WHAT Happens when the Captain goes TOO FAR? Airblue flight 202

Have you ever been really humiliated by someone you work with? Do you remember how you felt and how it made you act in the minutes and hours after it happened? Now imagine you have that feeling but instead of sitting in an office you are operating a heavy commercial airliner in marginal weather conditions. You perform a really complicated maneuver in mountainous terrain and suddenly things start to go very wrong. Pay attention. Many thanks to Curiousstream for sponsoring this video on the morning of July 28, 2010. Air Blue Flight 202 was a scheduled domestic passenger service between Karachi and Islamabad in Pakistan.

The aircraft it was flying was a four-year-old Airbus A321. , which is the slightly lengthened version of the very common Airbus A320 family. The

flight

was scheduled to carry 146 passengers, four cabin crew and two pilots. The morning weather was really miserable, with heavy rain, low clouds and reasonably poor visibility. The weather had been like this for the two weeks before the

flight

; in fact, the weather had been so bad in Pakistan that it had caused several floods throughout the country. over the country and it was predicted to be just as bad

when

the flight was due to land in Islamabad later in the morning.

Now, under normal circumstances, rain and moderately poor visibility are not a problem, but the pilots were looking at their pre-flight briefing material and realized that the surface wind was 070 degrees at 16 knots and was forecast which would become even stronger later on the runways available at Islamabad, runway 3-0 and runway 1-2, but the problem here is that there is only one instrument approach procedure on runway 3-0 this is because that to the north of the runway there is a lot of mountainous terrain which makes it impossible to build an approach procedure from that direction and with this wind there was the possibility that the runway in use would be runway one two because they could not land without a strong tailwind, The only way to actually land on runway one two would be for the pilots to execute an approach procedure to runway three zero and then, if the weather was good enough, they would have to do a visual circle maneuver to runway one two.

Circular visual can be quite complicated for crews to fly, it's something we don't do very often and it involves a lot of tracking times and it's also a visual maneuver, which means I needed to have pretty good visibility, pretty good weather to do it and the The way Air Blue instructed its crews to fly the circling procedure was to set themselves on the incoming approach procedure, in this case an Islamabad which was to be the ILF with gear down and flap 3 selected then had to descend to their minimum descent altitude, which was going to be 2,500 feet and as long as they had the runway environment in, they could start braking to the right, they couldn't brake to the left because the city of Islamabad was there and it was not approved to fly over it, so they had to turn right 45 degrees.

They have to do this using the heading mode selected on the autopilot and then time for about 30 seconds of departure after those 30 seconds are up. They needed to turn downwind, flying into a threshold beam all the time keeping the runway environment in view. Start timing once you turn the threshold, fly for 20 seconds out and then turn left, select full flaps and then hopefully settle down to the last 400 feet. over the runway and land on runway 1 2. The reason these times are so important is because you have to stay fairly close to the runway to be able to see the runway if visibility is poor, but the most important thing is that the mda is the minimum.

The descent altitude is calculated to give the crew a clear area extending approximately 4.2 nautical miles from each runway threshold and within that area you can maneuver and have at least 394 feet of ground clearance, for which is really very important

when

you do a visual circuit maneuver like this, that you stay within those 4.2 miles and this is going to be really important, very soon the pilots would have been aware that there was a very real possibility that This was the type of procedure they would have to do once they arrived in Islamabad and although the minimum visibility to turn around was only 2400 meters, in reality you need better visibility than that and if at any time during the circuit maneuver you lose contact with the runway, you will have to execute a turn and a missed approach and the missed approach procedure you must follow is the procedure of the approach you flew before breaking the circuit, this makes the missed approach procedure potentially quite demanding as well. , so the pilots would have been very aware that unless the weather worsened. much better when they arrived there was a very real possibility that this flight would end in a diversion the pilots who were scheduled to operate together on this flight had very different levels of experience the

captain

was 61 years old with about 25,500 hours which is a lot, He had around 1,000 hours of experience in the Airbus A320 family and had previously worked a few years before for another airline, but that airline had a mandatory retirement age of 60 and that is why he changed to Air blue.

The first officer was 34 instead. years and around 1,900 hours of total experience with just under 300 hours on the airbus a320 that is why they decided during the previous flights that the

captain

was going to be a pilot flying for the flight due to the complexity of the possible circuit later on, by the way , this makes a lot of sense because they had to turn right for a left loop and that would mean the runway would be outside the captain's window, which would make things easier. for him to see after the pilots completed their planning, informed their cabin crew and headed to the plane where they checked the technical condition of the plane, which they found in perfect working order at time city 241, i.e. 7 .41 local time, so quite early in the morning, Air Blue flight two cir2 took off from Karachi and started flying towards Islamabad, about 11 minutes into the flight, the cabin crew came in and served the pilots a couple. of croissants and some tea and, apparently, the captain. found that this was the perfect opportunity to start testing the first officer's technical and operational knowledge and remember that this was not a training flight according to the final report, the captain did it in a very snobbish, degrading and humiliating way and apparently not it was.

He was very happy with the answers he was getting from his much younger first officer, so this interrogation continued on and off for about an hour of the flight and throughout this entire ordeal, the first officer became increasingly quiet, becoming less and less involved in the conversation as everyone I can understand, I want to take a moment here to really explain how potentially devastating behavior like this can be to crew resource management within a cockpit. Remember that this first mate was not among the apprentice, so he would not have been prepared to be questioned. by his colleague while he was operating the aircraft and even if this had been a training flight, we in the training department our job is to try to train our colleagues, the people we are training, so in fact we could be doing occasional questions. to test the level of knowledge of those we are training, but if we find that there are deficiencies we simply write it down so that they can be informed later so that they can increase their level of knowledge, you should never ever put yourself in a position where you make the another person feels smaller, feels worthless and loses confidence in themselves because if you do you could find yourself in a situation where they could potentially help you you are making mistakes something is happening on the flight but because they have lost all their confidence in you They are not going to do that and we are going to see a terrifying example of that very soon, once the captain finally finished questioning the first officer, he told him to take the weather to Islamabad.

The first officer went to the 80s. frequency and received the weather and as expected it was as bad as when they left, he confirmed that runway 1 2 was going to be the landing strip and that the wind did indeed favor the visibility of the runway out about three and a half kilometers with some Low clouds around this clearly made the captain quite nervous because he could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder confusing the arrival airport and holding patterns with a completely different airport, but of He started to set up the cabin for the arrival procedure anyway, but strangely he didn't.

To prepare for the company-approved circling procedure, he instead began configuring his flight management computer with waypoints he created for a clockwise circling pattern instead of the turning circling pattern. to the left that was approved now. This doesn't make much sense because the approach plate clearly states that there is a prohibited area just west of the airfield and that he is not allowed to fly over the city, but other than that, he is sitting in the left seat and if he would divert to left to make a right turn. it would mean the airport would be on the first officer's side instead of his anyway the captain continues preparing the cockpit for an approach this way the first officer sees this happening but doesn't say anything and the captain starts creating these pbd fmc waypoints now pbd means point bearing distance and basically the way you do this if you want to create your own waypoints is that you find a fixed point and then set a bearing and a distance from that point to create a new point is that the captain is doing this because you are now trying to create a route that will take you towards a final for track one two without having to fly this really complicated company stipulated circuit procedure.

Now one of the problems with doing it this way is that when the fmc does not have an approach procedure for a runway, it will create a default point called point cf, okay center fix, this center fix is ​​by default five nautical miles away at the end of the track you wish to enter. So when the captain is creating this right hand pattern with one two, he uses the threshold point and creates a couple of points bearing from the threshold, then connects these points with the cf points and then with the track, but like I said Point CF is five nautical miles away, which means all of these other points you're creating are also more than five miles away.

Remember

what

I said about the protected area, in case we're going around, that's 4.2 miles, which means this entire loop. that you are creating is actually outside the protected area and the cf point by the way the default point that fmc has created doesn't take into account any type of terrain or anything it's just a default point now before we continue it's really It is important that they understand how pilots operate the autopilot on the Airbus, so that the autopilot is controlled from something called the mode control panel on the glare shield. Up there, pilots can choose whether the plane flies according to

what

we call a managed mode.

This is what you think of when you think of an autopilot: it's basically the airplane that flies a pre-programmed route and the pre-programmed profile that is optimal or maybe they want to fly it in a selected mode. This is where the pilot actually tells the aircraft exactly what they wanted to do, for example they wanted to fly on a specific heading or trajectory or maybe they want to fly at a specific vertical speed or something like that, there are many reasons why pilots can want to go from a managed mode to the selected mode. It could be that they want to divert around a storm cell, for example, or like what we're talking about today, fly a circular maneuver now, if the pilot wants to exit a managed navigation mode to a selected heading mode, which They do is set the heading they want and the mod control panel and then they pull out the heading selector when they do that the autopilot will understand that okay the pilots now want it to turn to that heading and it will turn in the shortest direction possible towards whatever. heading that the pilots have selected, if the pilot is then, after the plane has to turn, they want to go back to management mode, then they will have to put it on an intercept heading towards the runway and then press the heading selector back .

Again, that will tell the autopilot that okay, now the pilots want it to intercept the route we were flying and then follow the route forward to understand what's about to happen in the story. It's really important that you understand the difference. between those two modes and how pilots are supposed to manipulate the autopilot when the captain finallyfinished his briefing, told his first officer to request descent and at times 03 48 and 17 seconds the aircraft received its first descent clearance from its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet towards Islamabad about six minutes later, the Air traffic controller returned and said they could expect radar vectors for an ILS approach from 3-0 with a circuit to land on runway 1-2.

This was read by The first officer who once again asked if it would be possible for them to make a right turn instead of a left turn, air traffic control came back and said no, that is not possible due to the restrictions locals, expect a right turn. For a left turn, this meant that all the waypoints the captain had created during his setup that depended on a left turn to go around the west side of the airport would now be unusable, so after descending now The captain told the first officer to create a similar waypoint east of the airport.

Instead the first officer didn't seem to mind doing this. He went in and created these waypoints pbd based on the runway threshold and point cf, they were called pbd 10 11 and then to point cf creating a pattern like root, but as I mentioned before, these waypoints and this root that was now being created looks nothing like the circle they were supposed to fly and in fact, if they had looked closely, they would have noticed that this root would take them into the Margala Hills, where the terrain was actually much higher than the minimum descent. altitude they were about to descend to now before entering the approach and the final part of this story, I just want to share this short message from my sponsor who allows me to make this type of videos every time I travel somewhere. like last week when my family and I went to Dubai, the way I use curiosity flow is I try to find a documentary there about the place I'm going, so for example we saw the Burj Khalifa vertical city Dubai and that.

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Air blue flight 434 202 received its final vector and descent clearance to 3,900 feet to intercept the ils approach runway. 3-0 the crew read this when they started selecting some flaps to slow the plane down and once they settled on the ils they were transferred to the Islamabad tower. Now it is important to note here that the Islamabad tower did not have its own radar screen. so the previous sector could see the aircraft on the radar but the tower could not because the aircraft was descending on the glide slope, the crew again asked the tower for the meteorological conditions downwind to the right for runway one two, the tower signaled again they realized that the right downwind was not going to be available, they would have to turn right for a left downwind, the pilots had set their altitude selector at 2500 feet, which is the minimum descent altitude for the circuit, but during descent on the glide slope. the captain suddenly came up and sat at 2000 feet instead this was picked up by the first officer who said no the mda is at 2500 feet as we informed him and the altitude selector was reset but This already indicates here that the captain was willing to descend lower than the mda possibly because the lower the glide slope the more chance he will have of seeing the runway because he is approaching the runway, but that would also mean he would have less clearance of descent during the actual circular maneuver and shows a bit of the captain's mentality at zero forward moments 37 and three seconds the airplane levels off at 2500 feet without having made visual contact with the runway the captain activates the selected heading mode and continues flying in a straight line towards the romeo november vr beacon, which is the missed approach point, which is the last point at which they must be able to see the runway to be able to interrupt the circuit, if they have not seen anything by then, they must execute a go- during the short flight to the vor, the tower controller comes in and tells the crew that another plane has just managed to land on runway 1-2, it is likely that this information has been introduced into the pilots' minds, making them think that well.

If they were able to land then we definitely can too maybe the weather is better than we thought is what the tower didn't tell them was that that plane managed to land at romwe 1 2 on its third attempt and another plane that tried just before They diverted due to bad weather anyway, just as the plane is about to reach the November Romy beacon, the pilot can see the runway ahead of them and the captain, in the selected heading mode, turns the plane to the right in a trajectory of 352 degrees. The tower controller who can also see the aircraft at this point calls them and tells them to call him downwind so he can issue the landing clearance for runway one two.

The tower controller also tells them to consider making a bad weather circuit, possibly referring to making the circuit as narrow as possible due to poor visibility, but in response to that, the captain inside the cockpit simply mutters to the first officer. Let him say whatever he wants to say, possibly indicating that he has some plans of his own soon after this. The captain also approaches and reduces the altitude selector from 2,500 feet to 2,300 feet. The first officer does not speak this time and the plane begins to descend. This is now violating the minimum descent altitude during the loop and reducing the terrain clearance available to the aircraft, the next thing that

happens

is the captain now tells the first officer that he intends to enter managed navigation mode following the route the first officer created earlier but does not actually activate navigation mode but instead continues on the selected heading mode departing on a heading of 352 degrees the first officer says ok sir but is it visual and the captain responds visualizes well and the plane continues flying further and further away from the airport and the captain explains to the first officer that he wants to fly to point pbd 11 where he will select flaps 3 and then full flaps as they turn towards point cf.

This clearly shows that the captain has every intention of flying this scheduled route that they have created and does not. the company specified the circuit procedure they are supposed to fly now they are also so far from the airport that it is impossible for the captain to have the runway inside further violating the procedure at times 04 39 and 32 seconds the captain turned course to 300 degrees, this makes the plane parallel to the runway and is now heading directly towards the created waypoint pbd11. As you do this you also press the heading selector, this activates managed navigation mode, so from this point the plane will try to follow whatever route is on the fmc, they are now approximately three and a half miles from the runway and are out of sight of the tower and rapidly approaching the outer limit of the 4.2 nautical mile protected circuit area, as this is While this is happening, the radar controller has been watching the aircraft on his radar screen and realizes that he is not where he is supposed to be, he is actually getting very close to a restricted area called op277, but because the tower controller does not have his own radar screen, he is unaware of this, so the radar controller calls the tower and asks what the aircraft is doing.

This tells the tower controller to call the aircraft and tell it to turn immediately left to avoid flying into the restricted area and from this point on everything is going to start happening very, very quickly, within a few seconds. From this call the first terrain warning ahead is issued in the cockpit this warning is issued by the enhanced ground proximity warning system and that system uses a global terrain database along with the GPS position of the aircraft its attitude and your flight path to predict terrain closure rates, this warning is issued when the aircraft is about 60 seconds away from a possible collision with terrain and is definitely not something you should hear under normal circumstances if you hear this warning in the form correct.

What you need to do is immediately change your flight path by either turning or climbing and definitely check your own position because under no circumstances should you be in a position where a train warning like this occurs, when this first warning is heard, the first officer speaks. up and says sir, the highest ground has arrived sir there is ground ahead sir turn left now the captain can be heard on the cockpit voice recorder getting nervous and he emphasized that this was clearly not something he had anticipated and it is This likely increased the stress levels that are now hitting you and further degrades your situational awareness because the plane simply continues flying toward the waypoint.

The tower controller now calls the plane and asks the pilots to confirm that they can still see the runway and the first officer cannot. He knows what to answer to this, so he simply turns to the captain and asks what I should tell him and when the tower controller repeats the same question again, both pilots switch to the frequency at the same time and say a firm blue flight 202. we are visual with the terrain, which is not the same as being visual with the runway, the first officer is now getting more and more anxious, which frankly anyone can understand and calls sir, the terrain chief is approaching and is accompanied for two more. egpws warnings and to that the captain finally responds yes we are turning and it is starting to turn heading error to the left but this is where the captain makes one of the biggest mistakes yet because remember the plane is now flying in managed navigation. mode towards the waypoints they have created, the captain activates the heading error, but that doesn't really do anything because the autopilot still thinks that he wants to continue the route so that the autopilot understands that the captain now wants to turn.

You would have had to pull out the heading selector to change it from managed mode to selected mode, but you don't and, in the stress the captain is probably feeling now, keeps turning the bug further and further to the left until it actually ends up in a heading of 086 degrees, this is where the captain finally pulls out the heading selector and changes it to the selected mode, but remember that the heading is now set to 086 degrees, the aircraft is on a heading of 300 degrees, this means that the way The fastest speed for the plane to turn to the selected heading is not to the left as the captain wants it to, it is the correct one and that is what the plane does: it begins to turn to the right, which takes the plane further towards the margala hills, further towards higher ground now more and more ground ahead egpws warnings can be heard in the cab and subsequently become ground ahead, stop whenever you have an oral stop warning in any cab, There is only one thing you must do as a pilot and that is the terrain escape maneuver in the Airbus, which means disengaging the autopilot, raising the aft side stick to maximum, adding full confidence to the toga, removing any speed brakes. if you are using them and also turn the wings level if that procedure had been followed.

There is a possibility that they could have cleared the land later, but unfortunately none of this is being done. The first officer can now be heard pleading, sir, turn left, sir, pull up, sir, pull up, but he doesn't get as far as to take. Captain controls clearly confused and bewildered and executes the terrain escape maneuver himself at time 0 4 40 and 33 seconds. There are some indications that the captain is making little effort to try to comply with the terrain warning, he moves the truss levers towards the Flexible Retainer which is not toga but increases thrust and also disengages the outer throttle.

It also sets 3700 feet on the altitude selector and this causes the airplane to begin climbing, but just a few seconds later it reduces altitude to 3100 feet and brings the thrust levers back to climb thrust, which once again reengages the external thrusts on the hills below. A couple of eyewitnesses could see the plane screaming above them at a surprisingly low altitude in the cockpit. The first officer continues to plead with the captain. Sir, stop,but the captain seems to still have the mentality of lowering this plane to the ground, he continues to turn the course more and more to the left and ends up at the value of 025 degrees, but since that is still in the mind of the autopilot he indicates a turn to the right, that's what the plane continues to do at times 0 4 40 and 46 seconds the captain finally decides to take matters into his own hands, disengages the autopilot and induces full left side stick along with some left rudder and These two actions together cause a rapid turn to the left up to a maximum value of 52 degrees.

At that time, the plane was actually climbing at 2,770 feet and reached a height of 3,110 feet before the combination of the high pitch angle and the captain. The forward side stick is now introduced causing the aircraft to begin descending and the descent reaches 3,000 feet per minute with a negative attitude of 4.6 degrees as the outboard thrust has now been re-engaged. The fact that the plane is now pitched forward causes the engines to start. backing off to try to maintain airspeed which caused a further drop, this increasing rate of descent along with the rolling and already low ground clearance made this accident inevitable and the last thing recorded on the crash recorder.

The voice from the cockpit was the first officer Miki speaking. up saying sir let's go down so let's go down and then the recording stops in city time for 41 and 8 seconds the plane crashes into the margala hills 9.6 miles from the airport at an altitude of 2858 feet , all 146 passengers and six crew members die in the accident. The final report that emerged from this investigation is one of the shortest and least complete I have seen relating to a modern aviation accident. It lacks the normal root cause analysis that is so important for us to learn something from an accident like this, what it basically is is a chronological description of what happened during this flight based on the cockpit voice recorder and blame this accident almost directly to the captain and his lack of crm mainly during the initial part of the flight where he completely erases the first officer's self-confidence and then obviously during the actual circular maneuver and his lack of discipline and not following procedures standard operating procedures, but they also mentioned that the first officer was too passive and that he should have taken the controls and done something about it when he recognized the danger.

However, what they were running into was that the fund report never looked at whether or not this was a cultural issue that existed within the airline, whether this captain had had prior issues with the crm, or whether other pilots within the airline company were used to doing it. doing this with the orthodox procedure of attempting to perform a circular maneuver in a managed navigation mode rather than the described heading mode they were supposed to do, so we never learn anything from this, the recommendations include things like building a new airport in Islamabad and more emphasis on CRM training and verification within the airline, but it is very vague and doesn't really help despite the very limited value we got from this final report.

I just want to use this accident as an example of how It's important that your leadership skills and your team building and crew resource management skills are if you're in any type of leadership position, whether it's in a cockpit or in a an office somewhere, you need to continually develop your team members by making sure they are all helping you move in the same direction and, crucially, making sure they are willing and feel like they can speak up no matter what the situation is, if not They feel that way and if you don't empower your team members, you might be able to.

You find yourself in a situation like the one the captain had in this accident, where something is going wrong, you are losing control of the situation and where your team members should be there to help you, in this case the first officer takes control and execute. the terrain escape maneuver will not be there for you when you need them most. I actually started doing leadership and decision making courses based on examples like this and if that's something you're interested in then go to mentorpilot.com and put your email on my email list so I can let you know.

When is my next course due? Watch this video below. It's a fascinating story that I think you will enjoy and if you want to support the work I do. then consider joining my awesome patreon team, it's a great bunch or get some merch. Have an absolutely fantastic day and see you next time, bye.