How a Tiny Hole Caused Dozens of Air Disasters
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ส.ค. 2023
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Did you change your microphone? It sounds like sh^t on my hifi.
I love sponsorblock
You are speaking very quickly, which isn't generally a problem, except when you have background music that is so loud it's competing for my ear's focus. I'm sorry, but this is unwatchable for me. (Unlistenable?)
Pitot is not pronounced pa-toe it’s pee-toe Simon. You’d be amazed how many young kids think the pitot probe is a a gun, 😆.
@@tiki_trash😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊p😊😊🎉
I earned my private pilot's license in 1989. In training, it was made abundantly clear the critical nature of the pitot/static system - even for a small airplane. Where I learned to fly there are also mud dauber wasps and we were warned that even if you landed en route just long enough to use the bathroom it was enough time for the wasps to do their dirty work - in other words, put the pitot covers on after landing *and* remove the covers and inspect the pitot tubes before starting the engine, no matter how short the time was. It still amazes me that accidents are caused by this problem.
Mud daubers are pretty much everywhere in the southern US and Caribbean. It's been dry this summer, so any sprinkler operating in daylight has mud daubers looking for mud.
My CFI would tear into my ass if I didn't do a proper preflight, as I'm sure yours would've too (CFIs are awesome). The Peru flight he mentioned, there should've been a proper preflight walk around and the airline should've had a policy to place to ensure the tape was very visible. I feel putting the blame on that one worker was a big copout.
The Air France flight OTOH.... that was pure stupidity and that FO had no business being in the cockpit of any aircraft. That crash investigation was difficult for me to read because of the idea that line trainers signed off on that FO.
As a passenger only POY. WTF?
POV😊
You _can_ work around it if you know it's down. On a light aircraft you can simply trim for take-off and rely on the flight dynamics. Airliners have systems to measure the actual angle of attack, which is usually the better way to go about this.
But that assumes you know about it and know to use some other reference. Otherwise, without a functioning ASI you may as well be blind.
Moral to the aviation side of the story: If you're on a takeoff roll and the airspeed indicators don't agree, don't take off.
Does nothing for in flight icing… but yes… you are correct
There’s also a procedure for unreliable airspeed in flight. Something like wings level, 85% power and 3 degrees nose up, while you work the unreliable airspeed checklist.
Sometimes, not taking off can be just as dangerous. Airports are sometimes in less ideal locations, and not taking off can mean falling off a cliff or smashing into a building.
That's only good until you hit the point of no return, where you don't have enough runway left to safely stop. If you notice a problem after that point, you're already committed to take-off.
@@foo219 Most procedures call for cross checking the instruments at 80 knots (depending on the type of aircraft) which is well below V1.
Tube covers exist for a reason. Finding them missing is cause to ground aircraft until inspected.
Tube covers aren't normally used on overnight stays. Most (US at least) airlines use them only for hangar visits or when the aircraft is on the ground for 5+ days. I agree that they should be used more often, but I don't blame the pilot for taking a plane without the covers on because that really is normal.
and there has been at least one flight that had trouble (I forget whether it crashed or not) because the covers weren't removed before takeoff.
@@kenbrown2808 that is why checklists are a thing. they should be done every time and preferably rotating who does it so they don't become complacent from doing it way too often.
@@danilooliveira6580 indeed.
@@AviatorFox May be true for transport-class aircraft. When I park my plane I put on the cover. I only have 1 pitot tube. Most of the former have 4. The exception being if stopping at the self-service fuel. Even if going inside the FBO for lunch, the cover is on, wheels chocked, tiedowns, and intake covers are on. Even then a failure of the system should not be critical to flight safety as I know how the aircraft performs at cruise and approach and I'm not flying in IMC.
The Air France crash was pure stupidity. That FO just froze with the sidestick in nose up pitch. He should've never been in a cockpit. From my understanding the pitot tube design had some issues with draining out the melted ice water and some already replaced as they gradually complied with a service bulletin (should've been an AD). But holding an aircraft in pitch-up attitude is going to bleed off a lot of speed quickly. Every pilot should be aware of their N1/N2 speeds. If engines are nominal then there's his setting. I would risk a barberpole than a flat spin. Time and time again, transport aircraft have proven to be able to take a beating far past their Vne.
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.
As I watched the video, I was thinking "pitch, power, and sort the problem"
was wondering the same thing... isnt there a standard combination of thrust percentage and airplane pitch angle that should keep you at correct speed? that you can go to while cruising until you figure out what to do?
I was thinking this. All the process and redundant equipment to succeed and they failed because of no critical thinking and poor choices.
@@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.
@@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.
When I was learning to fly on an old Navion we had a blockage caused by bugs crawling into the Pitot tube and dying in there, clogging it. We didnt realize it until we were up in the air. Luckily the instructor knew the plane and the airport very well and was able to get us back in the pattern and landed even without the gauges working...
Shouldnt this be checked before every flight? With a cheap endoscopic camera or so
"We didnt realize it until we were up in the air." Precisely the wrong time to find out there's a problem with a critical piece of equipment.
That first disaster is a classic example of doing whatever the boss says despite all the evidence that it's wrong.
So is the second. Look up the Aeroperu crash investigation/report. It was a tragedy, but the CA instruments indicated too fast while the FO said too slow. The FO just accepted whatever the CA said and it ended up killing them. Ignoring the stick shaker though, is by far the most painful thing these kind of crashes have in common. The shaker is your last chance warning, and when it's ignored these terrible things happen. I still cry whenever I read through the Aeroperu accident, because it was so totally avoidable in a dozen different ways. The cleaner should have used a flag on his tape to indicate that it was there, the pilot should have confirmed the static port was open on walk around, the CA should have followed the axiom "speed is life" rather than constantly trying to slow the aircraft down. It's like he thought some magical force was pushing the plane faster and faster and it was his job to dirty the thing up as much as possible to add drag. So many decisions could have turned that into a safe landing, but every way it could have gone wrong did. :'(
it's incredibly bad piloting to stall an airliner and just let it drop to the ground merely because one of two airspeed indicators was reading wrong.
The Air France flight was also from stupidity. That FO did not belong in the cockpit of a C152, let alone a 747.
Yes and Crew Resource Management is supposed to reduce the chances of this. Unfortunately, some pilots are very egotistical and the people who work under them either hesitate to speak up or are ignored if they do and have to deal with the consequences of being reported as "difficult" if it's one of those types of pilots. Same with boat captains. CRM is supposed to utilize everyone and their input on situations to reduce accidents caused by human error or find the best solution to an immediate problem but that doesn't work if one person still believes themselves to be "in charge" no matter what and believe that their input is automatically more valuable than other crew member's.
The junior pilot of Air France 447 in 2009 pulled back on his side stick and had his hand on the stick the whole time as the plane stalled and fell out of the sky it was eventually noticed by the returning captain who couldn’t recover the plane in time, That junior pilot was to blame for the majority of the accident.
Airbus themselves also share blame in that disaster.
To not have some form of feedback on the joysticks to let each pilot know what the other was doing is inexcusable.
I have a pilots license as well as a degree in aerospace engineering and that has always bothered me.
I actually met a pilot who flew both Boeings and Airbuses and he disliked that feature of the Airbus. Even though Boeings are also fly by wire they have servo feed back in the joysticks.
They still don't, there have be several crashes caused by their stupid averaging of the inputs between the sticks. Force feedback has been available in joysticks for 30 years so I don't understand why they haven't been forced to include it. The averaging system also never made sense to me, it seems as though it should always listen to one pilot at a time with a large indicator light to show which side it is responding to at the time. Why would dual inputs ever be needed in a completely fly by wire system? You don't fly by deciding "hey, you work the up and down, I'll work the left and right!" Boeing aircraft sometimes have both pilots holding the yoke if they lose hydraulics and are manually flying using the pulleys and wires, but an Airbus would crash in that scenario.
@@-Bill. Going back to my previous comment where a commercial pilot who flew BOTH Boeing and Airbus.
That conversation was over 20 years ago.
A little aside to your excellent video. In my 20s, I was a Lloyd's Aviation Broker and Birgen Air was one of my clients. I left the brokerage (to study aeronautical engineering) just before Birgen's policy came up for renewal. I'm told that my replacement failed to fully place the risk, but confirmed coverage all the same. The accident happened the next day, effectively uninsured! I believe this led to the largest ever professional indemnity claim in the market - and the end of that brokerage.
Our son's a private pilot first officer. One of his main duties is the proper covering of the pitot tubes and other safety tags and covers that will need to be removed prior to the plane once again flying which are then inspected by the captain.
I can proudly say he is very good at his job.
Op sec
@@italjahcorntrashrollerdoubtful this falls under op sec 🤣😂
@@italjahcorntrashroller
More like PMs.
Opsec is operational security, loose lips sink ships, check all four tires before you get in the car sort of stuff.
Good job! He knows how to check a small hole for debris! Good job 👏
You cannot be a private pilot first officer - there is NO SUCH thing as there are no ranks among private pilots.
You are either a private pilot or a commercial pilot.
Among commercial pilots there are rankings, like first officer, captain, as well as grades for instructors and positions within a flying organisation.
I live in Peru, and the moment the video started I remembered about the air crash caused by tape not having been removed from the Pitot tube. Thank you Simon and crew for such educational videos.
Small correction from an aircraft mechanic and pilot: The vertical speed indicator and altimeter do not use any data from the pitot tube. They use static pressure only for their readings. The VSI has a "calibrated leak", and the dial displays the rate of climb or descent as the pressure changes. The altimeter functions similarly, reading static pressure only, but is calibrated with an adjustment knob to the local barometric pressure, or standard sea level pressure of 29.92 inHg/1013.25 mb for all aircraft above 18,000 feet above sea level to display the correct altitude information. Only the airspeed indicator uses data from both systems.
You'd think after all this time, someone would've come up with a less accident-prone system than this. I know, now, these are a relatively low number of crashes, but frankly, crashing is one of those scenarios where once is too many.
They're measuring what matters to the wing, dynamic pressure. Aside from the multiple redundancy of these devices built into airliners, there are alternate sources for speed (like GPS), but they don't directly measure the critical dynamic (equivalent) airspeed in the way the pitot-static system does. At the end of the day, in the event of discrepancies between instruments the pilots need to cross-check ALL the airspeed sources to determine which is erroneous - which is what they failed to do in the examples here. And if all else fails, you fly pitch & power - pre-determined settings that are calculated to result in a safe airspeed.
I'm no expert, but I've seen a lot of videos and read articles about various airplane disasters (like MentourPilot and some long form articles posted on engineering and travel sites and such).
In pretty much all of the incidents I've seen, the equipment failures are not novel situations. That is, it is known that they could fail and there are procedures for assessing the situation and figuring out a way to deal with it safely. There is almost always a human component for the disaster. Yes, in a few of the incidents, a series of failures happened so fast that there wasn't enough time for the pilots to fully grasp everything and they basically had to make their best guess and it turned out poorly. But even in those situations, usually the human error occurred earlier with improper maintenance, airline execs trying to save money, or technician making a mistake and trying to cover it up rather than biting the bullet and addressing it properly or something.
The airline industry is so heavily regulated for safety, not just for the procedures of an actual flight, but all of the repeated inspections that must be done, regular maintenance, diagnostics, etc.
The pitot system doesn't seem particularly overly accident prone, at least to me. It's people that are accident prone, and with each new incident, authorities come up with new protocols to attempt to mitigate even the human errors.
I would think this IS the less accident prone system.
When I was a young man I worked several years in Air Traffic Control. At that time (late 1960s) they were phasing out runway caravans (RCVs), which had had a history dating back to the interwar years (I believe). They helped several potential catastrophes from happening. I think it was a cost issue to continue using them, for an occasional benefit. An alert crew of usually two assistant controllers might have spotted the pitot cover on the aircraft. I witnessed from the control tower a C-47 Dakota coming in to land cleared by the controller, when a red Very light was fired near the threshold and the aircraft did a go-around. They had spotted debris on the runway. An RCV might have saved Concorde on that fateful day in 2000.
The problem is that it is not easy to find out the airspeed @MrLunarlander said. You can easily find out the ground speed with radar reflection or GPS, but that does not tell you how quickly the air is flowing over the skin of the aircraft. If you are flying into a headwind, the air is moving more quickly over the aircraft than the ground speed would indicate. If there is a tail wind, the air is moving less quickly over the skin.
This airspeed is critical to understanding how much lift is being generated, which is kind of important since falling out of the sky is generally frowned upon.
I'm only 3 minutes in but had to say that this is a big issue in the tropics. Mud wasps LOVE tiny holes to lay their eggs in and then add food, then cover with mud. If Pitots aren't covered when on the ground, there is a high chance a wasp will find that uncovered Pitot. EDIT: 2 minutes later, Simon's writer gives an example.
Perfect example of why you should wait until the END OF THE FUCKING VIDEO,to make comments lol
@@jeffdroog I hear ya buddy
These insects exists elsewhere too, i frequently find the connector of my garden hoses blocked with their larvae plugs. (Germany)
These mudplugs are surprisingly resilient too, can't just flush them out with water pressure, unless you break them apart first.
To me they're just an annoyance, to an Aircraft they're deadly.
Once while I was a pilot during take off, we were getting a low airspeed. Looking out the cockpit we were clearly going fast enough. By then there wasn't enough room left to safety slow back down. Told tower what was happening as we took off, requesting immediate emergency landing. Circled back, and safety landed. During the investigation it was discovered the ground crew left the pitot tube cover on.
I highly doubt this ever happened. It is the duty of the aircrew to do a walkaround of the aircraft and visually confirm the pitot tubes are clear.
The airline industry has a "no blame" culture, where it is imperative to identify faults and learn from them, rather than punish people, but I do not believe any pilot would ever brag about such a blatant failure of duty as this person above.
@@ticijevish it is recorded in at least one incident.
@@ticijevishHe didn’t name an airline or a person, just an incident where they learned the importance of removing the covers. My father was an air traffic controller and a go around after takeoff for FOD like a bird strike in the engine or some other odd behavior of the plane was the exact correct procedure and does occasionally happen. Then the investigation on the ground is done to determine the cause. And since my mom was also a flight instructor and I heard her many times do a flight check after a student have to remind him about the pitot tube covers, yup, I ABSOLUTELY believe it.
Yikes! I hope you yelled at them for a while and they got yelled at by someone else next. Oh and they were retrained on how to do their jobs.
This definitely did not happen. It is the flight crew, not the ground crew, who are responsible for the final check. If this really happened, the pilot would be the party in trouble.
I calibrated the systems which checked to make sure they worked correctly. They are big, boring test sets. Thank you for explaining why they are so important. Kind of crazy I did this in Germany as well.
The first cockpit was filled with idiots. We have 2 working detectors and one giving erroneous readings... "Let's operate using the one that we know isn't working." It is a shame those idiots took 160 people with them. 😓
We are all humans... and humans are "faulty" creatures. Its a high workload situation, and combined with confirmation bias, it is much hard to correct such small errors while really being in the situation than sitting on your couch relaxed. To call them idiots is a little to self-satisfied in my eyes. Sometimes pilots save planes with seemingly genious decissions, sometimes they crash with seemingly idiotic decissions, deeper investigation not showing really a difference in experience and past decissionmaking. Judging a person by one time they fail... well, i hope for all of us, that that is not the usual way do judge "faulty" creatures all the time.
I remember hearing about an accident on a show called Mayday, according to Wikipedia, which outside of US & Canada is known as Air Crash Investigation. In the case they talked about the end result was also ice in the tubes. But the cause for the water in the tubes was because the plane had been washed without covering the tubes. And when the plane entered high altitude, the water froze.
Actually that was not the Pitot Tubes. It was the angle of attack sensor that froze. It's a mini "wing" on the side of the airplane that tilts up/down as the airflow passes it. On the mentioned accident, they washed the aircraft with high pressure (without following correct procedures) because it had a paint job done to it, and it was delayed.
Water entered inside the system, and on high altitude it made it froze on a specific angle. Therefore both the autopilot and the pilots thought their pitch was quite different from what it actually was.
Are those tubes horizontal for the entire length, or do they have an upward kink along their length which would allow such water to drain out. Should I suspect the former . . . ?
@@djgeorgetsagkadopoulos Possibly that. It's been a while since I actually saw that episode. Simon just talking about a mistake related to washing+freezing reminded me of that one.
@@EllieMaes-Grandad are you talking about Pitot tubes or Angle Of Attack sensors ?
For Pitot tubes it doesn't really matter. They don't block because water gets inside them and freeze (and thus you could drain them to avoid it). They block because of water molecules in the air (humidity) freezing and building up. The same way as a wing can built up ice, despite being a flat surface that naturally drains water, moving at speeds that usually exceed 0.8 Mach.
AFAIK Pitot tubes can be heated to avoid building ice inside on them, as long as someone turns that system on.
For Angle Of Attack sensors, they are sealed, so no water/moisture should get inside them under regular circumstances.
After that accident mentioned above, I'm pretty sure some procedures changed, and possibly future designs will be even better (since no-one thought to throw water on them on REALLY high pressure)
Thank you. I was referring to the washing incident which [allegedly] put water into the tube which stayed after take-off and froze. @@djgeorgetsagkadopoulos
A small correction: the island of Guam is in the *North* Pacific, east of the Philippines, north of New Guinea, and southeast of Japan.
I’ve seen many videos about Flight 447. It has even more contributing factors. The plane was flying in weather at night, with no visual references. When the instruments went haywire the crew were truly flying blind. The pilot flying was attempting to climb by pulling all the way back on the stick. Normally in an Airbus the flight computer would not allow excessive control movements but in this instance the aircraft was in “alternate law” which meant the pilot has full control. As the plane dropped through the darkness like a stone in a dead stall the crew struggled to understand what was happening. The pilot repeatedly attempted to climb when he should have pointed the nose down. By the time the crew realized what happened the aircraft was too low to recover.
All of these accidents were the result of pilot error, as for AF447 the period for which the airspeed was unreliable was about 10 seconds, after that it was working fine but the crew chose not to believe it, the stick was held at full aft for the duration of the incident (not the way to recover from a stall). The first two incidents required the use of the “unreliable airspeed” checklist, basically reverting to the relationship between power and attitude, the crew again chose not to do this.
A friend of mine lost his dad in the Birkenair.... really a messy incident to say the least
I was an aircraft mechanic in the US Army and the importance of attention to detail is drilled into us. With all these advanced systems that are on aircraft today. Military or civilian. Details such as these aren't stressed as much as they should be. This video should be required for any entry level aviator. When people get on the job it is up to the unit or company you work for to cover stuff like this. Thanks for the great video
I knew about Pitot tubes from ships, and I just wondered whether they used the same system on airplanes. And of course, redundancy doesn't mean much if you have to guess which one is right.
Well, most new systems use at least 3 air data systems, so you're supposed to go with the two that are saying the same thing rather than the one which is saying something different. The problem comes in when you have poor situational awareness, crew resource management, and/or training. Pitot failures happen all the time in light aircraft, and they aren't unheard of in airliners. Most of the time they cause inconvenience and nothing else, but when human factors come into play these minor failure can become catastrophes.
Airplanes have triple redundancy for critical systems. They can maintain operation if 1 of the circuits fails, and warn the pilots if 2 of them fail and no reliable data can be gathered. But no system can protect against stupid. If your plane stalls and your reaction is to pitch up sharply, you're only going to be alive for as long as nothing ever goes wrong.
They have three of them so if one was blocked, the other two can indicate the erroneous one.
@@TheOtherNeutrino I remember reading that the space shuttle had three identical flight computers each with three gyros and if any gyro disagreed with the others it would be taken out of the control loop by the software and in turn if any one flight computer disagreed with the other two it was taken out of service automatically.
@@atomicskull6405 Not much different for transport-class aircraft. Most have 3 independent inertial reference systems tied into redundant GNSS (GPS) receivers. In additions, Boeing and Airbus have 2 independent autopilot computers. During very low visibility conditions, pilots must use both systems and the systems ensure both agree within a small margin. There's a lot of redundancy that's required and even more redundancy for higher range ETOPS (Extended Range Twin-Engine Operations) which allows a transport aircraft to fly further distances from an enroute alternate airport (i.e. transoceanic). Prior to ETOPS, twin jets couldn't fly those routes and is why there were so many tri-jets.
It's worth noting that these disasters weren't caused simply by the pitot sensor failures alone. Most disasters of the scale involve multiple factors. I don't know about 50 years ago, but in the modern day and the past few decades, airliners have multiple pieces of equipment relaying all kind of information to the pilots. Pilots are trained to recognize when some sensor may not be reliable due to some fault, and many situations have precise protocols to help pilots diagnose the issue and mitigate it.
It's not like the pitot sensor freezing over == the plane is going down and everyone is dies.
That makes air travel sound way more risky than it actually is.
It sounds like the tubes should be made retractable. In fact, when retracted, they can be tested with an internal air pump to verify operation either before deploying or on demand if there is a question of accuracy mid flight. Yes, I know that more moving parts equals greater potential for failure, but in this case they can be tested internal then deployed before take off, Once deployed, they are no different than fixed units. You also have the option of keeping one retracted in reserve so that it is protected unless needed in an emergency.
You have a pretty decent idea which needs slight refinement: Just add a retractable Pitot to existing systems as a back up for the back up. Adds zero complexity or potential failure to the existing system while improving the reliability of the system as a whole.
You could do the same thing by having a telescoping ram which pushes through the tube on command to clear foreign material or debris, or to clear ice. Mechanisms like that would probably require a lot of extra certification though.
That or we could just remember to remove the pitot tube covers and turn on the pitot heat. (In other words, follow the checklists properly.)
@@-Bill. If it were left in the fully extended position while the plane is parked, it would also keep bugs out.
We have similar wasps in SC. Every ground plug and air compressor fitting is always packed with mud and larvae.
I believe they are also called mud daubers in the Carolina's, but I don't know if they are the same species, a related species, or a two different sub-species.
@@jackturner214 Definitely have those guys building mud tunnels on the walls. These other little guys are insidious and ruin air tools and outlets.
Just had my AC and gas heat replaced with a heat pump. The old refrigerant line was packed with both new and old wasp tubes. The mud dauber is a typical urban wasp in the Houston area. Gotta get more rural to find yellowjacket nests.
Sounds like an issue that could be solved with a system similar to how ejector pins work on manufacturing molding machines.
Regarding the incident in Peru, isn't one of the pilot's pre-flight checks supposed to be checking that the pitot tubes aren't blocked?
yes, they are supposed to be covered and that cover is to be remove before flight.
there was a case however were little time passed and a wasp blocked it.
Pretty sure that's part of it. A walk-around by the captain where anything that is visibly wrong is supposed to be caught. This would include a pitot tube cover, bad tires, whatever
Absolutely. You should look up the actual report. It was a piece of tape that matched the color of the aircraft's paint in that area, so it was tough to see. The pilot should have made positive contact with an OPEN static port, but I can understand why failing to see ANY static port might not rise to conscious awareness. He missed it because the covered port was camouflaged. Were it covered it should have been bright red with a streamer/flag hanging from it stating "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT". The cleaner didn't do that, partially because he didn't speak English so likely didn't know what the warnings around that port were saying, and also didn't receive very good training from his company.
Is it the fault of the cleaning company for not training properly? Yes. Is it the cleaner's fault? Yes. Is it the pilot's fault for missing the covered port? Yes. Is it the Captain's fault for his irrational conclusions once they were in the air? Yes. See the "Swiss Cheese Model of Error". Aeroperu is perhaps the single best aviation example I can think of when discussing human factors.
Edit:
I see you said pitot tube not being blocked. Peru wasn't actually the pitot tube, it was the static port. That's a small disc a little larger than a coin with a tiny hole in the middle, placed flush against the side of the aircraft. Unfortunately, that model plane has them well above your head also so you need to carefully look for them otherwise you would just miss it.
@@AviatorFox That makes some sense...easy to miss. Though pitot tubes are always bare metal at the tip, no? So it being the same color as the paint should have been a tip-off...but SO easy to miss, hard to blame the pilots for not catching that. They're looking for the red flag covers, not a bit of matching paint. So sad. :(
@@carmencrincoli Yeah, Simon is a great reader but he really left a lot out regarding Aeroperu. Look up Aeroperú Flight 603 on Wikipedia under "Investigation", it's a good laymen summary. The thing which was covered WAS NOT a pitot tube. It was actually the static port, briefly shown in a diagram on the video at 2:35. The static port is responsible for altitude, vertical speed, and works with the pitot tube to deduce airspeed. The static port being covered disables all three functions whereas the static port only affects airspeed in most instances. The static port on that aircraft is also bare metal, but closely surrounded by white paint. It is my understanding that the tape covering it was also white, and totally covered the unpainted disc of the static port which would then look to somebody on the ground as an unbroken white area (even though the static port is beneath it).
At my family’s home in Illinois, mud dobbers are a HUGE problem. They get into absolutely everything and create huge mud nests that are as hard as a rock. Literally anything they can get into, they will.
In the US we pronounce it "Pee-toh." On my certification flight my pitot tube got clogged by a bee and I lost my airspeed indicator. I immediately called an emergency and landed, which made my tester very impressed.
British always got to pronounce it differently from USA
simon always wings it with the pronounciations, pay no attention to that
It's French. The emphasis is on the second syllable. Think "petit".
(And just because I _have_ to make the obvious joke: you lot mispronounce _everything_ in the US, General *_Zed_* ;) )
Pilots in the UK pronounce it pee-toh too.
@@rogeratygc7895 An outrage, since half of their native language is French.
(Yes, redcoats, I'll take the piss out of youse as much as I will the yanks ;) )
Maybe another video could be on the other frequently involved instrument in crashes, the angle of attack sensors.
I've literally never heard of a crash attributed to an angle of attack sensor. Outside of military aircraft, most planes aren't even equipped with AOA instrumentation. Only very recently have Airbus and Boeing began to install them.
Oh shit, I used to not be afraid of flying.
I still am, but I used to be too
As this aircraft would have two separate airspeed systems for the captain and first officer plus a standby system, why didn’t the pilot cross check with the other two systems, it would only take seconds to confirm the error.
During my time as an aircraft engineer one of my responsibilities was the altitude and airspeed systems. One of the maintenance procedures was to inspect the condition of pitot probes for cleanliness, tip erosion of the pitot probes and cleanliness of the static ports. If any evidence of an obstruction were found a back flush with a clean nitrogen air source would be done to clear the pitot probe or static port. I also carried out calibration checks on airspeed and altitude indicating systems. If I had to blank off pitot drain holes or static ports I always used blanks with an enormous “remove before flight” streamer attached. But of course 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing!
I have a tape of the YF-23 dramatically slamming into the runway at high speed when the test pilot did a low pass with military thrust to burn off fuel. The data from the air data sensors (think numerous static ports) exceeded the parameters in the software, causing wild vertical oscillations that were too fast for the pilot to counter - he was behind the curve. Modern inherently unstable aircraft such as fighter planes are now run through numerous simulations to prevent something like that happening. Many modern planes have been tested throughout their flight envelope before they even fly
I'm not afraid of flying in complex machinery, I'm afraid of human incompetence to maintain machinery. Thanks for unlocking a new reason to be fearful.
Pitot tubes themselves don’t cause disasters, despite what the title says. They’re incredibly important, but blockages in them and covers over them have caused accidents. However, AF447 was not one of those. They could have fairly easily recovered the aircraft, but it wasn’t a pitot issue that brought it down.
Bonin brought it down.
Same goes for the first example in the video. They had 3 airspeed indications with 2 of them being correct and the captain's being incorrect. But the captain chose to rely on his airspeed indicator and the other crew members failed to check and override him.
To give you an idea as to how sensative these are the area around the pitot tubes on modern airliners is referred to as the RVSM (Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums) critical area ANY damage in this area including just chipping paint renders the aircraft restricted from operating at RVSM altitudes (29,000-41,000 feet) till repaired as it can throw the readings off by slightly changing the flow of air around the pitot tube.
Excellent as always Simon, attention to the tiny details folks, it helps avoid catastrophic events!!!🙏😢✈️❣️
Excellent video, Simon! 😊
I truly enjoy your videos! You have an amazing way of delivering these videos! Thank you for the great content!
We have mud daubers in the US as well as. For those unfamiliar, they fly around your yard inspecting the exterior for small spiders that they then sting and carry off. They find a small hole and put the spiders in, lay an egg on it and close the hole with mud. They are extremely industrious! In the course of a little over six hours they located the pump exhaust on an outboard boat motor and plugged it solid. Lesson learned. Aircraft manufacturers issued red cloth covers for their tubes to keep the daubers out.
It’s funny how the pitot indicator isn’t cross referenced with GPS to warn pilots of a conflicting reading. This would allow the pilots to switch to a another pitot tube to read from that’s given an matching reading. Anyone with a smart phone can tell the speed of a plane in flight provided you have a signal. For satellite phones this is no problem no matter the altitude.
Typically that third pitot tube has a direct air line to a standby airspeed indicator that should be within a certain tolerance of the primary indicators. A quick glance at all three will tell you which one is incorrect.
What a speed of speech... i am impressed. With other contend, you sometimes have to speed up the video to up to 2 times normal speed to get such a flow of speech. Really impressive when using such elaborated language.
It's amazing to me that someone can try a solution to a problem (pull up and reduce power due to high airspeed indicted) and completely ignore the observation that the problem gets worse instead of better. Then go on to apply the same solution with more vigor. Not only is this bad airmanship it's sheer stupidity in human nature.
watching the air diaster videos has made me highly aware of pitot tubes and just how easily a malfunction or blockage can kill everyone on board
I remember wondering what pitot is as "pitot heater" is in start-up procedure for pretty much anything flying in simulation games. Always assumed its acronym for something.
Imagine if they just added a 2nd one that was generally closed, and could be opened in case of an instrument failure on the others.
Easy test for this, would be to have a single lead to pressure test them prior to each flight...
It is always remarkable how we trust complacency, over simply overengineering something enough to make it truly safe.
Just a heated line, with a compressor could have saved a majority of these people.
All the while, a massive a hole caused the crash of a KLM 747 on Tenerife.
As in a massive arsehole with too big an ego?
I have a tiny hole that has caused a lot of disasters in my life too.
Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find a comment like this, but still well done
I figured this video was about a flight attendant
Bravo. 🤣🤣🤣
Get any wasps in there though?
@@nekolalia3389Mate!!! Bloody hell, stuff of nightmares!
Great music in this one. really sets the mood for the final story.
Lets start out with a 1min 45 sec ad.
Why moan, better the start than in the middle
@adamhousden6349 i agree, but why not at the end? Why that freaking long?
Tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap. Problem solved. 5-8 seconds
I heard the size of the hole and immediately thought of not mud daubers, but the little guys who take over abandoned wasp nests, line 'em with bits of leaf and petals and do a behbeh house. Pollenator bees.
The reliability of this system could be increased if they faced aft and measured the ram vacuum.
Furthermore in addition to heaters, a compressed air line hooked up to the system could be implemented to purge a potentially blocked pitot.
Maybe even a hybrid system of ram pressure tubes and ram vacuum tubes?
Bugs, tape, dirt, and ice shouldn't be killing people!
Just remember takeoffs are optional but landings are mandatory.
Great video Simon! Very tragic...
Gps Ground speed is not the same as air speed but in case of failure I guess it is beter then nothing
As a pilot, I have *never* heard of a "pit-OwE" tube. Every pilot I have known has always called it a "PEE-toe" tube.
Pee-tot 😂
He points out that it's named after a French guy. In US English PEE-toe seems to be the way everyone says it but to follow French pronunciation rules I'd expect it to be neither "puh-TOE" nor "PEE-toe". French doesn't use the "schwa" sound as much as English so "pee-TOE" seems most correct for French, to me
I’m not even a pilot and even I always pronounced it that way lol
THANK YOU! As a former aircraft mechanic, this one had me eyeballing 'ol Whistle-boy every time he said it 😂.
As a pilot, what got me was the way at 3:00 Simon pronounced "altar-meter." I got a good chuckle out of that one!
What I'm getting out of this, when in doubt over airspeed, take either the lower reading or try to fly faster to reduce the risk of stalling.
In response to a lot of these instances, Boeing began incuding an IAS DISAGREE flag in their EICAS system to provide an earlier indication, I think in the reaction to the Birgen Air crash. And, I think, reworked the logic of the pitot/static system to allow the crew to select the best working set of sources rather than just defaulting to the captains set. The EICAS flag throws a mandatory alert and a mandatory memory-item procedure that increases the chance of successfully aborting takeoff if the system is found to be not working, because there’s a much better chance of stopping safely from 80 KIAS than there is from V1.
The problem with a pitot/static fault is that you have a very narrow window to detect it *and* it’s not always easy to tell which instrument is affected .. even with multiple independent instruments. If you don’t get an immediate and unambiguous warning at 80 KIAS, you quickly get to V1 and have to hope you guessed right by rotation speed ..
Did they also make the heater always on or automatic?
you'd think they'd have a system in place that if the multiple redundant tubes gave varying readings a specific alarm would sound
If you block the end of a peto tube it goes from being a speed sensor to being an altimeter. Basically the blocked end traps air inside. As the plane gets higher instead of measuring dynamic presure it simply measures outside air pressure vs what the air pressure was when the blockage occured. The higher you go the higher the differential and the higher the indicated "speed". How do you slow a plane down? Reduce power and gain a little altitude. But now you are higher so the "speed" is higher so you reduce power and gain altitude. Until you are trying to fly vertically with your engines idling.
Great video.
Nice to see reminders of the critical nature of the systems I maintain.
One critical point to learn is that pitch+power=performance. Pilots who routinely fly should learn the common power settings by heart. If it claims you are over-speed at 50% throttle and 20 degrees pitch up, the instrument is wrong. But wait, what if the engine is really running at full throttle? Then the engine instruments would be showing odd behavior themselves. In the case of the recent ATR crash, for instance, the pilots should have also noticed that the engines were not humming the same song as usual on landing.
In the case of Bergen Air .....a 757 has three speed systems.......pilot, first officer and standby system, plus data from the ADIRUs, the air data inertial guidance units. Plus now days you have GPS speed data. An airspeed disagree causes the pilots to cross check their air speed indication with the standby system. Two systems that agree out-vote the one that disagrees and you then go by the one good primary flight display plus the standby system. It's a bad situation for sure but it should be one of those things that they routinely practice during flight simulator training.
Given the number of failures caused by accidentally leaving covers on Pitot tubes and Static ports, you would think they would make covers for these things that are brightly colored and reflective (so they instantly stand out from the color of the actual plane) and then mandate that cleaners, maintanence guys and anyone else must use the brightly colored covers.
Or maybe that's already a thing, I don't know...
Bright red ribbon-looking tags, labeled "Remove Before Flight"
1:50 Bright red things like flags
I didn't expect to laugh as hard as I did at him calling the Altimeter an Alternator. Not sure why that one tickled me the way it did. 😅
They’re called whistler tubes!
They’re located in strategic places around the fuselage in modern aircraft for whistling
-Simon Whistlertube
All these issues make me wonder why planes don't have a backup pitot tube that is hidden in a closed compartment to keep it clean/from freezing over until it's needed.
Fray Bentos is actually a place, wow, I wonder if they developed the pies. Great video. Well it would be, Fact Boy is running it.
5:52 Nope! A tiny wasp did not take down a giant airliner - poor maintenance aside, pilot error and poor CRM did the job. There are three Pitot-Probes because there are three airspeed indicators in the instrument panel; one on each of the pilots' Primary Flight Displays and one standby (can be a third electronic display or a pneumatic indicator). Compare the three indicator values and disregard the one that doesn't agree. Aside from that, a pilot should have _some_ idea what speed the aircraft will be doing at a given weight , altitude, attitude, and engine power setting. There was no excuse for this crash.
“Killing everyone onboard”
I guess that’s why people are so scared of flying. Crashes don’t happen often, but when they do, they’re nearly always disastrous.
The first case was the static port being plugged. Causing the airspeed to read higher and higher
the tape situation really spiraled out of control there hahaha what a twist
I forget the flight details, think it was Brisbane airport had a similar problem with those wasps nesting in pitot tubes - there was one plane that had it's pitot covers installed while it was idle on the apron and all the pre-flight inspections missed that the covers were on somehow. Think they managed to bring it back down in one piece... but the wasps getting us on both sides there.
Pitot tubes sand static ports must always be checked on pre-flight. It’s unfortunate that something as simple as forgetting to cover before or uncover after washing a plane can bring it down. It’s because of these things that pre flight checks exist in the first place. Also why complacency is one of the dirty dozen of aviation human factors.
Almost seems like when all 3 pitot systems fail your best course of action is to hold whatever speed and altitude you can. If you didn't feel a lurch from losing or gaining a ton of speed, you definitely can safely assume you didn't just jump 100 knots in speed and to start finding a safe spot to land.
When that happens, pilots have a plan to keep flying at safe airspeeds. One method is "pitch and power," where we use known combinations of pitch angle and power setting to get close to a desired airspeed.
On some modern airliners, the plane use the Angle of Attack sensors to extrapolate rough "speed," i.e. "too fast" or "too slow." Too high angle of attack means the airspeed is too slow, and too low angle of attack means airspeed is too fast.
To dispel the fear of flying these stories have likely given people, let me point out some of the safety measures airlines and pilots now use to prevent such accidents:
First of all, the most recent crash caused by a Pitot tube malfunction was in *2009*
As briefly mentioned in the video, Pitot tubes are now heated. These heaters also automatically switch on in case of a forgetful pilot.
Manual checks of the Pitot tube are a part of pre-flight procedures. Many pilots will do a "walkaround" of their aircraft to manually inspect the tubes as well as brake pads, engines, etc
ATC towers have independent speed measurements, and both commercial and hobby pilots can request a speed check at any time.
The amount of guys that takeoff with the Pitot covered today is scary.
Can't you make a system that flushes the tubes with high pressure water or something? Or at least detect if the water flows out slower than expected? I know it's an additional complexity, but for a critical component this sensitive it seems justified. For a plane to be taken down by a wasp is insane
It still amazes me that the B2 is from the 80s.
I can't remember where I heard the story, but apparently Australia has wasps that are even worse at blocking thoae tubes than the 1s in... I think Simon said somewhere in South America. As I recall, he said that plane had been sitting unprotected from wasps for 20hrs. The Australian ones can block those tubes in 20 minutes! (or less)
Pito static tubes freezing over, yep pretty deadly when you rely on it solely for what is going on.
Damn I was waiting for the but they fixed it part. Now I’m like great another thing to worry about
Thanks to Mayday Air Disasters i knew exactly what that pitot tube in the thumbnail was and the disasters that they have caused
Why isn't there a light sensor that would detect if the holes had an obstruction? You could have an artificial light outside that would compensate for the changing ambient light brightness. That would allow it to work at night or on cloudy days.
Or they could go the other way and make it a blowhole. Just blow air out the hole and measure how much pressure is required to do so. Any small insect would get blown out, and anything more substantial like ice would restrict the flow and register a higher pressure than expected. If you detect that higher pressure, you know you have an obstruction.
I worked in a paintshop for airplanes and helicopters, and we were very careful when masking both the pitot tube and static ports. Our licensed mechanic had to check everything out too.
What is that watch your are wearing? Looks so nice!
Gotta say that graphic for the flight is some old school flight sim
if you're interested in these kind of videos about air accident's, I'd highly recommend listening to the Black Box Down podcast.
They cover a large amount of global air disasters with a definite result.
They cover the events leading up to, what was happening during the flight and go in detail on the accident report to teach you how that accident improved air safety.
For your statistics: an advert at the beginning is much more likely to just run its length, instead of me being half way thru some information then trying to skip it then getting fed up at missing where it ends and closing the rest of the vid...
I do love what the 'whistler channels' do and the writers behind them... OK and the presenter
...its always wasps
IIRC less troublesome alternatives are being developed using laser light, at least as a backup to the tubes.
Watched a pair get in a light aircraft without a walk around, called ops to radio them to say you need to remove the pitot cover!
The aero peru had actually made it through the first 2 legs just fine. It was the final leg between peru and chile.
Mud wasps spiders and other flies plug pitot tubes often or a drop of water can do it too , some pilots try to cook them out with the pitot heat
In all those incidents, the pitot blockage may have initiated the accident chain, but in
pilot error was the accident cause. With the possible exception of the B-2, the pilots all had enough information and time to fly the a/c safely and land. That all were easily avoidable is what makes these airline accidents so tragic.
Not really with Aeroperu 603, at night without any reliable airspeed or altitude indicators they were basically completely helpless. ATC couldn't help them because the altitude readings the tower gets are the ones measured by the plane. The only way they could have been saved was by another plane going up there and flying dangerously close to them to guide them down.
@@BirdieRumia The altimeter problem could have been sufficiently enough solved by the outside temperature reading. You don't need any great accuracy - all you need to know is, when the temperature is not in a deep subzero (C) region, you are dangerously low. There was no excuse for descending to sea level.
If the airspeed indicators disagree or are acting weird, go partial panel and fly pitch and power. If nothing else, that should at least let you stay within the flight envelope while you troubleshoot.