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In the year or so that I’ve owned the NGX, with hundreds of hours on it, I never crashed it. I might have had some scary go-arounds, and some spine-compressing landings, but the safety systems always prevented major disasters. Yesterday, I’m ashamed to admit, I crashed the 777. The incident unfolded in almost the exact same way as the Asiana 214 disaster –I was on short final for a visual approach, AT switches were both armed, AT on, yet the plane continued to lose airspeed on approach, to the point that it stalled right before the runway. In a panic, I finally noticed airspeed dropping, but it was too late to get the engines spooled up again and the plane hit the water at speeds freakishly similar to the Asiana flight. According to my research, some pilots believe the Asiana disaster might have been caused by the behavior of the FLCH mode, what some pilots apparently refer to as the “flight level change trap”. http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_22_2013_p25-597816.xml My incident is described almost word for word in this article. I was in FLCH mode when I crashed, and had selected 0 feet in the altitude window. The plane began to idle at 500ft or so, and with gear extended and flaps coming down, it diminished very quickly. Nothing I could do would make the AT ‘wake up’. Disengaging AP (which I thought would disengage FLCH) didn’t do anything to wake up the throttles. Despite the fact that AT was on, the plane continue to idle at 118kts at 400 feet, dropping quickly. The flight envelope protection systems never kicked on either. It’s as though FLCH completely disables flight envelope protection. I am not one to believe strongly in automated systems (see avatar) and don’t particularly think a pilot should rely on them to save the plane, yet I am a bit frustrated that flight envelope protection didn’t activate. To be honest, the 777’s systems can seem spooky sometimes. I am still having issues trying to understand how all these fly-by-wire systems interact and where the line between manual and automatic is truly drawn. I read that airlines are working on the FLCH trap in training now, and I really wish I could get some of that training too. Has anyone ran across this FLCH issue or have an idea of what Boeing’s goal was with the FLCH mode from a theoretical standpoint? And what could I have done differently? Should FLCH never be used during approaches?
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