Flight 214 I spoke with a friend about this accident at SFO and his belief is an interesting point. He suspect the Auto Throttle (AT) was turned "on" and the manual throttle was set to a low power setting. If the pilot flew the plane down to the runway with the Auto throttle on this could have been the cause of the crash. Apperently the CAT 3 ILS system was not functioning that day for the runway so the pilot would have made a visual approtch probably vectored in by SF approtch controlers. Then, 10 miles to the airport they get switched to SF control tower for the last few moment of the flight. AT acts like your cars cruse control, you regain manual control by breaking or shutting it off. So, if you disturbe the manual throttle settings the system will disengage the AT and defalt to the power setting of the throttle lever. When AT is on the manual throttle stays at the last position place by the pilot even if the throttle setting is changed throught the computer (which sounds very wrong to me :( ). If the pilot or co-pilot bumped the throttle hard enough to disengage the AT near the sea wall of the runway 28R and the manual throttle setting was at near idle setting the engines would have started to spool down as the pilot trys to pitch up the aircraft. Pilot upon noticing the power is dropping he trys to spool up the engines but running out of time he hits the sea wall. The engines have a few seconds of power lag from throttle to thrust being due to mass/inertial forces in the jets engines. Hopfully I got it a bit right, intersting never the less. On the below A380 landing at SFO the AT is shut off well before getting near the landing point.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 02:22:18 +0000
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