Quote:
Originally Posted by tylertwo
As someone who has also watched most of those docs, I can only think of one where the inability to overrule the pilot was the primary contributing factor, that was "Tenerife" (the senior pilot on KLM).
There was one other crash where it was felt that the issue of seniority may have contributed, but to a much lesser degree. There have been a few others where training was inadequate because of technical upgrades, etc., but these were not due to the problem you are referring to and I cant think of any other disasters that were because of seniority issues specifically.
The Tenerife disaster is a great example, as you mention, in which junior officers failed to more forcefully contradict their more senior, experienced captain.
Another good example is the Birgenair 301 disaster in which the pilot’s pitot tube was clogged giving faulty airspeed readings. Despite his vast experience (24,000+ hrs in the cockpit), the pilot chose to take off rather than abort the takeoff, despite still having time to do so. Then at altitude, he got confused by the mixed signals when he had overspeed readings but then the plane stalled. Despite the stick shaker going off, he cut back on power and never did realize what was going on despite first officer telling him he needed to get nose down, and reserve pilot behind him pointing out the attitude indicator showing maximum nose-up condition. This was a classic crash which again put focus on flight deck culture (here a Turkish crew), as the co-pilot could have pushed the nose down himself rather than defer to the captain, even though he knew they were stalling.
To a lesser extent, the Air Florida 90 crash also illustrates the issue, in which the first officer (with less than half the flight time as the captain) points out the icing concerns but captain takes off and doesn’t comprehend the dangers until it is too late. That captain was experienced, but had past judgment issues raised against him, so not the best example of the phenomena.
There is a great example involving a Russian crew, although the flight number escapes my memory, in which a very experienced senior captain doesn’t understand what’s going on and the other flight deck members realize the situation fully but are not bold enough to contradict the captain or take control of the aircraft. Much of the blame was placed on the role of strict hierarchy in the airline’s culture.
And there’s also United flight 173 in which a very experienced crew led by one of United’s most senior captains (27,000+ hrs) became so fixated on a faulty landing gear indicator light that they actually ran out of fuel and crash landed in a neighborhood. All that experience in the cockpit, and nobody paid attention to the basics of flying the aircraft.
My point here was simply that some of aviation’s major blunders occur with a very experienced pilot at the controls. Of course, inexperienced pilots screw up, too, but that tends to amaze me less. I didn’t intend such an innocuous point to be controversial.