Alaska Airline Tail Strikes , good article

[Scudrunner]

Worth the read about how their operation reacted to these incidents. This is something that needs to be talked about when breaking the chain in accidents.



https://www.seattletimes.com/business/b ... -the-plug/

[Nark]

This article exemplifies why Airbus is better than Boeing.
I’m not sayin Airbus is immune from tail strikes, but the aircraft weighs itself. Our SOP is to compare the displayed weight to the performance data we receive. If is off by 500lbs we have to dive deeper with dispatch.

It removes one of the holes in the Swiss cheese model.


Not to cast stones from atop me ivory throne in a glass house … Airbus’s flight controls aren’t connected and it sums the input of both side sticks, if “dual input” is well, input. This is certainly a flaw when you’re teaching a new guy and he needs just a little something to help the landing. Takeoff is also a bad time, as students (new pilots to the bus) are so afraid of a tail strike, they under rotate and very often get V2+ 20-30knots (way to fast for a jet’s takeoff).

[Eric Janson]

This article exemplifies why Airbus is better than Boeing.
I’m not sayin Airbus is immune from tail strikes, but the aircraft weighs itself. Our SOP is to compare the displayed weight to the performance data we receive. If is off by 500lbs we have to dive deeper with dispatch.

It removes one of the holes in the Swiss cheese model.


Not to cast stones from atop me ivory throne in a glass house … Airbus’s flight controls aren’t connected and it sums the input of both side sticks, if “dual input” is well, input. This is certainly a flaw when you’re teaching a new guy and he needs just a little something to help the landing. Takeoff is also a bad time, as students (new pilots to the bus) are so afraid of a tail strike, they under rotate and very often get V2+ 20-30knots (way to fast for a jet’s takeoff).

That's not the case on the A340 - there is a clear warning in the books that entering the wrong Zero Fuel Weight will result in incorrect speeds being displayed.

I always do a 'reasonableness' check -100kg/pax works really well. I also compare the Flightplan predicted weights against what we actually have. We do our own loadsheet using the Flysmart app on an iPad.

In all my years on 3 different airbus types I have never had a "dual input" - I've flown with cadets straight out of Line Training.

[Nark]

I have flysmart for all phases of flight, but we’re only using it fleetwide for landing #’s.

My last FO had the Swiss cheese lined up real nice…
Didn’t follow procedure, inserted TOGA (in and of itself, not a wrong thing to do.) but then saw there wasn’t a flex temp, and manually entered a flex temp.

This gave the MCDU V speeds for max Thrust, but would limit the thrust (human error by normally only pushing the thrust to FLEX for TO.) the difference of V1 and V2 was roughly 15-20knots.


Anything can happen out there….