year. By the time she failed to add power, when the performance-increasing gust ended, it was likely too late for the Captain to fix it.
 
Lindberg said:
How did you determine there were no defective parts?
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We haven't seen any emergency AD's or SB's on the landing gear on the CRJ. That tells us they didn't find parts that were damaged/fatigued/broken before impact...
 
Bob Noel said:
I don't know why senority should be king. I would like to think that safety takes priority over senority.
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They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Airlines are plenty safe while still honoring seniority. There is always room to improve safety without abrogating seniority
 
Bob Noel said:
I don't know why senority should be king. I would like to think that safety takes priority over senority.
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Unions. Good luck flipping that seniority system. This is the largest reason that I never tried to make a living with aviation. In technology, I can jump companies and just make more money. My worth is coupled to the value I can produce, not my years in service at a particular company.

Meanwhile, in airlines, your employer screws up and you lose your job. Now you get to join another airline at the bottom. It makes no sense and quite frankly is not in the pilots best interest, but good luck convincing them of that.
 
jesse said:
Meanwhile, in airlines, your employer screws up and you lose your job. Now you get to join another airline at the bottom. It makes no sense and quite frankly is not in the pilots best interest, but good luck convincing them of that.
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I remember when Braniff failed. I was on the second to last flight, arriving into a dark terminal at DFW with no announcements and no one to unload bags. Remember hearing about an airline pilot driving UPS trucks after that. My wife worked for another airline that failed, years later. I watched the formal announcement with her in airport meeting room, with all the pilots, ramp people, and gate agents there. Tough business.
 
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You guys are way off on a tangent with seniority. How do you think seniority impacted this accident?

The sim instructor/Captain did not use seniority to get this trip. It was either an open trip or he displaced the trip holder for his currency flight.

This was not a Green/Green pairing.
 
Seniority does promote safety. Without it, a junior person ALLOWS a senior person to screw up, so they can move up.

Secondly, if bidding was performance based, all the weakest pilots would be doing the hardest flying.

Thirdly, in the case of a mishap, first question the defense asks is whether the MOST QUALIFIED pilot was flying. No? Why not? Preempted by us all being EQUALLY qualified.

I don’t think the squeamish public wants a dog eat dog performance based pilot group.
 
Create a new thread if you want to have a seniority discussion, please. As Larry said, it's not relevant to this accident anyway.
 
Seniority had nothing to do with this.

Just like flight hour experience had nothing to do with the Colgan crash.

But when something newsworthy happens, the FAA's need to "do something" often has simplistic actions.

We'll have to see what the NTSB recommendations, and FAA actions bring to the play book.
 
kyleb said:
Nope. When you hit something (the ground, in this case) hard enough, things break. Their vertical speed at touchdown was the issue, not a defective or under engineered part. The root cause here was the pilot and I expect the pilot(s) to suffer the consequences.
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Juan I believe said they hit at 1100 FPM at touchdown. Seems hard but not excessive.
Did any passengers complain I wonder.

Have to wait and see what they decide on the landing gear failure. Landing didn’t look really awful and thinking other like airframe’s must of been dropped in before without failure.
 
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bonefishpete said:
Juan I believe said they hit at 1100 FPM at touchdown. Seems hard but not excessive.
Did any passengers complain I wonder.
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Did you not read the part of the thread where it was discussed that 1100 FPM is about twice what the gear is designed for?
 
bonefishpete said:
Juan I believe said they hit at 1100 FPM at touchdown. Seems hard but not excessive.
Did any passengers complain I wonder.
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Not excessive??

You have to be joking.

1100 fpm is not a landing. It’s a crash. As evidenced by the airplane status after the “landing.”
 
Larry in TN said:
You'd have to look at the regulation for the details. The limit is 600fpm at max landing weight. 360fpm at max takeoff weight.
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600fpm for BOTH main landing gear. This was 1100 fpm for ONE. Essentially 4x force on the right side.
 
Rene said:
"So, Mr, and Mrs. Smith, how was the landing? I mean, before the abrupt swerve, the cabin rolling over, and you guys hanging by your seat belts from the ceiling?"
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Yea the landing not the E Ticket ride afterwards. The pilot put the wheels on the runway, what do you want?
 
Larry in TN said:
You'll have to show me where that is in the regulation. Airplanes frequently touchdown with one main before the other.
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Show me the regulation where a green pilot is allowed to do a CFiT on landing at 1100 fpm on one MLG, barrel roll the thing, while on fire.

Bob Hoover would be impressed.

She made a rookie mistake and nearly killed a bunch of people. I want to read the CVR transcripts.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
…She made a rookie mistake and nearly killed a bunch of people. I want to read the CVR transcripts.
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In all fairness, the FAA pays lip service to its wind shear awareness program.

This incident didn’t occur for a lot of reasons; it occurred because of a failure to recognize the effect of shear wasn’t taken into account. Beat up the PF all day long, but the PM could have called for a go around at any point.
 
TCABM said:
In all fairness, the FAA pays lip service to its wind shear awareness program.

This incident didn’t occur for a lot of reasons; it occurred because of a failure to recognize the effect of shear wasn’t taken into account. Beat up the PF all day long, but the PM could have called for a go around at any point.
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That's the problem. No one up front appeared to follow procedures in that situation. The PM should have had the experience of "Hey, I saw this movie before. Let's go around". The PF put them in an unrecoverable position of going to flight idle at 100vf because she was lured in by a headwind die-off.
 
jordane93 said:
I disagree. Seniority is king and should be kept that way. Beef up training, make sim instructors fly the line more, more line checks, stricter limitations on repeat sim events, etc is what I think would be better.
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Those would be OK too. The mitigation is up to management.

But, seniority doesn't trump green on green, so why should it trump a sim instructor who barely flies on a FO that doesn't even have 1500 hours yet?

kayoh190 said:
If you have heartburn over this, you should see what we do on the widebody.
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I wouldn't say I have heartburn... And IIRC you guys have special currency rules because you don't get many approaches and landings per flight hour, I assume that's what you're referring to? If not, do tell.

dtuuri said:
True? Take note you folks who say, "Look to the far end of the runway." Looking more off to the side would give more accurate height perception, imo. Tunnel vision down the runway could make a 160' width look farther below if accustomed to seeing something wider there. Pardon Moi, if this has been said before.
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Kinda tough to fool the EGPWS tho.

Lindberg said:
Are they also rewriting their CBA?
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I haven't read an airline CBA, but I would imagine that there's provisions in there regarding management's ability to make changes to procedures for safety purposes, as well as to ensure that the union has a representative in the room when the discussions are happening around safety risk mitigations.

Larry in TN said:
I'm not sure what people think should be required. The F/O wasn't green. She had close to 500 hours in the airplane and had been flying it for a year. By the time she failed to add power, when the performance-increasing gust ended, it was likely too late for the Captain to fix it.
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I'm not as concerned about the FO as the captain. However, even with 500 hours in the airplane, the FO's overall flying experience level is pretty low.

Larry in TN said:
You guys are way off on a tangent with seniority. How do you think seniority impacted this accident?
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I don't think that's what is being said.

I am saying that this was not a good crew pairing, even though it was legal, and that the captain should be flying more and more often; that there should be discussions about this going on in terms of risk mitigation. @jordane93 is saying that those changes should take a back seat to strictly seniority based scheduling.

bonefishpete said:
Juan I believe said they hit at 1100 FPM at touchdown. Seems hard but not excessive.
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Are you kidding? :o That's nearly 20 feet per SECOND... Or, put another way, if we put you in a chair whose legs are 6 feet off the ground and just drop you.

bonefishpete said:
Did any passengers complain I wonder.
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Yes. With lawyers and courts even.
 
@flyingcheesehead I think you are looking for solutions to a nonexistent problem.

Crew pairing wasn’t the problem.

Let me put it this way. Did this flight require a special skill set that one would not expect any random line pilot to posses? Also just a friendly reminder the captains role as PIC is not to be Chuck Yeager. The captain is the final authority for decisions and safe operation. This captain failed the test and I don’t think more time in the seat would have changed much.

Basically I’m saying this is a failure of the individual, not the system. No one made the sim instructor fly that day. It was his decision making. No matter how little he had flown real metal his decision making skills should have been fine.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Those would be OK too. The mitigation is up to management.

But, seniority doesn't trump green on green, so why should it trump a sim instructor who barely flies on a FO that doesn't even have 1500 hours yet?


I wouldn't say I have heartburn... And IIRC you guys have special currency rules because you don't get many approaches and landings per flight hour, I assume that's what you're referring to? If not, do tell.


Kinda tough to fool the EGPWS tho.


I haven't read an airline CBA, but I would imagine that there's provisions in there regarding management's ability to make changes to procedures for safety purposes, as well as to ensure that the union has a representative in the room when the discussions are happening around safety risk mitigations.


I'm not as concerned about the FO as the captain. However, even with 500 hours in the airplane, the FO's overall flying experience level is pretty low.


I don't think that's what is being said.

I am saying that this was not a good crew pairing, even though it was legal, and that the captain should be flying more and more often; that there should be discussions about this going on in terms of risk mitigation. @jordane93 is saying that those changes should take a back seat to strictly seniority based scheduling.


Are you kidding? :o That's nearly 20 feet per SECOND... Or, put another way, if we put you in a chair whose legs are 6 feet off the ground and just drop you.


Yes. With lawyers and courts even.
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Like @Tarheelpilot said, I think you’re fixating too much on the crew pairing. And FWIW this wasn’t a green on green pairing because that’s not allowed. There’s no real special landing recency rules for international. At my airline, you just have to have a crossing within 2 years otherwise you’ll have to go with a check airman. I get about 1 landing per month and sometimes not even that. We have guys go down to the sim all the time to get their 90 day currency. 4 man crews are even harder to get your landings in. I also dont know of any airline’s CBA that would arbitrarily allow management to change in the name of safety. And I think that’s a good a thing.
 
Ultimately yes, PIC failure.

The better question is WHY he “succeeded” as a PIC. If this were a “one of” situation, ya, story ends here.

But it isn’t. It’s just the rare case of bad policy finally coming to fruition. Can I “prove” that? No. Rather, it’s my humble opinion having been in this industry (in about every capacity there is… majors, regional, fly by night ad hoc cargo, commercial, corporate, lt civil, military, pt 141 and it 61 flight school, part 145 repair station, major airline law suit consultation on training AND maintenance) for a LONG time that this was inevitable.

Systems being what they are and their size, it’s gonna be a while until the pendulum starts back. I believe a bunch more incidents are coming, and they’ll be root cause attributable to policies of years ago.
 
Tools said:
Ultimately yes, PIC failure.

The better question is WHY he “succeeded” as a PIC. If this were a “one of” situation, ya, story ends here.

But it isn’t. It’s just the rare case of bad policy finally coming to fruition. Can I “prove” that? No. Rather, it’s my humble opinion having been in this industry (in about every capacity there is… majors, regional, fly by night ad hoc cargo, commercial, corporate, lt civil, military, pt 141 and it 61 flight school, part 145 repair station, major airline law suit consultation on training AND maintenance) for a LONG time that this was inevitable.

Systems being what they are and their size, it’s gonna be a while until the pendulum starts back. I believe a bunch more incidents are coming, and they’ll be root cause attributable to policies of years ago.
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I won’t say you’re wrong. But I won’t quite agree either. There are so many places in this business where the system depends on the pilots good judgment. I don’t think it’s possible to build a system that takes that away from the captain. It is essentially our job as captains.

There are obvious bad ideas. Hence green on green limitations. I just don’t think it’s possible to eliminate all of the bad ideas in a system.

I’m sure this element will be looked at during the investigation but, as I’m sure you know from experience, there is always a significant amount of discretion left to the captain to prevent undesirable outcomes. If this dude was an instructor he should have been capable of preventing this bad outcome regardless of his recency of flight.

The best part of it all is when we do our jobs and make the outcome positive by saying no to the operation at best it’s ignored and in some cases ridiculed by some **** in an office.

I don’t know what the answer is. I reckon at some point a team of dorks will build an AI the public trusts more than salty captains and those seats up front will be premium passenger seats.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
I wouldn't say I have heartburn... And IIRC you guys have special currency rules because you don't get many approaches and landings per flight hour, I assume that's what you're referring to? If not, do tell.
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Nope - nothing special. Just the 3 landings every 90 days and our standard 12 month recurrent cycle. As you noted we don't get nearly as many approaches and landings - as a lineholder I fly 6 or 8 legs per month (so 3 or 4 landings if I'm the FO, fewer as the relief pilot), but a short call reserve might fly one trip every other month. And since a short call can't control whether he's a first officer or a relief first officer, that pilot might only see a landing or two in the real airplane every year. So we're not nearly as proficient as a domestic guy humping a 737 around the country. But hey, at least we fly tired too! ;)
 
Tarheelpilot said:
If this dude was an instructor he should have been capable of preventing this bad outcome regardless of his recency of flight.
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As I understand it, he was a simulator instructor. Is the flight simulator of 2025 for a CRJ the same as a CRJ?

I don't know. I have an uncle whose unit would train and train on Abrams simulators. Then lose competitions at Grafenwöhr to conscripted long-haired Dutch tankers who only practiced with live rounds.
 
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