United battered by hail

Only trouble is -- this was a Delta flight. All the pilots had to do was punch the button for Autoland and sit back and be thankful the plane could see better than they could. Losing the GPS had to be interesting, too. Do agree they kept their cool -- passenger stated the Captain sounded like he was ordering food thru a drive-thru fast food place. Professionalism! That's what they train for and are expected to do in emergencies. Wonder if this A320 will ever see the air again. Engine was also damaged.
 
evapilotaz said:
Can someone please explain auto land? Are all airliners equipt with them?
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Short explanation is the airliners that are equipped with it can fly an approach and land with the pilots just monitoring the proceedings and not physically touching the controls (after it is set up). For a more technical explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

No, not all airliners are so equipped but it has been around for some time. The A320 does everything but unload the passengers and cargo!:lol:
 
With dispatchers, flight planning and sophisticated onboard radar, this really shouldn't happen. Especially to an experienced crew on a mainline US flight with an advanced airliner. Hail isn't like turbulence where it can occur unexpectedly in good weather. Obvious, and avoidable, bad weather contains hail. The only other thing I could think of would be that the crew tried to unsuccessfully climb over a cell and flew through it instead.
 
This happening more and more lately. American 787, Delta 747 and 320, and now this one.
 
oregonboy109 said:
With dispatchers, flight planning and sophisticated onboard radar, this really shouldn't happen. Especially to an experienced crew on a mainline US flight with an advanced airliner. Hail isn't like turbulence where it can occur unexpectedly in good weather. Obvious, and avoidable, bad weather contains hail. The only other thing I could think of would be that the crew tried to unsuccessfully climb over a cell and flew through it instead.
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From one of the "aviation experts" I saw on TV he made the statement that the passengers hooked to WIFI had a better weather picture than the pointy end crew did cause they didn't have WIFI (something about possible terrorist infiltration). Not sure I believe that one but it was reported pilots were going between two cells that had a large hole between them. Unfortunately, that large hole closed up before they got thru it. Airline pilots don't want to die and I'm sure the picture they saw was sufficient enough for them to take that route. Hindsight is always 20/20. The great thing is everyone, except the plane, came thru okay with one minor injury. Could have been much worse.
 
They don't need a team of maintenance workers to evaluate that plane... they need a team of insurance adjusters instead.
 
oregonboy109 said:
With dispatchers, flight planning and sophisticated onboard radar, this really shouldn't happen. Especially to an experienced crew on a mainline US flight with an advanced airliner. Hail isn't like turbulence where it can occur unexpectedly in good weather. Obvious, and avoidable, bad weather contains hail. The only other thing I could think of would be that the crew tried to unsuccessfully climb over a cell and flew through it instead.
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Well it can happen in blue sky if you are downwind under an overhang or an overshooting top is involved on a Thunderstorm. But I totally agree keep blue sky on both sides... at nighttime things aren’t as easy to interpret as in the day and you can end up getting a haircut from one of these things easier than most folks realize ...

Honestly the most I get from dispatchers is a printout of a convective sig...whoopity doo...you have to really stay on them to get real decision points. Often it’s just easier to dial them up on AIRINC and talk directly with a dispatch supervisor if time is of the essence.
 
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Believe it. No WI-FI and my company specifically rules out usage of external GPS recievers. We have radar, weather via an ACARS uplink, can call dispatch which yields not much and finally Mark One Eyeballs. GA with Foreflight and a Status2 have a better overall picture of systems of weather. We have speed, training and experience.

I attached a couple of photos from just off the coast of Burma as we were heading into the Bay of Bengal. Radar is zoomed out so they look very close and as you can see in the photo of the storms they indeed are "attached". With the spotty communications and lack of a real radar over there, we just continued up to the weather to take a look but in fact we skimmed the top of the clouds between the two storms. We were up in the mid 30's and never got a bump and only went IFR about one second. At night, we would might have done something a bit different.

Sorry for the bad orientation of the photos. If someone can tell me how to rotate them I will change them.





old cfi said:
From one of the "aviation experts" I saw on TV he made the statement that the passengers hooked to WIFI had a better weather picture than the pointy end crew did cause they didn't have WIFI (something about possible terrorist infiltration). Not sure I believe that one but it was reported pilots were going between two cells that had a large hole between them. Unfortunately, that large hole closed up before they got thru it. Airline pilots don't want to die and I'm sure the picture they saw was sufficient enough for them to take that route. Hindsight is always 20/20. The great thing is everyone, except the plane, came thru okay with one minor injury. Could have been much worse.
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Not every airline crew is without wifi. It's new technology, it will take time, but eventually it will be adopted by other companies.

Our OpsSpecs permit internet usage precisely for this reason, route planning/weather avoidance.

I was flying that night, going the same direction, planned through the same area, in the same type of aircraft. The radar via internet sources looked absolutely nasty. My dispatcher saw the same thing with his weather source and we decided to go to the north instead of picking our way south of that line.

Once we got in range and tried to paint the system in radar it really didn't look bad. Seriously, I've picked my way through worse looking stuff. Another flight noted the same thing on center frequency, saying they really weren't painting anything. Yet another flight, remarked a little later that they had flown through it and it "was the worst of his career". He also asked if there had been any reports of hail damage to aircraft. Maybe he had heard about the Delta flight? Not sure.

GA certainly has better resources available. The 121 world is slow to adopt, but it's coming.

FWIW


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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old cfi said:
Short explanation is the airliners that are equipped with it can fly an approach and land with the pilots just monitoring the proceedings and not physically touching the controls (after it is set up). For a more technical explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

No, not all airliners are so equipped but it has been around for some time. The A320 does everything but unload the passengers and cargo!:lol:
Click to expand...

Actually on the A320 you need to pull the thrust levers to idle just before touchdown.
 
GA certainly has better resources available. The 121 world is slow to adopt, but it's coming.


Agreed, but I will be dead before my company is "forced" into it.
 
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