Comments by "Halfdan Ingolfsson" (@Halli50) on "Today I Found Out" channel.

  1. The Birgenair crash was extremely avoidable: One single barometric component "failed" (the Captain's pitot tube) and the captain decided to follow it to their death, ignoring the plethora of other indications that were actually correct, the Copilot & STBY airspeed indicators as well as attitude, power setting, climb rate and altitude etc. A backseat trainee apparently tried to call this out but was ignored. Cultural "power-slope" practices effectively reduced this multi-crew operation to a single-arrogant-captain operation. The lessons learned from this crash saved our skin once: At liftoff it became obvious we had a serious airspeed indication discrepancy, and because this crash had been a case study in one of our recurrent CRM training sessions, we automatically reverted to a default, safe condition: Known climb power setting and attitude until the problem was sorted out. Within a few seconds we discovered a single skipped pre-taxi checklist item; "Pitot Heat ON"! The temperature was around 0°C and the runway wet and with traces of slush. A no-brainer, as it turned out.
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  2.  @BillyTzENDURO , there certainly is: The most familiar situations are climb and cruise. Soon after takeoff you set climb power and fly a given attitude (always very similar for any given aircraft type). In cruise you set cruise power and maintain altitude. In case of a barometric instrument failure, altitude and airspeed are unreliable, you simply fly 0° attitude. Once the pilot flying has things stabilized, the non-flying pilot start a systematic troubleshooting process.
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  3.  @CHEESYhairyGASH , as far as I know, all the static ports were fine so, yes, the altimeters and vertical speed indicators would have been working. Aircraft of this size normally have at least 3 pitot tubes, one for the Captain's airspeed indicator (ASI), one for the Copilot and one for the Air Data Computer/Autopilot. Apparently only one ASI did not work, and the Captain fixated on it, ignoring everything else. Mind you, it has been a long time since I reviewed this case in CRM training, my recall is probably a bit fuzzy by now.
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  4.  @BigBinky_Gaming , this ended up as a single-pilot flight to the scene of the crash. A sad state of affairs and should never happen in the modern airline industry - actually there are specific parts of the training (MMC & CRM) that are designed to prevent this, but an overblown ego like tis Captain's is hard to control.
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  5. I cannot help seeing many similarities between pre-WW2 Germany and the last decade in Putin's Russia. The merciless stamping out any dissenters come from the same playbook on how to establish a ruthless Autocracy, a total Dictatorship. I predict that Putin and his cronies will eventually come to the same sticky end as Hitler and HIS cronies, the main question being how many hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives will be forfeit before that finally comes to pass.
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  6. One wonders what similarities scholars of becoming-Nazi Germany can identify and compare with what is currently happening. Russia has now been embarking on this road to "world domination" for more than a decade. There is no doubt that 'Murica is poised to be the next nation to go rouge. History tells us that no nation or empire will last. The Roman Empire lasted for centuries, the British Empire lasted a century and a half, and Third Reich hardly lasted a decade. Hopefully Putin's Russian Empire will last even shorter. But what about the worst-case scenario, 'Murica turning full Fascist and do the Oppressive Empire bit, only to be eventually beaten by the rest of the world? Will the 'Murican education system be similar to the German one in, say, 20-30 years? Will half 'Murica be ruled by "Communist" (spelled autocratic) China for decades, much like half of Germany was ruled by the "Communist" (spelled autocratic) Soviet Union? That is a rather bleak future...
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