An Air India passenger plane bound for London with more than 240 people on board crashed Thursday in India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad, and there were no known survivors, officials said.
Yeah, India has to be one of the worst places for an accident like this just due to pure population density too. Looking at the direction it took off, they would have had to make it 7 miles at an absolute minimum to clear most of the densely populated area, or turn right and attempt to land in the river. But in this situation it only made it 1 mile, so neither was a possibility.
It’s a whole lot different with an aircraft that size. I mean I used to practice power off forced approaches pretty frequently when I was flying, in small aircraft it’s pretty safe. But that was starting from altitude. How many times have you cut the engine and practiced a power loss situation shortly after takeoff? I don’t believe I ever have at least, closet thing I did to that was a simulated rope break while instructing on gliders and even then we gave ourselves wayyy more altitude than we required and were flying over the airport still when we pulled the release. Plus it’s a glider, so cheating a bit. It’s just too risky even to practice really, because you don’t have an easy out if the engine dies after being pulled to idle or something. Same goes for an airliner but much worse, at most they may have trained for this in a simulator. Best thing you can do to prepare is have altitude based decision gates so you don’t have to think as much and can just act if something does go wrong, even if those decisions are “200 to 500 feet I’m landing in the trees”.
I got lucky and in my years of gliding never had an actual rope break. In fact I only ever heard of one happening at this place while I worked there. They had the ropes down to an art though, inspected multiple times a day and the end inspected on every launch, custom covers for the ring to protect it while dragged down the runway, it was fancy. Being a training facility I suppose that’s smart. Closest I got was during my instructor training with the chief pilot, that’s the only person allowed to do unbriefed emergency simulations. It definitely caught me off guard!
Yeah, India has to be one of the worst places for an accident like this just due to pure population density too. Looking at the direction it took off, they would have had to make it 7 miles at an absolute minimum to clear most of the densely populated area, or turn right and attempt to land in the river. But in this situation it only made it 1 mile, so neither was a possibility.
It’s a whole lot different with an aircraft that size. I mean I used to practice power off forced approaches pretty frequently when I was flying, in small aircraft it’s pretty safe. But that was starting from altitude. How many times have you cut the engine and practiced a power loss situation shortly after takeoff? I don’t believe I ever have at least, closet thing I did to that was a simulated rope break while instructing on gliders and even then we gave ourselves wayyy more altitude than we required and were flying over the airport still when we pulled the release. Plus it’s a glider, so cheating a bit. It’s just too risky even to practice really, because you don’t have an easy out if the engine dies after being pulled to idle or something. Same goes for an airliner but much worse, at most they may have trained for this in a simulator. Best thing you can do to prepare is have altitude based decision gates so you don’t have to think as much and can just act if something does go wrong, even if those decisions are “200 to 500 feet I’m landing in the trees”.
Yeah same, except I had a bunch of actual rope breaks (faulty rope). It’s fucking harrowing.
I got lucky and in my years of gliding never had an actual rope break. In fact I only ever heard of one happening at this place while I worked there. They had the ropes down to an art though, inspected multiple times a day and the end inspected on every launch, custom covers for the ring to protect it while dragged down the runway, it was fancy. Being a training facility I suppose that’s smart. Closest I got was during my instructor training with the chief pilot, that’s the only person allowed to do unbriefed emergency simulations. It definitely caught me off guard!