I’d be surprised if it were reversed ailerons – unless the pilot recognises it VERY quickly, the plane usually doesn’t get more than 100 feet off the ground before it’s unrecoverable. There’s a video of a Caribou online rolling over and crashing almost immediately after takeoff.
Those who have to think about which way the ailerons move – when checking that controls are free and correct, I say “to you, up yours”. To the British passengers onboard, it raises a chuckle….
Nice one! Easy to remember.
I am massively unimpressed by the performance of ATC.
There was so much more they could have done for pilots who were clearly beyond their capacity. Every time they were asked for and gave vectors “to the ocean” they gave a vector and then failed to point out to the pilots, for extended periods, that they were turning in circles. If ever there was a need for “no compass, no gyros” procedure this was it.
I don’t know what happens to ATCOs when they get south of the Pyrenees, but I don’t like it.
Do they still require ATCOs to have at least a PPL?
We did this before many times. I think the real issue in these parts of the world is a near-zero ATC ELP i.e. many of the controllers speak really zero “conversational English” i.e. they understand (and speak) only the defined standard phrases. If you fly down there, you generally find that any radio call which deviates (even partly) from the standard phrases doesn’t get you any response. No “say again” etc. Just pure silence. You might be in an urgent situation but you will get total silence – because instead of “Nxxxx request 20 degrees left to avoid” or “Nxxxx request climb FL180 due to icing” you said something in “normal English” e.g. “Nxxxx need to climb due to buildups ahead”. My speculation is that the silence ensures that nothing ends up on the tape.
And those radio calls from the airliner have loads of bits which are nonstandard. Well, the crew were under massive pressure. But so were ATC; the problem is they probably didn’t understand the crew’s calls.
Do they still require ATCOs to have at least a PPL?
In the UK, this requirement ended several decades ago.
Proper preflight checks, thinking which way ailerons should move etc… you can’t be serious considering the affected airplane is a large transport category airliner.
I think you’ll find in general the portuguese ELP (both aviation an non aviation) far superior to all other southern countries.
I’ve only read Loco’s transcript, but as Timothy points out, the crew would probably have benefited from ATC realizing there might have been a serious compass issue. They might have thought the turns weren’t due to bad instruments, but due to a control issue.
On the other hand, there were a couple good such as telling the river was probably better than the sea (it likely would have been, it it super wide, flat, and near rescue), and while sending the F16s might be a standard procedure, it probably saved their life.
Cobalt wrote:
Do they still require ATCOs to have at least a PPL?
In Germany yes AFAIK. And I think that is the way it should be.
@MedEwok: Unfortuantely, that is not the case. Many take up flying as a kind of matching hobby, but from personal experience I know that neither military nor civilian ATCOs are required to have any flight experience at all.
We went over the PPL-theroy during the classes, but never ever got close to an airplane as part of the training. I know some trainees who left with the feeling that all small airplanes were flimsy, outdated and unsafe. Plus the conception that VFR flying means that they cannot navigate by any other means than following a river.
To my experience, this leads to the misconception that small airplanes are not “real” airplanes because they are so slow, “un-airbussy” and with mostly amateur pilots and a nuisance at best.
And to be honest, many, many PPL/SPL/microlight pilots don’t do exactly much to help that…For example, way too often we hear people calling in on the TWR frequency not knowing about the mere existence of Visual Reporting points, let alone finding them (and we have good ones, like a lighthouse and an autobahn roundabout). Plus those who give the story of their personal, their plane’s and their dog’s life as initial call.
Sorry for the rant… but some times I feel really, really embarrassed by those other pilots.
