I was on this flight, it was 2005 not 2007. When the cabin crew announced the plane was going to make an emergency landing at Amsterdam, instead of people freaking out like in the film Airplane, it was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop in the cabin in the last 15 minutes of the flight. The plan was to fix the A340, and fly on to LHR, but as time went by, the departure time was put back several times. We were at Amsterdam for around 10 hours before Virgin sent a 747-400 to pick us up and get us back to LHR.
@@thedave7760 you can remain calm even with 1 engine running.... And if you have eric moody as a captain you can remain calm even with 0 engines running
I flew an Embraer for a few years. Every February we were met with weird and wonderful errors on the clock. Each and everyone was due to the clock. We saw that there were now as many 90 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour. We were told that we were about to run of fuel, couldn’t reach our destination and other rubbish. All of this was due to a “February” clock. The silly clock drove all the internal systems.
@@TraceUK Until you got used to it and before other systems were updated it was concerning. As a result of these updates just the clock’s display that now does stupid things.
Longtime Airbus pilot here and I’m confused why you think the ECAM item “FUEL T TK XFR FAULT” is a poor naming convention: it was written for qualified A-340 pilots, not for the general public. ECAM titles can physically take up no more than one line on the display with the action steps below that. You apparently don’t know that “XFR” is an abbreviation for “transfer” in many models of aircraft, and this would have not been misunderstood by the crew. If anyone is confused by the title of a procedure (which will always start with the relevant system name, i.e. “FUEL”), there’s a description in plain language as the very next line on the page. Second point: not all ECAM items have actions for the pilot to take. After finishing the ECAM message and referring to the QRH in those cases the procedure normally just says “Crew Awareness”, and it gets written up in the logbook. When time permits, company maintenance will normally be contacted to make sure the crew didn’t miss anything; you didn’t say if that was done in this case. There are some authorized resets for Airbus aircraft, but not having flown the 346 personally, I don’t know if this was one of them. To mitigate exactly this kind of issue my company mandates looking at the fuel page at every reporting point at a minimum to make sure that not only the quantity required is onboard, but that the distribution is also normal.
Not sure which Airbus you fly but in the A320 family it has the circuit breaker panels behind and above the pilots. On the bigger planes it has the reset switches (like circuit breakers). Those are only above the pilot and may be reset if required. Anything not above the pilots should not be touched apparently is the policy
@@tomstravels520 Are you addressing Virgin SOP or Airbus FCOM guidance? The norm is not to reset tripped CBs on any panel if not needed for safety of flight or specifically authorized. There are some CBs that are forbidden to be reset under any circumstances (e.g. wingtip brakes). There are also Airbus-specific system reset procedures, some of which involve CBs and some of which do not, that are authorized; some of them are only authorized on the ground, some are different on the ground and in flight. My point was that the crew performed a reset involving CBs, seemingly from memory (if I I followed the narration correctly) and it was a common occurrence in this specific fleet. What was not revealed was whether this was a reset specifically authorized by Airbus and Virgin.
@@HEDGE1011 supposedly the reset buttons on the long haul fleet can be used. So for this to reset the FCMC they would pull the FCMC reset button then push back in which they seemingly did but not for long enough. It’s the same as doing a PRIM reset by turning off and on
Great episode as usual, particularly technical as you noted! For once I can contribute a tiny detail :-) for those unfamiliar with electronics, the "clock" referred to in the title isn't a clock meant to give time to humans, more like a crystal oscillator closer to what you'd find in a good old quartz watch ; these are meant to pace computer systems (including processors, although the ones in your computer and phone are a bit more complex), and definitely two systems meant to communicate with each other should ideally have synchronized clocks (or better yet, both depend on the same one) !
@@virginiaviola5097 Hahaha yes! Although I was referring to the fact that modern processors basically pace themselves, and in fact can vary their own frequency depending on demand & available power ; but back in the dinosaur age of the 6502's and the Z80's, this would have been fairly accurate!
They use MEMS oscillators in aircraft, don't they? Crystal oscillators are adversely affected by forces, they go far out of specification when there are forces applied to them. Maybe I am thinking about missiles though, they have to withstand extreme forces.
A340. Of the 377 built, not a single fatality! Just that Air France A340 300 that touched down half way down a soaken Canadian runway & over ran is the only hull loss, I believe. Miraculously, everyone on board survived that one.
Despite the redundancy in the automation, when a flight deck crew makes the decision that a manual operation should happen, the aircraft should never absolutely deny the command. Warning, sure. Reject, no.
its not as simple as that. sure, it should not reject commands because the software thinks it is a bad idea, but it should clearly indicate/reject commands it is physically unable to perform. For a semi related example a Fuel Transfer Pump fails (as in gets physically seized up). if the Crew attempts a manual Fuel Transfer with that pump it should still show a clear rejection, not a Warning. because warning intuitively means to me "i dont think this is a good idea, but i will do it anyway", and the crew could think the fuel transfer works when in fact it does not. a clear rejection/failure is more appopriate here.
Totally. It's crazy there are so many micro events and controls and wouldn't allow the crew to do what they want even after diagnosing. Ground rule (or Air rule in this case) should be, you can have a million things automated, but the Pilots should be able to override anything and make things work as per their wish. One can say what if they are wrong, but definitely well trained and sane pilots will not go wrong on the fundamentals of flying, especially when there is an alarm that something is wrong in the plane, they will stay alert until too many things happen at once. But their timely action will prevent things from escalating to that.
Yes. And no. A lot of those "I'm sorry Dave" issues are there to stop pilots from making serious mistakes. Pilots are humans; humans make mistakes. The computer systems aren't supposed to be able to make those types of mistakes. [a great deal of testing is supposed happen to make sure they can't.] But similar to humans... computers are mechanical systems -- programmed by humans, and mechanical systems can break -- programs have bugs and edge cases. The thing is, they break far less often than humans make mistakes. Here, the problem was ultimately one of the humans... everyone got used to this failure, so no one ever bothered to actually fix it. "Oh yeah, it does that. Turn it off, count to 20, turn it back on." Put another way, how should it play out when the pilot(s) command the system to manually drain the inner tanks? That's going to lead to a flame-out. It's a violation of process and procedure, so the systems should NOT allow it. But what if the tank is leaking and you want to save that fuel? Well, there's a procedure for that, and you'll have to override (overrule) the computers - most likely by turning them off.
The problem here is that the computer failures meant that even though the manual action was doing what they asked they couldn't tell that it was doing that. Thats a huge difference from the plane not actually doing what they asked. The real issue here is that there wasn't anything handling oversight of the fuel system computers in a way that would allow it to detect a fault in they're own error reporting capabilities, meaning they silently failed.
Hang on, if they were already in Dutch airspace they were under 300 miles from Heathrow, and no more than 90 from Amsterdam. At that point their biggest problem would be losing altitude fast enough to get stopped at Schiphol. But given the imminent lack of engines they made a good decision to not head out over the North Sea.
I don't understand why they would have a problem landing at Amsterdam. You said they were in Dutch airspace when they discovered the fuel problem. Netherlands is a VERY small country so it they would have been well under an hour from Amsterdam no matter where they were in the Netherlands. Heck, it can't be more than an hour's flight normally from Amsterdam to London. It's not like they were flying over Mongolia or something.
Faults should not be normalised - whatever the industry. If Airbus received all of these fault instances they may have been able to run an analysis to highlight the problem - Virgin should have.
The nice thing about the A340 is it’s just an extended A330 with extra engines. They both use the exact same wing design, but the A330 has the outer nacelles blanked off. As such, it would make sense for the plane to be able to fly with only two engines, though you might expect some trouble
I thought the mentality of “this happens all the time, ignore it…” was kind of the opposite of the mentality for plane maintenance. I guess that’s what seems most odd to me. Or is that more common than I think?
This recent RUclips item has an audio level problem-- almost inaudible, even when I am set to full volume. Today, at least two other of my RUclips selections have had the same low volume problem, but those may not be related to your situation.
If the problem is really as pervasive as mentioned, I'd expect a mandatory recall to replace the unreliable units before something like this happens again. Switching devices off and on again routinely is not the kind of reliabilty I expect from a modern passenger jet.
1:50 .not correct, an ECAM caution without actions is not considered weird, its pretty common actually. what you are describing is a Level 1 ECAM caution. They carry no ECAM actions to complete and don't offer any aural alarm to us in the flight deck. They are purely displayed on the ECAM for giving us awareness of system degradation and me must then monitor the status of the fault (if possible) hope this helps * also FUEL TK XFR FAULT means fuel tank transfer fault 🤣standard aviation phraseology seen all over the world
That's the part that I don't think was clear. Did the captain just ignore the FCMS faults because they were common? I'm assuming that was the thought process, in which case it's hard to fault just the captain. The fact that there was no direction on the ECAM is also puzzling, isn't that something that should be dealth with?
@@blackduckfarmcanada It disappeared because they power cycled the computer. That's not part of a checklist, and honestly shouldn't have been regularly done. If it was part of the checklist, then I'd say that checklist needed updating given the root cause.
ECAM alerts are in levels. Some are only caution and advisory and don't require immediate action. Also make sure the actions you are taking won't make the situation worse. The fatal Concorde accident in Paris was partly a result of the Flight Engineer shutting down the engines too soon. Yes, they were getting a fire indication on multiple engines, but what's the point of shutting down multiple engines immediately if you can't even keep the aircraft in the air. Aviate, Navigate, etc...
This is a common and difficult, problem with complex systems. You have a bunch of independent and redundant systems that are all supposed to work together and back up each other when there is a failure, as well as report when such issues happen.
Love the sound level, one of few channels I feel doesn't worsen my tinnitus when listening with headphones. Nice video, but a little uncomfortable to hear about maintenance starting to view something as such a common problem, they expect pilots to just sort of work around it.
Another thing that's great about his videos is that he doesn't use any background music. We just get to hear his narration. I go bananas with other channels that think that background music is helpful or desired. It is absolutely not needed and it is extremely annoying. I end up with cc and muting the video.
To be honest there are a lot of technicalities which could have been troubleshooted. However the people who were responsible for that didn't investigate deeper enough. But when you have half of the cases failing with the same error at least I think that the normal thing to do would be to find the root cause.
That sounds too smart 😂 Would think that any problems with planes would be fixed before they were allowed to fly. Could have been much worse. They were lucky in this occasion.
@@randommadness1021 It's not a matter of "smart"... To be sure something is "inherently fault free" you not only have to cover the initial "bugs" in the system, but the various flaws that are only ever going to "crop up" when it's been in service for years-on-end... SO unless you've got a clever way to fly a brand new airliner for more than a decade to "shake out all the bugs" WITHOUT clearance (and thereby no passengers or cargo allowed)... It's not going to happen. We like to think we're extra clever with Computer Modeling, but we can't program stresses we don't know about... AND that's a LOT of unknowns in a system as sophisticated as a commercial jetliner... SO... without even being about "pennies before people", we're stuck in an imperfect system, and it has to rely on succinct and prompt reporting and feedback, as well as engineers taking regular "hard looks" at patterns in the faults as if there might be a flaw that needs rectified... AND sometimes they "make the call" and are incorrect in the judgment that a "stop-gap" or "band-aid fix" should be well and good, but is simply buying them time they're not actively using... Hopefully, the engineers at Airbus have learned from this one, and won't be so reliant on "stop-gaps" and "band-aid fixes" in the future. That's about the best we're going to get. ;o)
@@randommadness1021 Every plane has a list of classified possible failures. Whenever a combination of failures falls in certain classes of severity, the plane gets grounded. Otherwise it can fly. For instance, two unfixed minor failures won't stop a flight but four would.
You would be surprised. Working for a major express carrier, the standard printed procedure for users for handheld scanning device faults (of which users were experiencing multiple per day) started with turning off / on, then step 2nif that didn't work was a so called warm reboot, step 3 if that didn't work was a full "cold" reboot, and step 3 was to reload the OS... Yes you would think finding the errors and fixing them would be the thing to do. But it's easier just to have the users rebooting all day.
@@PRH123 Well if a restart helps then it's ok. But failing multiple times and a restart is just a temporary solution. Then I would want to find the root cause.
Great film.Thanks. It is a bit like my pueblo in Spain. Visitors ask why no sign to the pool ? Because everyone knows where it is ! If EVERYONE knows the work around there is going to be trouble at some stage with someone who should know but does not. When a work around is popular and well known the root cause MUST be fixed.
Volume, turn up the volume I can barely hear you.👂👂. On another note I do enjoy your channel and I appreciate the research and time you put into videos.
You just keep getting better and better! I hadn't heard about this event before, and it was a truly fascinating (and really scary) event. Thank you for your dedication to giving us great content!
One more example where taking manual control away from a pilot and giving it to a F**king computer nearly killed a plane load of passengers. Automation is fine, but Manual control should never be removed from a pilot's control.
Lol if the two clocks deviate so badly, the software handshake needed to keep the two systems in sync fails. Or even better, they will synchronize one data packet off*. That has actually happened and almost crashed a plane. *) like let's say the format is X Y Z, the receiver expects X, but the sender is already at Y. Since all of these are complete data packets and being in the middle of a data packet when the start of a packet is expected will throw an out-of-sync error, necessitating both devices to do a sync handshake. But if the receiver expects a start of a data packet and that's what it's receiving, it didn't expect it to be the wrong packet.
Problems that occur frequently, even when they seem manageable should be escalated and the real reason what goes wrong should be determined. I had things like that in IT on medical diagnose equipment. You find a system totally messed up and when you ask more intensive you hear, that for months or even years it got a habit to do crazy workarounds by the without operators without understanding what they risk or mess up but informing service personal because ....
One would expect a fault that common to become topic of conversation in the associated pilot community. Also, a quick call to Operations about an odd situation might have been in orde. It might even provide something to do on a long flight like that.
M.A.C.I:Remember if you're having trouble with your tech, turning it off and then back on is always a viable option. Me:Unless it risks crashing the plane right?
It wasn't mentioned but I would assume they would have contacted ground maintenance to loop them in on this. This fault situation needed to be elevated to the manufacturer/FAA long before this incident.
Similar to and yet different from a case in 1983 involving Republic Airlines in the US. An MD-80 (back when it was still called the "DC-9 Super 80") lost power in both engines after the _crew_ neglected to configure the fuel system properly, leading to the wing tanks being emptied while the centre tank still had plenty of fuel. Fortunately they managed to slosh enough fuel around to relight one engine long enough to power the boost pumps, otherwise they'd have had to crash land in the middle of the night in unfamiliar territory.
6:09 The ECAM only has space for so many characters per line, so abbreviations are needed. But even as a layman, I can make out "FUEL TRANSFER TANK TRANSFER FAULT" from that.
You’re wrong about the ECAM, it can issue you a warning of a failure without having an associated procedure displayed, in this case the crew can consult the QRH for resets or FCOM
Why is your voice always so quiet? Every time I chose your channel, that has very interesting content, I have to push up the volume on my loudspeakers.
Unless a permenant fix of this computer problem is found and implemented on ALL Airbus A 340 aircraft, then surely this could, and will happen again? If it does, might the next time end in disaster? For me, this is all very worrying.
I find that resetting/rebooting is a great way to clear temporary/spike faults but that fix can also hide repeating problems that ought to be traced down and fixed. I also find this works real well with humans, but the reboot takes 9 months plus the age of the human and someone is bound to notice “hey, that person is suddenly 30 years younger and is completely different …”, so I cannot recommend it unless you were not going to do the boot part of reboot anyway … and that then leads to murder charges and is not advisable.
Huh, funny. It was an ARINC FCMC that failed. I used to work for ARINC - hope I had nothing to do with it! They went bust years ago and got chopped up by liquidators. By the way, the company name is pronounced "AIR ink". It stands for Aeronautical Radio Incorporated.
Sometimes it seems like replacing the Flight Engineer's console with a glorified arduino might not have been the best decision; and IMO anything computerized needs to have a mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, or hard-wired backup for it because having your redundancy be "we have 2 of the same computer that have to agree with each other" doesn't really work when computers are fragile, fickle, full of buggy code, and (in the case of aircraft and spacecraft) constantly being exposed to bit-flips in RAM and ROM whenever they're at cruise altitude from the amount of cosmic radiation. Error checking can only do so much and when your plane's got an expected service life measured in decades, it's extremely concerning to trust a computer to be the only thing capable of performing a flight-critical task.
Aircraft designers need to keep things simple because the more complex the more to go wrong and the harder to sort out when flying. Seems highly irresponsible for pilots and engineers to think is ok to turn systems off and back on again to clear errors and then keep flying not knowing what the problem was/is based on the hope that everything will be fine. The off-and-on again temporary fix might be fine for a home pc but the stakes are too high to rely on that in a passenger aircraft. These guys did not put safety first and need to have their arses kicked until their noses bleed.
I hope there's some regulation in place requiring reporting of "soft" fault events so that "try turning it off and on again" doesn't become standard operating procedure.
@@blackduckfarmcanada Prestwick is about 650 miles away from London, I'd never heard of an alternative that far away, Maybe it was something to do with the weather on that day?
I had to start the video again to focus on the narration. Somehow, I was distracted by how the A340 appears to have the slats extended and the horizontal stabilizer trimmed upwards with the elevators downwards at cruise.
In olden days there was a human flight engineer. One of their responsibilities was to keep track of fuel consumption. They would *gasp* actually look at an analog meter, interpolate to get a number, and use a pencil to make a dot on their fuel graph. From that graph they could determine if the gauge was working, I.e. the level was not zero or pinned beyond max and slowly dropping on any active tank, therefore a plausible reading. From the position of the dot on the graph they could judge whether consumption was reasonable and nominal, whether it was trending better or worse. There were not duplicate and supervisory computers that could mask or override or misreport or obscure the situation. In all too many recent incidents the flight crew seems to have had no knowledge of the fuel situation until engines conked out. IMHO, unacceptable. Some human should be explicitly watching. Apparently the automated systems are not smart enough to agree on what is wrong or what to do about it.
"Maintenance crews just expected pilots to pull a few circuit breakers" Unlikely that "Maintenance crews" expected this, more likely that the airline CAMO dictated this as a temporary solution to an ongoing issue. Pilots are only authorised to operate certain CBs and in certain circumstances. This has to be authorised by either the flight manual, operations manual or other CAMO document. If aircrew "pull a CB" because "A Maintenance crew told them to" they are violating safe practices. The only circumstances where this would be OK for example, would be in a situation where the airframe has taken major damage and has multiple system failures which the flight/operations manual does not cover. For example those historic incidents where engines have been ripped off, control surfaces damaged and hydraulic systems lost...
The A340 has reset switches above the pilots which are permitted by the crew to operate. Any CB’s they shouldn’t be pulling are in the avionics bay for a reason
Refers to a quartz oscillator. It clocks computer systems. Now if two computer systems have two independent clock systems, they need something to synchronize (usually a software handshake). Now if the two clock systems are deviating too much (because one's broken), they fall out of sync so bad, they can't resync and that causes havoc.
Thank you for your videos. They are always well worth watching. But the volume of the sound is below the average used by other channels. I always have wind it up when I come here.
It’s just ridiculous that maintenance crews can decide that they’ve had enough and develop work-arounds. Something as serious as this should have been reported to the FAA and every other regulator.
Interesting report. One comment though. Its mentioned this was an A 340-600 aircraft yet the depictions are of a -500 , noted by the centre body landing gear.
? Use your volume control on your device. The audio levels are fine. Could be a screwup in RUclips's re-encoding. Sound is quite loud on my Pixel phone device.
How The PANDEMIC Almost Crashed A Passenger Jet : ruclips.net/video/QfCl7zFh51o/видео.html
Goodnight
I was on this flight, it was 2005 not 2007. When the cabin crew announced the plane was going to make an emergency landing at Amsterdam, instead of people freaking out like in the film Airplane, it was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop in the cabin in the last 15 minutes of the flight. The plan was to fix the A340, and fly on to LHR, but as time went by, the departure time was put back several times. We were at Amsterdam for around 10 hours before Virgin sent a 747-400 to pick us up and get us back to LHR.
aShUaLlY
Could just have visited Amsterdam instead, 15 minutes by train
As long as I can hear 2 or 3 of the 4 engines running I will remain calm even in massive turbulence and lightening.
@@thedave7760 you can remain calm even with 1 engine running....
And if you have eric moody as a captain you can remain calm even with 0 engines running
or Sully
I flew an Embraer for a few years. Every February we were met with weird and wonderful errors on the clock. Each and everyone was due to the clock. We saw that there were now as many 90 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour. We were told that we were about to run of fuel, couldn’t reach our destination and other rubbish. All of this was due to a “February” clock. The silly clock drove all the internal systems.
Ok that’s concerning 😮😮😮 Was it built by Ford?!
@@TraceUK Until you got used to it and before other systems were updated it was concerning. As a result of these updates just the clock’s display that now does stupid things.
Brazilian clocks can't handle cold weather ?
Omg!
Longtime Airbus pilot here and I’m confused why you think the ECAM item “FUEL T TK XFR FAULT” is a poor naming convention: it was written for qualified A-340 pilots, not for the general public. ECAM titles can physically take up no more than one line on the display with the action steps below that. You apparently don’t know that “XFR” is an abbreviation for “transfer” in many models of aircraft, and this would have not been misunderstood by the crew. If anyone is confused by the title of a procedure (which will always start with the relevant system name, i.e. “FUEL”), there’s a description in plain language as the very next line on the page.
Second point: not all ECAM items have actions for the pilot to take. After finishing the ECAM message and referring to the QRH in those cases the procedure normally just says “Crew Awareness”, and it gets written up in the logbook. When time permits, company maintenance will normally be contacted to make sure the crew didn’t miss anything; you didn’t say if that was done in this case.
There are some authorized resets for Airbus aircraft, but not having flown the 346 personally, I don’t know if this was one of them.
To mitigate exactly this kind of issue my company mandates looking at the fuel page at every reporting point at a minimum to make sure that not only the quantity required is onboard, but that the distribution is also normal.
Not sure which Airbus you fly but in the A320 family it has the circuit breaker panels behind and above the pilots. On the bigger planes it has the reset switches (like circuit breakers). Those are only above the pilot and may be reset if required. Anything not above the pilots should not be touched apparently is the policy
@@tomstravels520 Are you addressing Virgin SOP or Airbus FCOM guidance? The norm is not to reset tripped CBs on any panel if not needed for safety of flight or specifically authorized. There are some CBs that are forbidden to be reset under any circumstances (e.g. wingtip brakes). There are also Airbus-specific system reset procedures, some of which involve CBs and some of which do not, that are authorized; some of them are only authorized on the ground, some are different on the ground and in flight. My point was that the crew performed a reset involving CBs, seemingly from memory (if I I followed the narration correctly) and it was a common occurrence in this specific fleet. What was not revealed was whether this was a reset specifically authorized by Airbus and Virgin.
@@HEDGE1011 supposedly the reset buttons on the long haul fleet can be used. So for this to reset the FCMC they would pull the FCMC reset button then push back in which they seemingly did but not for long enough. It’s the same as doing a PRIM reset by turning off and on
That is top quality roast, 00:35 "On Airbus jets, ...., if you hear something blow up, chances are the ECAM will tell ".
Great episode as usual, particularly technical as you noted! For once I can contribute a tiny detail :-) for those unfamiliar with electronics, the "clock" referred to in the title isn't a clock meant to give time to humans, more like a crystal oscillator closer to what you'd find in a good old quartz watch ; these are meant to pace computer systems (including processors, although the ones in your computer and phone are a bit more complex), and definitely two systems meant to communicate with each other should ideally have synchronized clocks (or better yet, both depend on the same one) !
THANK YOU for explaining the 'clock'. I could not figure that out.
@@patriciaramsey5294 Really glad to hear my comment was useful!
A little more complex than the crystal radio set my Grandfather helped me make some time back in the dark ages for sure..
@@virginiaviola5097 Hahaha yes! Although I was referring to the fact that modern processors basically pace themselves, and in fact can vary their own frequency depending on demand & available power ; but back in the dinosaur age of the 6502's and the Z80's, this would have been fairly accurate!
They use MEMS oscillators in aircraft, don't they? Crystal oscillators are adversely affected by forces, they go far out of specification when there are forces applied to them. Maybe I am thinking about missiles though, they have to withstand extreme forces.
A340. Of the 377 built, not a single fatality! Just that Air France A340 300 that touched down half way down a soaken Canadian runway & over ran is the only hull loss, I believe. Miraculously, everyone on board survived that one.
Having four engines and an excellent safety record the A340 is maybe THE most safe plane out there.
Despite the redundancy in the automation, when a flight deck crew makes the decision that a manual operation should happen, the aircraft should never absolutely deny the command. Warning, sure. Reject, no.
its not as simple as that. sure, it should not reject commands because the software thinks it is a bad idea, but it should clearly indicate/reject commands it is physically unable to perform. For a semi related example a Fuel Transfer Pump fails (as in gets physically seized up). if the Crew attempts a manual Fuel Transfer with that pump it should still show a clear rejection, not a Warning. because warning intuitively means to me "i dont think this is a good idea, but i will do it anyway", and the crew could think the fuel transfer works when in fact it does not. a clear rejection/failure is more appopriate here.
Agree. Who is supposed to be in command, the pilot or the system that has a fault. Bad bad design.
Totally. It's crazy there are so many micro events and controls and wouldn't allow the crew to do what they want even after diagnosing. Ground rule (or Air rule in this case) should be, you can have a million things automated, but the Pilots should be able to override anything and make things work as per their wish. One can say what if they are wrong, but definitely well trained and sane pilots will not go wrong on the fundamentals of flying, especially when there is an alarm that something is wrong in the plane, they will stay alert until too many things happen at once. But their timely action will prevent things from escalating to that.
Yes. And no. A lot of those "I'm sorry Dave" issues are there to stop pilots from making serious mistakes. Pilots are humans; humans make mistakes. The computer systems aren't supposed to be able to make those types of mistakes. [a great deal of testing is supposed happen to make sure they can't.] But similar to humans... computers are mechanical systems -- programmed by humans, and mechanical systems can break -- programs have bugs and edge cases. The thing is, they break far less often than humans make mistakes. Here, the problem was ultimately one of the humans... everyone got used to this failure, so no one ever bothered to actually fix it. "Oh yeah, it does that. Turn it off, count to 20, turn it back on."
Put another way, how should it play out when the pilot(s) command the system to manually drain the inner tanks? That's going to lead to a flame-out. It's a violation of process and procedure, so the systems should NOT allow it. But what if the tank is leaking and you want to save that fuel? Well, there's a procedure for that, and you'll have to override (overrule) the computers - most likely by turning them off.
The problem here is that the computer failures meant that even though the manual action was doing what they asked they couldn't tell that it was doing that. Thats a huge difference from the plane not actually doing what they asked.
The real issue here is that there wasn't anything handling oversight of the fuel system computers in a way that would allow it to detect a fault in they're own error reporting capabilities, meaning they silently failed.
Hang on, if they were already in Dutch airspace they were under 300 miles from Heathrow, and no more than 90 from Amsterdam. At that point their biggest problem would be losing altitude fast enough to get stopped at Schiphol. But given the imminent lack of engines they made a good decision to not head out over the North Sea.
No way were they in Dutch airspace. Approaching Dutch airspace maybe.
You’d rather circle down near an airport than fly over the sea to another, especially if you’re on ‘bingo fuel.’
@@99dndd Ex RAF Manston is only about 15 mines from there.
Interesting event. All air accidents from the ones where all survive, to the fatal ones, they all pave the way for improved airline safety. Usually.
I don't understand why they would have a problem landing at Amsterdam. You said they were in Dutch airspace when they discovered the fuel problem. Netherlands is a VERY small country so it they would have been well under an hour from Amsterdam no matter where they were in the Netherlands. Heck, it can't be more than an hour's flight normally from Amsterdam to London. It's not like they were flying over Mongolia or something.
Faults should not be normalised - whatever the industry. If Airbus received all of these fault instances they may have been able to run an analysis to highlight the problem - Virgin should have.
Turning it off and on again is literally part of the 787's SOP.
It works on 767 too
It’s good to listen to a scenario wherein the crew did not wait too long to get on the ground.
Interesting event, awesome explanation, Mini Air Crash Investigation delivers again!
The nice thing about the A340 is it’s just an extended A330 with extra engines. They both use the exact same wing design, but the A330 has the outer nacelles blanked off. As such, it would make sense for the plane to be able to fly with only two engines, though you might expect some trouble
For the -200/-300 yes. The -500/-600 has a larger wing
I thought the mentality of “this happens all the time, ignore it…” was kind of the opposite of the mentality for plane maintenance. I guess that’s what seems most odd to me. Or is that more common than I think?
This recent RUclips item has an audio level problem-- almost inaudible, even when I am set to full volume. Today, at least two other of my RUclips selections have had the same low volume problem, but those may not be related to your situation.
I had to put on headphones to be able to hear the audio loud enough to understand.
If the problem is really as pervasive as mentioned, I'd expect a mandatory recall to replace the unreliable units before something like this happens again.
Switching devices off and on again routinely is not the kind of reliabilty I expect from a modern passenger jet.
1:50 .not correct, an ECAM caution without actions is not considered weird, its pretty common actually.
what you are describing is a Level 1 ECAM caution.
They carry no ECAM actions to complete and don't offer any aural alarm to us in the flight deck.
They are purely displayed on the ECAM for giving us awareness of system degradation and me must then monitor the status of the fault (if possible)
hope this helps
* also FUEL TK XFR FAULT means fuel tank transfer fault 🤣standard aviation phraseology seen all over the world
This Captain was a nuts. I am a atp with in excess of 18000 hours. Follow up NOW on any Ecam alerts NOW. Don't wait till you get into so much trouble.
That's the part that I don't think was clear. Did the captain just ignore the FCMS faults because they were common? I'm assuming that was the thought process, in which case it's hard to fault just the captain.
The fact that there was no direction on the ECAM is also puzzling, isn't that something that should be dealth with?
Well. If you have a fault message that promptly disappears... do you action the checklist for a now unannunciated fault?
I fly 737s so we don't have ECAMs, so I really don't know the procedure.
@@blackduckfarmcanada It disappeared because they power cycled the computer. That's not part of a checklist, and honestly shouldn't have been regularly done. If it was part of the checklist, then I'd say that checklist needed updating given the root cause.
ECAM alerts are in levels. Some are only caution and advisory and don't require immediate action. Also make sure the actions you are taking won't make the situation worse. The fatal Concorde accident in Paris was partly a result of the Flight Engineer shutting down the engines too soon. Yes, they were getting a fire indication on multiple engines, but what's the point of shutting down multiple engines immediately if you can't even keep the aircraft in the air.
Aviate, Navigate, etc...
This is a common and difficult, problem with complex systems.
You have a bunch of independent and redundant systems that are all supposed to work together and back up each other when there is a failure, as well as report when such issues happen.
Yeah, the plane itself is like a buddy.
Love the sound level, one of few channels I feel doesn't worsen my tinnitus when listening with headphones. Nice video, but a little uncomfortable to hear about maintenance starting to view something as such a common problem, they expect pilots to just sort of work around it.
Another thing that's great about his videos is that he doesn't use any background music. We just get to hear his narration. I go bananas with other channels that think that background music is helpful or desired. It is absolutely not needed and it is extremely annoying. I end up with cc and muting the video.
Actually the audio is low to industry standards..Its good audio but its low to normal.
@@storytimewithunclekumaran5004 Then I wish more channels, and especially commercials, decided to start using a lower audio.
@@storytimewithunclekumaran5004 Agree. Audio is great however I have all of my 3 volumes turned way up high. I don't mind though.
Same. My phone is a piece of crap but I still like the volume on this channel
Please increase the volume of audio. Its quite impossible to hear without speakers
The A340 has one of the best service records. Having four engines is also a safety bonus. This is a very save plane.
To be honest there are a lot of technicalities which could have been troubleshooted. However the people who were responsible for that didn't investigate deeper enough. But when you have half of the cases failing with the same error at least I think that the normal thing to do would be to find the root cause.
That sounds too smart 😂
Would think that any problems with planes would be fixed before they were allowed to fly. Could have been much worse. They were lucky in this occasion.
@@randommadness1021 It's not a matter of "smart"... To be sure something is "inherently fault free" you not only have to cover the initial "bugs" in the system, but the various flaws that are only ever going to "crop up" when it's been in service for years-on-end... SO unless you've got a clever way to fly a brand new airliner for more than a decade to "shake out all the bugs" WITHOUT clearance (and thereby no passengers or cargo allowed)... It's not going to happen.
We like to think we're extra clever with Computer Modeling, but we can't program stresses we don't know about... AND that's a LOT of unknowns in a system as sophisticated as a commercial jetliner...
SO... without even being about "pennies before people", we're stuck in an imperfect system, and it has to rely on succinct and prompt reporting and feedback, as well as engineers taking regular "hard looks" at patterns in the faults as if there might be a flaw that needs rectified... AND sometimes they "make the call" and are incorrect in the judgment that a "stop-gap" or "band-aid fix" should be well and good, but is simply buying them time they're not actively using...
Hopefully, the engineers at Airbus have learned from this one, and won't be so reliant on "stop-gaps" and "band-aid fixes" in the future. That's about the best we're going to get. ;o)
@@randommadness1021 Every plane has a list of classified possible failures. Whenever a combination of failures falls in certain classes of severity, the plane gets grounded. Otherwise it can fly. For instance, two unfixed minor failures won't stop a flight but four would.
You would be surprised. Working for a major express carrier, the standard printed procedure for users for handheld scanning device faults (of which users were experiencing multiple per day) started with turning off / on, then step 2nif that didn't work was a so called warm reboot, step 3 if that didn't work was a full "cold" reboot, and step 3 was to reload the OS... Yes you would think finding the errors and fixing them would be the thing to do. But it's easier just to have the users rebooting all day.
@@PRH123 Well if a restart helps then it's ok. But failing multiple times and a restart is just a temporary solution. Then I would want to find the root cause.
It's a great name for the checklist.
Fuel Trim-Tank Transfer Fault. It's exactly what it says.
I don't see the problem here.
Great video thank you!
Great film.Thanks. It is a bit like my pueblo in Spain. Visitors ask why no sign to the pool ? Because everyone knows where it is ! If EVERYONE knows the work around there is going to be trouble at some stage with someone who should know but does not. When a work around is popular and well known the root cause MUST be fixed.
Volume, turn up the volume I can barely hear you.👂👂. On another note I do enjoy your channel and I appreciate the research and time you put into videos.
Do the Airbus engineers still recommend this 'workaround' to the FCMC failing mid flight? Or has a more robust foolproof solution been put into place?
Just needed a few more mississippi's between pulling the circuit breaker and pushing it back in.
That's one strong green light you have on your plane there
You just keep getting better and better! I hadn't heard about this event before, and it was a truly fascinating (and really scary) event. Thank you for your dedication to giving us great content!
Thanks for another great video
One more example where taking manual control away from a pilot and giving it to a F**king computer nearly killed a plane load of passengers.
Automation is fine, but Manual control should never be removed from a pilot's control.
Next video title:-
" How a single handshake crashed this plane."
Love your videos ❤. Keep it up.
Lol if the two clocks deviate so badly, the software handshake needed to keep the two systems in sync fails. Or even better, they will synchronize one data packet off*. That has actually happened and almost crashed a plane.
*) like let's say the format is X Y Z, the receiver expects X, but the sender is already at Y. Since all of these are complete data packets and being in the middle of a data packet when the start of a packet is expected will throw an out-of-sync error, necessitating both devices to do a sync handshake. But if the receiver expects a start of a data packet and that's what it's receiving, it didn't expect it to be the wrong packet.
Problems that occur frequently, even when they seem manageable should be escalated and the real reason what goes wrong should be determined.
I had things like that in IT on medical diagnose equipment. You find a system totally messed up and when you ask more intensive you hear, that for months or even years it got a habit to do crazy workarounds by the without operators without understanding what they risk or mess up but informing service personal because ....
The volume in this episode is so low. You should look into it
One would expect a fault that common to become topic of conversation in the associated pilot community. Also, a quick call to Operations about an odd situation might have been in orde. It might even provide something to do on a long flight like that.
M.A.C.I:Remember if you're having trouble with your tech, turning it off and then back on is always a viable option. Me:Unless it risks crashing the plane right?
Wasn't a good idea on Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501.
Love the old-school graphics.
Very good explanation of a very sophisticated system.
FUEL T TK XFR FAULT
= fuel trim tank transfer fault
but yeah, great naming xD
It wasn't mentioned but I would assume they would have contacted ground maintenance to loop them in on this. This fault situation needed to be elevated to the manufacturer/FAA long before this incident.
Similar to and yet different from a case in 1983 involving Republic Airlines in the US. An MD-80 (back when it was still called the "DC-9 Super 80") lost power in both engines after the _crew_ neglected to configure the fuel system properly, leading to the wing tanks being emptied while the centre tank still had plenty of fuel. Fortunately they managed to slosh enough fuel around to relight one engine long enough to power the boost pumps, otherwise they'd have had to crash land in the middle of the night in unfamiliar territory.
Odd the designers never thought there would be a reason to run the boost pumps from the APU.
"Yikes" is an understatement.
Nice work, keep going like that^^
I am not comfortable with maintenance just shrugging their shoulders and saying in effect: "I'm sure the pilots will just deal with it".
Was this in the final report or was it speculation on the part of the video author?
We don’t take problems with aircraft seriously enough. A plane is not a car that can be pulled over.
It's frightening how many planes crash or have issues due to faulty maintenance or software issues
vids are a little too quiet, but great work!
6:09 The ECAM only has space for so many characters per line, so abbreviations are needed. But even as a layman, I can make out "FUEL TRANSFER TANK TRANSFER FAULT" from that.
"Captain we have a stabiliser malfunction!"
"See that banged up corner of the console? Hit it with the flat of the fire axe, should fix it."
Airbus engineers "a dual FCMC failure is inconceivable" The plane "hold my beer".
FCMC?
@@Capecodham listen to the video
@@blackduckfarmcanada Don't you watch video and listen to audio?
Please increase recording volume. With my 5w speaker cant make the words
Virgin aircraft versus Chad crew. They did a great job dealing with an unusual and confusing problem
You’re wrong about the ECAM, it can issue you a warning of a failure without having an associated procedure displayed, in this case the crew can consult the QRH for resets or FCOM
Fantastic video!😸
Why is your voice always so quiet? Every time I chose your channel, that has very interesting content, I have to push up the volume on my loudspeakers.
Agreed. Was about to comment the same
same
Me too
I don't have this problem???
Same here as well.
It seems like the crew should have called the manufacturer to get instructions. It's been done before in other situations.
What was the corrective action taken?
Unless a permenant fix of this computer problem is found and implemented on ALL Airbus A 340 aircraft, then surely this could, and will happen again? If it does, might the next time end in disaster? For me, this is all very worrying.
I find that resetting/rebooting is a great way to clear temporary/spike faults but that fix can also hide repeating problems that ought to be traced down and fixed.
I also find this works real well with humans, but the reboot takes 9 months plus the age of the human and someone is bound to notice “hey, that person is suddenly 30 years younger and is completely different …”, so I cannot recommend it unless you were not going to do the boot part of reboot anyway … and that then leads to murder charges and is not advisable.
Huh, funny. It was an ARINC FCMC that failed. I used to work for ARINC - hope I had nothing to do with it! They went bust years ago and got chopped up by liquidators. By the way, the company name is pronounced "AIR ink". It stands for Aeronautical Radio Incorporated.
Volume all the way up and I can't hear you. Please recheck your rendering settings. Volume should be about twice as loud.
"Something's wrong, and we don't know what it is, and we don't know how to fix it. Let's press on!" God spare us....
ECAM = Extremely Confusing Annoyances and Menaces.
ECAM = Extremely Confusing and Annoying Messages.
Going “bing” and lighting up a button saying “master caution” lighting up for every fault is so much less informative.
@@davidwright7193 better than a light that just says FUEL or HYD and then trying to work out what is wrong
Sometimes it seems like replacing the Flight Engineer's console with a glorified arduino might not have been the best decision; and IMO anything computerized needs to have a mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, or hard-wired backup for it because having your redundancy be "we have 2 of the same computer that have to agree with each other" doesn't really work when computers are fragile, fickle, full of buggy code, and (in the case of aircraft and spacecraft) constantly being exposed to bit-flips in RAM and ROM whenever they're at cruise altitude from the amount of cosmic radiation. Error checking can only do so much and when your plane's got an expected service life measured in decades, it's extremely concerning to trust a computer to be the only thing capable of performing a flight-critical task.
I'm a fan but I find your audio super quiet compared to most on RUclips. Have you considered getting your final audio mastered a bit hotter?
Aircraft designers need to keep things simple because the more complex the more to go wrong and the harder to sort out when flying. Seems highly irresponsible for pilots and engineers to think is ok to turn systems off and back on again to clear errors and then keep flying not knowing what the problem was/is based on the hope that everything will be fine. The off-and-on again temporary fix might be fine for a home pc but the stakes are too high to rely on that in a passenger aircraft. These guys did not put safety first and need to have their arses kicked until their noses bleed.
I hope there's some regulation in place requiring reporting of "soft" fault events so that "try turning it off and on again" doesn't become standard operating procedure.
13:08 Still was not sure? Just Joshing you, ace video as always. ❤❤❤
TBF Amsterdam is nearer to London than their alternative of Prestwick, lol.
Better to have a faraway alternate, that way you really make sure you have yhe fuel you need
@@blackduckfarmcanada Prestwick is about 650 miles away from London, I'd never heard of an alternative that far away, Maybe it was something to do with the weather on that day?
The audio on this video was very quiet.
Moral of the story: kludges are not often good long-term solutions.
Another great video, keep them coming. And keep the blue side up.🙂
Why is your volume so low?
I had to start the video again to focus on the narration. Somehow, I was distracted by how the A340 appears to have the slats extended and the horizontal stabilizer trimmed upwards with the elevators downwards at cruise.
I liked that you used A340-300 cartoon for this A340-600 video. I like those tiny engines on this huge plane.
Not forgetting it appeared to be at cruise altitude with the slats extended.
Sound is far too quiet.
Another great video, thank you! (And I think your volume is perfect 😊)
The system was too complicated but that's no excuse for ignoring a warning from it.
agree, should have called engineering.
Sounds like they need a terminal that just runs commands with no checks
FYI: On every emergency, Schiphol will give the plane a discrete frequency.
MINI!!!!!
Smol.
@@rilmar2137 atom
MEGA!
The pilot did the right thing by deverting the plane if in doubt better safe than sorry 15:03
Just like a few bolts would’ve stopped the door departing the Boeing aircraft, this would’ve also been an easy fix for Airbus.
In olden days there was a human flight engineer. One of their responsibilities was to keep track of fuel consumption. They would *gasp* actually look at an analog meter, interpolate to get a number, and use a pencil to make a dot on their fuel graph. From that graph they could determine if the gauge was working, I.e. the level was not zero or pinned beyond max and slowly dropping on any active tank, therefore a plausible reading. From the position of the dot on the graph they could judge whether consumption was reasonable and nominal, whether it was trending better or worse. There were not duplicate and supervisory computers that could mask or override or misreport or obscure the situation. In all too many recent incidents the flight crew seems to have had no knowledge of the fuel situation until engines conked out. IMHO, unacceptable. Some human should be explicitly watching. Apparently the automated systems are not smart enough to agree on what is wrong or what to do about it.
"Maintenance crews just expected pilots to pull a few circuit breakers"
Unlikely that "Maintenance crews" expected this, more likely that the airline CAMO dictated this as a temporary solution to an ongoing issue.
Pilots are only authorised to operate certain CBs and in certain circumstances.
This has to be authorised by either the flight manual, operations manual or other CAMO document.
If aircrew "pull a CB" because "A Maintenance crew told them to" they are violating safe practices.
The only circumstances where this would be OK for example, would be in a situation where the airframe has taken major damage and has multiple system failures which the flight/operations manual does not cover.
For example those historic incidents where engines have been ripped off, control surfaces damaged and hydraulic systems lost...
The A340 has reset switches above the pilots which are permitted by the crew to operate. Any CB’s they shouldn’t be pulling are in the avionics bay for a reason
Broken clock? huh?
click bait
Refers to a quartz oscillator. It clocks computer systems. Now if two computer systems have two independent clock systems, they need something to synchronize (usually a software handshake). Now if the two clock systems are deviating too much (because one's broken), they fall out of sync so bad, they can't resync and that causes havoc.
@@senilyDeluxe He said that where in the video?
If you’re not an Aeronautical engineer/electrician then you should be!!!
Thank you for your videos. They are always well worth watching. But the volume of the sound is below the average used by other channels. I always have wind it up when I come here.
It’s just ridiculous that maintenance crews can decide that they’ve had enough and develop work-arounds. Something as serious as this should have been reported to the FAA and every other regulator.
Interesting report. One comment though. Its mentioned this was an A 340-600 aircraft yet the depictions are of a -500 , noted by the centre body landing gear.
You mean -300, it depicts the CFM engines as well
Pilot: "A broken clock is correct twice a day"
Co-Pilot "Yea, but I fail to see how that helps us in this scenario"
Pilot: *Grins
you need to fix your audio. Too low in most of your videos
#855👍😤Too much automation is never enough when it continues to fail!! This unique problem somehow just never got fixed🤔🌰s!!
Great video but the audio level is low.
? Use your volume control on your device. The audio levels are fine.
Could be a screwup in RUclips's re-encoding. Sound is quite loud on my Pixel phone device.
The A340 was/is actually a very nice plane to fly.