Enter the wrong Flex Temp.........and near catastrophe

[vc10man 732]

The Canadian Boeing 737 was taking off from Belfast International Airport when a mistake by cabin crew meant its top speed was not hit - and take-off was prevented.

Failing to fly at the required height the plane smashed into the light, but thanks to a lack of runway obstacles, was able to avoid hitting anything else. 

The incident occurred when a crew member entered the outside temperature as-52C instead of the actual temperature of 16C.

The error on the Flight Management Computer meant the assumed temperate thrust only delivered 60% of the thrust required for take-off, in July last year. 

[nawarren 83]

7 minutes ago, vc10man said:

a mistake by cabin crew

I don,t think you can blame this one on cabin crew! I think it has more to do with the pilots, don't you think?

[vc10man 732]

13 minutes ago, nawarren said:

I don,t think you can blame this one on cabin crew! I think it has more to do with the pilots, don't you think?

I am NOT blaming the cabin crew----all I did was copy/paste the news article, which was rather long. I too raised my eyebrows when I saw the 'cabin crew' reference, but a newspaper probably cannot distinguish between flightdeck crew and cabin crew.

So, don't blame the messenger!

 

Edited November 22, 2018 by vc10man

[Chock 17,769]

Wow, that's some sloppy pre-flight setting up for sure. It's no big deal to get it a few degrees wrong, in fact you pretty much will anyway in most cases when compared to the real actual temperature, but out by 68 degrees is more than a little off the mark!

[FDEdev 955]

The whole article doesn't make sense. Since they actually took off, take off wasn't prevented. And things like the Sunwing accident happen more often than you might think! 

But if nothing happens you usually don't read about it 😉  

Edited November 22, 2018 by FDEdev

[simbol 5,819]

Ok, I am confused.. is it not the responsibility of the pilots to enter this information inside the FMC?

S.

 

[FDEdev 955]

yes it is.

[skelsey 765]

Probably an easier mistake to make than one might think...

They didn't enter the wrong assumed temperature. They both calculated and entered that correctly.

What they did was enter the cruise OAT instead of the ambient OAT.

This resulted in the FMC thrust calculation being wrong. However, that's pretty hard to trap: everywhere they looked to check the assumed temperature/derate (on the EICAS etc) it would have been correct.

The only way to know something was wrong would have been to know that the calculated N1 was wrong. But that information was not available on their takeoff performance calculation software (and frankly I don't think it is on many) and when you're doing derated/reduced thrust takeoffs day in, day out with all sorts of N1 figures, what chance that you have a good "normal" reference baseline? The runway was relatively long, the airport is near sea level... talking purely from a sim perspective, I'm not sure I would be able to pick up at all if the calculated N1/EPR was off.

Of course, you could ask what sort of system requires manual input of the OAT when most every other type senses that automatically...

[simbol 5,819]

6 minutes ago, FDEdev said:

yes it is.

So why they blame the cabin crew in the article? do they mean the pilots? very badly written.

Regards,
S.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

48 minutes ago, vc10man said:

I am NOT blaming the cabin crew----all I did was copy/paste the news article, which was rather long. I too raised my eyebrows when I saw the 'cabin crew' reference, but a newspaper probably cannot distinguish between flightdeck crew and cabin crew.

So, don't blame the messenger!

 

Rick,

Next time you’re quoting an article, you’d be better served to mention that in the preface and put quotes “” around the part you’ve copied and pasted, otherwise we'll assume what you’ve written are your words, not someone else’s. Might want to post the link to the article you’re quoting as well.

[vc10man 732]

Sorry, Sean.

Here's the headlines on the article.

"

Packed holiday jet smashed into a runway light in near 'catastrophic' accident in Belfast after crew entered the wrong data into its flight computer

• Canadian Boeing 737 smashed into runway a light at Belfast International Airport
• The Corfu bound jet had failed to reach required height after a crew mistake 
• A further system malfunction prevented an alarm alerting the cabin's crew                     "
•  

    Under which, this 

 " The Sunwing plane hit a light but did manage to fly to Greece without further incident - had there been any other obstacles in the flight path - there could have been a 'catastrophic' incident a report said 

A further malfunction meant staff were not alerted via an alarm to the mistake during take-off at around 3.45pm. 

The Sunwing Airlines plane destined for Corfu then took off from the airport with 'insufficient power to meet regulated performance requirements' and struck the light.   

An investigation found there were no injuries and no damage to the aircraft which continued its flight to Corfu without incident but the report adds that this was only because of a lack of obstacles in the flight path.

The report states: 'It was only the benign nature of the runway clearway and lack of obstacles in the climb-out path which allowed the aircraft to climb away without further collision after it struck the runway light.

                                                                                                                                                   "

 

 

[vc10man 732]

44 minutes ago, simbol said:

So why they blame the cabin crew in the article? do they mean the pilots? very badly written.

Regards,
S.

Yes, it is a newspaper that probably as I indicated above, in post#3, lumps Flightdeck Crew and Cabin Crew as one and the same Flight Crew.

[ckyliu 1,749]

Is there an official report available on this incident available from the AAIB?

Edited November 22, 2018 by ckyliu

[srcooke 52]

9 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

Is there an official report available on this incident available from the Irish authorities?

AAIB

 

[Jude Bradley 659]

AAIB since it's part of UK.