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I'm sorry for not being a member anymore. I had to cancel all subscriptions and memberships, donation that were dear to me because of the energyshituation (not a spelling mistake). I went quite basic, and sadly that also included your channel. I'll still be 'just' subscribed to wacltch your videos though. You know I've like them from the very beginning and I still do. They are so comprehensible whereas the ones recreating a crash with MSFSx or 2000 use technical terms like everyone immediately goed 'oh,yes that seems logical' and hence goes over my head most of the time . Yours never do. And how cool the Patrons got an actual engine part! Admit I am a little jealous but hey, they deserved it:)
@@n3ov What, the controllers? If anything they repeatedly showed competence when pilots didn't. (PIA 8303 was far from an unusual case, with previous cases where ATC ordered the aircraft to go around, orders that were ignored)
@@NielsC68 Sadly, such is the incompetency of our authority. They were not allowed to perform duties again. It's been almost 2.5 years since the incident.
The pilots had first extended the landing gear to reduce speed, but then forgot about it when the usual moment to extend it for landing came. Then, they mistakenly retracted the landing gear unconsciously thinking they were extending it. There is only one thing you can do with the landing gear lever: change its up or down position to the opposite. Which they just did without consciously thinking what state resulted.
Hum. If I wanted to stop such accidents… I’d require a different motion to raise/lower the gear, but also keep an intuitive link between the motion and its outcome (If mounted on a horzontal surface, make it a plunger type selector, press down to lower, pull up to raise.. Also add audible chimes (decending tone for lowered gear, rising tone for raising gear) - call them ‘id-ten-t chimes’, and perhaps suppress them if the gear action makes sense in context (climbing after takeoff + raising gear, on ILS + lowering gear). Lastly, sound terrain warnings if about to land gear up. Though with all those tweaks/enhancements, someone would STILL find a way to land a plane gear up by mistake -> I’d gladly refer them to Darwin for a consult.
@@Relkond Good usability recommendations. A lot of people miss this when designing user interfaces. In this case, the landing gear “switch” is a lever with two little wheels (that is, just like the actual landing gear) that one must pull down in order to lower the gear. This lever is also unlike anything else in the cockpit. So, basically, they’ve already followed your advice - and these pilots _still_ managed to goof it all up.
While it would appear that there are a number of issues that led up to the point that you were describing, I find your theory to be a very plausible explanation for their otherwise incomprehensible actions once they reached that decision point. Very good insight.
Them not responding to Air traffic, and carrying on with the landing, shows their inflated egos had overridden the rational thinking causing them to make mistakes that could of easily been avoided. Not responding to Air Traffic should be a offence, as bad communication puts lives at risk.
Airspace and Mentour Pilot are the only channels that I trust to give good and informative reports regarding the air accidents. Great work as always! It is though a really unfortunate ending to this story, but luckily there weren't many more casualties from the residential area considering the destruction that the aircraft caused.
Don't forget 3 Greens - Aviation Safety and Green Dot Aviation. Both great channels with the latter having the best presentation of any aviation channel imo.
@@djaneczko4 Airspace, Mentour and Green Dot Aviation are three of my favourite channels. They make me wanna become a pilot. I don't know about 3 greens, i've never watched his videos.
Mentour landed on my blacklist after he totally bluntly copied AeroNewsGermanys Blueprints to sell them. Btw. that channel is probably the best aviation channel out there, but only in german
I think it's a plain case of continuation bias. The bias to continue if you think it is at all possible to achieve your desired outcome without deviating from the original plan. I believe the gear was raised because of a combination of stress and habit. In the A320(at least my company's SOPs and what I have seen other operators do), selecting gear down and flaps three are almost always done together. The pilot flying may have called for "Gear down, flaps 3" and the pilot monitoring may have also forgotten the gear was already down and simply moved the gear handle before selecting flaps 3 purely by muscle memory.
This is exactly why the Sterile Cockpit rule exists. If Pakistan doesn't have such a rule, then hopefully this incident would be a good impetus to impose one.
Covid alcohol wipes are heavily promoted in Pakistan , the cockpit was sterile... food safety however is NOT recommended in Pakistan. Avoid the street foods
@@Haywood-Jablomie That's not what "sterile cockpit" means. It means that flight crew are forbidden from discussing anything that isn't directly related to the safe operation of the aircraft during critical phases of flight such as takeoff or landing.
@@PassiveSmoking I know. lol . I was just joking around. In most airlines and airspaces it's recommended to have a sterile cockpit at or below 10000 feet. Some it's 8000 to 12000. I was only making a covid joke because those useless wipes are everywhere still
The initial botched approach was likely due to personal issues such as poor focus and bad judgement, but when they ignored four offers to correct their mistakes by going around, I suspect two factors at play: 1. An incompetence so grave it prevented them from a timely realization that a safe decent has become impossible and 2. Fear that a horribly belated go-around request might expose their fraudulent licenses…
Excellent review of this incident; it was a hard one to watch when it happened. Keep up the great work, you are punching way above your weight class with this content!
Unbelievable! I am speachless! But: Much respect to the traffic controllers at the airport. If only the pilots would have accepted their helpfull offer!
people don't understand how MANY warnings would have sounded in the cockpit once they went below their minimum altitude w/o the landing gear extended, how they managed to ignore all of that is truly astounding it's almost as if they turned deaf and wanted to crash the plane
Your description is so good. Though I am not into aviation, I really like listening to such incidents!! Just before this, I saw your germanwings incident. Thank you for your explanation!!
In my Opinion this was simply pilot error. Failure to abide by the sterile cockpit rule thus engaging in extraneous talks during the critical phase of the flight, this led to a none stabilised approach which was handled improperly, leading to the crash. A Simple piloting dictate is; if not sure, go around. If you are receiving warnings of any kind or yet to achieve the stabilised approach criteria at the MDA/DH, go around.
But can you imagine? Looking at the whole sequence of events, these guys actually did both. They first made it to the runway and then went up again so that they could crash. I doubt I could do that no matter how hard I tried. Also, you must do it in this order. You just can't crash first and then make it to the runway.
One fact that many have missed is that this crash was during a Ramadhan fasting month. Both Pakistani pilots are Muslims and seem to be devout (judging by their families' comments on Facebook), and it is likely that both pilots were fasting at that time. The low blood sugar condition must have caused the loss of concentration on managing the altitude, the mistake of retracting the landing gear while trying to lower it, and the severe confusion when all the cockpit alarms were blaring. Imagine when you are hypoglycemic and thirsty, all your senses, including sight and sound dampen out - your vision blurs, your ears ring. Those who have fasted must have known this sensation very well. Crash time was at 14:45 local time, thus about 12 hours after starting the fast. Added to the fact that this is after COVID-19 lockdown when many pilots were a bit rustier, thus explains why such experienced pilots committed such basic errors.
I cannot put into words the sheer level of incompetence displayed here. You could almost be forgiven for thinking they had never flown an aircraft before. As for the sketchy licenses, well….. given the country I’m not the slightest bit surprised.
I closely followed this crash. The Captain had clocked more than 17000 hours and was pilot monitoring. Upon departure from origin airport he questioned ATC about the runway lights. When the flight was cleared to land, there were all the aural warnings like overspeed, gear, sink rate etc buzzing in the cockpit. The pilots extended the landing gear and intercepted the ILS from above(high) and then retracted the landing gear probably by mistake and then extended the gear again which didn’t extend due to overspeed and they continued the approach without visually checking gear-down lights. The aircraft touched down on its engines and this was the first mistake followed by another mistake of going-around in a full circuit pattern for RWY 25L instead of a teardrop on opposite RWY 07L or RWY 07R. Also, an ATC transcript is missing here where the ATC asked the pilot whether the second approach will be a belly landing. Lastly, the engines flamed out and they did a short approach. The aircraft was on final RWY25L which had threshold closer by around 500ft than RWY25R threshold which was ahead but had buildings on the short final. Had the pilots analyzed this risk moved to a bit right then would have undershot the RWY 25R but could have landed on an empty field instead of crashing upon buildings. Task saturation and complacency I believe. Remember, every landing is a go-around with an option to land.
I have read about this one before but nowhere else were the dodgy pilot's licences mentioned! Wow... As was said, i guess it still needs to be ascertained whether the two in question had them....although presumably whether the Captain's licence transpires to be a forgery or not, in reality may not be that much if an issue if the nan had, incredibly, flown over 18000 hours - presumably by then he had got the gist of it! To me, it sounds very much like the captain simply being highly emotional and unprofessional and overriding/ignoring the prompts from the control tower and his own first officer - not to mention of course, everything the plane itself was telling him. But the final thing that took my breath away was powering up to go around after they'd already hit the ground!!! At that point they should DEFINITELY have just been resigned to the fact there had been a major screw up and let the thing scrape to a halt. It almost felt like, in doing the go around at that catastrophically late point, that somehow "no one would notice" or that at least the plane would just need some minor panel and paintwork.....it just reeked of inadequate personalities, lacking professionalism and flying passengers by the seat of their pants instead of by the book......
Wow, the approach controller was obviously VERY worried about these guys. Approach controllers usually do the opposite- they hang you out to dry and leave you high and fast right before handing you off to the next controller. This guy knew a crash was coming-he offered them numerous options to descend, and then even got landing clearance for them because he knew it was chaos in there. He was trying to prevent a crash.
20, 000 hours Capt but no skills. Crash landed without extending the gears and took off again after damaging both the Engines instead of full stop and killed everyone on Board.
Yes! Finally a video on this crash! As far as I know, it is still under investigation and only a preliminary report has been released. But maybe I didn't catch up to the latest news. Poor piloting indeed.
As a side note, on another channel covering this crash, it was pointed out that if they had simply let the plane slide along the ground and not tried to go around, they all probably would have survived not to mention avoiding ground casualties.
Thank you for another gem of yours! Unbelievable, that even in "Heavy Weight" jobs like this the routine and even worse the "whatever it'll be fine" effect can kick in.
Wow, that's so cool with the actual engine parts to first class Patrons! 😀 Sadly, this is one of the airplane accidents that make me the most upset, since it seems to have been caused by such recklessness. Though I think it is also important for the investigation to consider what might have contributed to the poor decision-making. Anyway, great video as always! Gave much more insight than I had before! I hope you had a nice Christmas and wish you a Happy new year!
I commented on this on another YT channel right after the accident. I listened to the tapes of communications between the pilots and the controllers. I also checked the PIA website. These pilots were Oxygen starved. They were not thinking straight. PIA had strict COVID mask requirements for all crew. On top of that, it was Ramadan, and they had been fasting. Masks restrict Oxygen intake. Add a Cabin Altitude of 8,000 ft. during the flight, and these guys were in dreamland. There's an old joke about a pilot who landed gear up. Afterward, the Tower controller asked why the pilot didn't respond to his warnings. The pilot said, I couldn't hear the radio because the damned Gear Warning Horn was too loud. The PIA crew could not think straight!
Sorry, your theory is higly impossible if not entirely unlikely. Masks do not affect oxygen saturation in the blood, and the cabin altitude during approach is roughly 1000ft to 0ft, so these pilots were definitely not hypoxic.
It seems like nobody thought about turning on the APU after the first landing attempt, hence the ram air turbine. Maybe their qualifications were a little "embellished" ?
I'm not sure how in-depth the final report was studied, but the pilots indeed put the landing gear lever down prior to landing. But because they were attempting to land the plane way out of a stabilized approach speed (above 260 ias), the air bus by design did not allow the gear to be extended but instead provide a continuous beep warning to the pilots, which can incidentally be heard in the background during some of the ATC tapes.
I’m sure the investigators knew within the first few days whether or not the licenses were fake. However, it takes longer to understand WHY it was done, HOW it was done and WHO was at fault all without losing their jobs.
Really sad what has happened to PIA, used to be one of the best in the world for a long time but typical incompetent bureaucracy has put them in the embarrassing state they're in now
After seeing this, I searched Google and here is what I found: Pilot licensing scam: Pakistani airlines face flying ban to 188 countries Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority has failed to meet the international norms related to the personnel licensing and training in relation to the licensing process for pilot
I have watched several videos of this particular crash, but none of them had the information about the landing gears being retracted after they were lowered. Perhaps that is what was found from the FDR since this is a much newer video. Some Pakistani amateur pilots along with foreign pilots having 22000 flying hours re-enacted the exact pilot errors and configuration of PK8303 in level-D flight simulators of A320, and one of the amateur pilots reported that although the aircraft rings bells and gives stick shaker warnings but perhaps the pilots of PK8303 confused landing gear warnings with speed warnings hence went ahead with the landing anyway as the speed warnings were perhaps a smaller issue.
I believe because they extended the landing gear early, in order to slow their decent, they then forgot they'd done that and thought they were lowering the landing gear at the normal time while they were on the glide slope but instead did the opposite. It was just negligence and a lapse of concentration. However, I'd expect the airplane to warn them that the landing gear was up as it reaches certain key altitudes on the decent, maybe that happens now.
The Final Accident Report is out now a let me tell you, that wasn't the issue. There was no aural warning that the gear wasn't out, but it was listed on the ECAM screen. The reason there wasn't a "too low Gear" aural warning is simple though. The aircraft was occupied with throwing other warnings at the cockpit crew. Like, "Too low Terrain", "Sinkrate" and "Pull Up". With other words the aircraft simple didn't believe they intended to land with such a crazy sinkrate and speed, which were both more than 70% over the upper limit and almost 100% over what would deemed ideal.
One thing has me confused? Did the Landing Gear ever actually physically deploy on that first approach? One of the alarms sounding in the background of some radio calls was the Landing Gear Overspeed Alarm. The plane wont let the gear deploy above a certain airspeed as it woullld rip the landing gear doors off. I thiught the assumption has been they attempted to lower the gear, got an error, pulled the lever back and forgot about it?
They should have listened to the ATC. There should be a penalty for not following an air traffic controller's instructions if any type of incident occurs in not following their instructions.
@airspace the "Landing Gear Not Extended" warning is clear enough to cause a pilot to check the position of the landing gear lever, right? Unless the pilot in question is distracted. Thanks for the awesome videos! Greetings from Kenya!
Damn, it's tricky. They want confident pilots, so they can stay composed and speak up when something is wrong, but then it also becomes more likely that their pride would keep them from admitting mistakes and making the right decisions...
the pilots were nitwits. They were not focused on their primary job i.e., flying and safely landing the aircraft. So they commited series of mistakes. 1) didn't follow SOPs as far as elevation and speed are concerned. 2) Instead of taking an orbit to safely lowering the elevation, they opted unnecessarily for acrobatic maneuvers to drastically attain desired elevation before landing. 3) they didn't bother about warning alarms about the retracted landing gears. perhaps it was because there were multiple warning alarms sounding in the cockpit and they weren't at par to deal with such situation. 4) It seems that the first officer didn't contribute much. he didn't say anything nor try to bring pilot's attention to situations mentioned above. 5) After touchdown and realization that landing gears are not down, the pilots should have turned off the engines and tried to stop the plane. flying it again was simply dumb. 6) Once airborne again, and knowing that engines have failed, it was idiotic to lowering landing gears before time. it increased the drag. if gears were lowered after a few minutes, the plane could have crossed the housing area
If you study aviation history in Pakistan you will come to see that about 90 percent of the accidents in that country are either because of pilot error or incompetence. And yet they claim they have the best pilots in the world.
A question that entered my mind during this is what authority do ATC normally operate in situations such as these? Do they have a specific mandate to refuse landing clearance if a pilot is not approaching correctly or is this responsibility, ultimately squarely on pilots. The ATC clearly had all the expertise and information to see that their approach wasn't safe, would a different ATC team in a different country have responded much more firmly from the beginning? I note that you said that ATC did "order" them to go around but in the end gave clearance. Did they not refuse an ATC instruction and thus jeopardize their pilot's license?
In this day of advanced automation and "fail safe" design, I'm wondering why there isn't a system that puts an airplane into go around mode if the pilots continue to ignore a "gear not down" warning below a certain altitude.
On the pictures from the accident you could see the L4 door stuck into a car and that really hit me hard as i’m often seated there. I work for a Middle Eastern carrier and the management culture is really similar to sub-continent airlines in some aspects. My personal hypothesis is that the due to the pandemic and personal issues due to the ongoing pandemic, both pilots were in extreme pressure not to “screw up” and get themselves fired as it had already started back then. A missed approach, orbit or mistake could’ve been more than enough fuel for management to let them go during those times. You could argue that safety is always priority, but they will always find a way to screw you over if they look hard enough and they have the goal. Regarding the license issues, it definitely was a thing to look at, but with all that flying time, you could argue that they knew what they were doing. How many people without a licence can drive a car better than those who just got theirs? Still not an excuse, but also a thing to keep in mind as flying, licensed or not after such a long time, is muscle memory and following procedures on which buttons to press. From a new second officer screwing over, yes, from a captain, not such a strong case of the license being the sole cause of the incident
Why would you retract the gear, especially when you intended to land, when you were going to fast? Having the gear down creates drag that helps slow you down and they needed it for landing anyway. How could they have ignored the landing/gear up alert too? I wonder if they panicked but the CVR would've picked that up.
All of this sounds more like something that a flight simmer during his first couple of flights would do, not real pilots in a real plane. The ECAM Memo LDG has at least 2 blues in such a situation, if I remember correctly. The GPWS screams "TOO LOW, GEAR!" and probably other warnings and these guys just irgnore all of it. Nevermind being stable at 1000 feet. There is just no excuse here. Even if they felt overwhelmed, that would just have been another argument to do a go around and sort everything out. Let alone the fact, that they went on the decent all wrong. Slow your speed above ground down first, then go flaps 4 und gear down. Yes, technically higher speeds mean higher drag, so you lose energy quicker, but if you slow down your speed towards the runway, you gain a lot more time simply by taking longer to reach the runway.
I'm having trouble getting my head around this one. If the gear isn't down, aren't the pilots eardrums assaulted by a continuous, blaring, impossible-to-override horn? Hard to ignore, I'd have thought, even with other alerts sounding off.
I don't understand why the pilot wanted to do a go around when the plane had touched down without extending the landing gear. Surely it would have been safer to have damaged the runway rather than crashing the plane.
*They ignored the warnings, they were too high and too fast, and when they had a chance to turn around to make a 360, they didn't, so I think the accident was the most logical outcome of such sheer nonsense. RIP all who died.*
That means the airline is banned from flying to a certain country/region. And a pilot's license can be faked pretty easily if the employing airline doesn't check carefully I guess..
So an Airbus will let you land gear up? Strictly speaking no, that is why the gear and GPWS warnings sounded. Like any plane, an Airbus cannot prevent a pilot commanded CFIT, which is what this technically was.
This crash happened a couple streets behind my house 😢 so scary and this serves as a reminder that we never know when we are gonna leave this earth so we must cherish our lives while we still have them Edit: after an investigation pakistan's aviation authority layed off 20% of their pilots because it was discovered they had forged their licences
They lost focus and on the go around it’s like they froze up not knowing what to do. The plane was further ahead of them. They were two feet behind the plane when they and the plane should have been in the same spot, but the plane was faster than their thoughts and reactions. They should have let the plane skid down the runway. There may have been a greater chance for passenger survival. They were confused.
Can any person tell me that with so much safety in aircraft manufacturing,there is nothing present to indicate pilot that landing gear is not down when plane close on ground?
In my opinion it was pilots and atc fault. You can't put all blame to pilots. If you hear cvr you would know it was an unstablised approach and pilots insisted to proceed due to over confidence. Atc can prevent that incident but he didn't instead he asked pilots do you want to perform belly landing? What a stupid question could it be. Pilots forgot to extract landing gear due to high work load of unstablised approach. When they realised due to high speed they crossed the landing zone and no enough runway is left they decided a go around. Which was not possible due to engine damage with ground. After climbing with remaining thrust they manually extract landing gear which increased drag to plane and it started loosing altitude. During landing alarm was telling them something is wrong and instead of going around and sort out the problem pilots insisted to land and killed everyone. Still there is no response from airbus about flight data recorder and final report of investigation.
Here's a question I wanted to know afterwards. We know the gear will not lower if the airspeed is above 260knots (or is it 250?). If the gear lever was selected down above that speed but then speed decreased to below it, would the gear then lower automatically or does it require the lever to be recycled for another attempt?
@@AirspaceVideos I thought it was possible but I didn’t know if the computers would require a recycling of the gear to try the action again if it didn’t first time as the valve would open but hear in down position might not be deemed safe. Was that 245knots the first or second time?
We can deduce from this vlog that the ROOT CAUSE of the accident was (mysterious!!??) A320 LANDING GEAR RETRACTION: how can both pilots miss RED lights? Was there any LDG or it’s system modification performed? Could there have been auto-retraction of LDG (system fault) subsequent to overspeed landing approach? Could there be malfunction of the LDG switch itself? Can anyone aviation expert answer the questions above?
