iceaura: "The court ruled that inexcusable pilot screwup caused the failure to make the Palermo airport."
It is not reasonable to dismiss the installation of a misleading fuel indicator, and the failure to follow fueling procedures as primary causes in the emergency that lead to the ditching. There were smaller mistakes on down the line, that may or may not have worsened the outcome- that's something that no investigation can ever ascertain. But certainly, installing a misleading gauge and misfueling the plane led to a perplexing procedure loop, where following procedure kept returning the crew to ever more desperate restart attempts.
If the crew had immediately realized the irreversible source of their engine problems they would have abandoned restart attempts, and it's possible maybe Palermo
might have been safely approachable- but that is still not clear from any information I've seen. What has unfortunately come to the fore instead, in a sensationalist reconstruction of events, is the hasty assumption that the last errors in this accident chain are most compelling. They are the most saleable in sensationalist exaggeration. But in a scientific and logical assessment, we look at causation more dispassionately, and realize that sometimes down the line from seemingly mundane errors (like not having enough fuel along with conflicting information about fuel status) a crew can find themselves in a place that the checklists don't lead safely out of.
With miraculous epiphany, they may have dismissed procedure with a "Hail Mary" or equivalent, feathered the props, secured the engines, and trimmed her out for a hands-free glide to Palermo. But the checklists said to run the restart procedures. Restart is draggy, and gobbles up altitude and time, but when a restart is possible, it's prudent. Had they abandoned procedure, they might have had time for a leisurely snack along the quiet glide to an airport- maybe they could have relaxed until it came time to turn the glider into a silent dive-bomber with wheels and flaps laboriously put out to the breeze without the benefit of the engine-driven hydraulic pumps, which could have unraveled into something equally busy and risky to many lives had they wound up stretching the glide over Palermo's rooftops. They didn't do that, because while the window of opportunity to make Palermo was closing, the Captain was working on mixing the fuel he thought he had with the sparks and air he did have to wake his crippled bird back up into some semblance of an airliner.
They were trained to go for relight, and as those attempts failed, it happened that it came down to ditching with the nearest visible help at hand as the best available option. They never figured out what had made their engines so incomprehensibly unresponsive until after the crash.
I think that the title of this thread gets right to the heart of the motivation for this ridicious conviction, that I expect will be overturned soon. Airline unions will come down on this with some very expensive lawyering, and their membership will fully support the effort.
Air regulations begin with the following words for good reason:
The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.
Now, there is lots of legality following that, but particularly in those zen moments when some sort of figurative or literal shit is hitting the fan, it is important that we allow the Captain a certain certitude of authority. In some emergencies with some altitude, I have chosen to do ostensibly "nothing" for my own sweet time, and I emphatically reserve the right to do "nothing" comprehensible to any other human being but my own way of getting into the moment. I realize it's a stupid thing to try and convince anyone of in such an anonymous venue as this, but having dealt with emergencies with some "aplomb" shall we say, I demand and assert and will defend in the strongest terms the right and necessity for the Pilot in Command to do what seems best in the most fateful moments of his or her experience.
If the Italian court were making a sincere rebuke or retribution of Captain Gharbi's actions in command of Tuninter 1153, then they would have focused as the aviation investigators did on his lack of attention to fuel accounting duties before departure. They would also have demanded their pound of flesh from the installers of the misleading fuel indicator. But they didn't, and we're left reading headlines and listening to gossip about Muslim prayer. I'm a little bit astounded that intelligent people like you,
Bells and
iceaura don't see right through this sick charade.
"I skimmed the parts about how much simulator practice with anything like this either pilot had had (it's mentioned, if you're curious) but I doubt this kind of event is something anyone has much experience in."
Well, I do have some experience in inflight emergencies, and sophisticated simulators. As an isolated scenario, dual flameout with fuel guages to the wrong airplane secretly swapped out would be considered a little far-fetched and sadistic, as a challenge to the "victim" of a training session to sort it all out in a flying (not pre-flight) scenario. Especially in the training ATR pilots got before this notorious accident. We pilots read accident reports all the time, and especially ones like this- because most accidents (sadly) are still far less original than this. We read the most outlandishly unlikely ones not only because they're original, but also in hopes that if we're ever trapped in that same spiraling hell of following emergency procedures, but missing the answers, we'll remember a saving insight -a mysterious insight that this perfectly-functional fuel gauge I see before me is not of this plane, and lies- admittedly, it's a more distant little voice, if recent maintenance records are not reviewed before flight (as was also required of this crew).
There's an old flight training sentiment that goes something like this: Superior pilots employ superior judgement, so that we need not to resort to our superior skills to save the day. This tragedy was not sealed with a prayer, and it did not happen because the Captain ran short of the "Right Stuff" in the final minutes. The culture-war slander being advanced, that an aviator's retreat into prayerful inaction was the root cause, is a discredit to every person and institution that entertains it.
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