Earlier this week I wrote about the sudden and unexplained drop on a LATAM 787 flight from Australia to New Zealand. Particularly chilling was that a pilot purportedly told a passenger that the instrument control panels temporarily shut off. Now that passenger has come forward and offered additional details.
More Details Emerge About LATAM 787 Flight That Experienced “Techincal Event” (Sudden Drop) Over Tasman Sea
Brian Jokat is a 61-year-old Canadian who lives in London and was on a round-the-world trip. He sat toward the front of the economy class cabin on LATAM flight 800 from Sydney (SYD) to Auckland (AKL), a Fifth Freedom service operated by the Chilean carrier. Here is how he tells hte story:
“I had passed out sleeping on the plane and the next thing I know, bodies were flying past me and onto the roof of the plane and it was pretty scary really. It actually felt like it wasn’t happening, it felt like a dream … but then a gentleman went from the roof down to hit the armrest next to me and it became very real, real quick.
“I was sure we were going down. I resided to the fact that this was out of my control. It felt like it was all going to end.”
Words including nosedive, drop, plunge, and spiral have been used to describe the sudden change in altitude. Whatever caused it, pilots were able to gain control seconds later and steadied the aircraft. No explanation was given over the PA system.
With an hour to go till landing, doctors and nurses onboard sprung up and began offering assistance. More than 50 passengers were injured and a dozen were eventually taken to hospital in Auckland. Four remain in hospital, but all are now in stable condition according to New Zealand’s health ministry.
On the ground in Auckland, the captain appeared in the cabin. JOkat claims he asked the captain directly what happened and was told that the instrument panel had gone “blank.”
“He said that he lost control of his instrument panel and it just went blank on him for a split second. There was no warning.”
Thus far, LATAM has provided no further details, simply stating that a “technical event” caused a “strong movement” onboard.
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CONCLUSION
A passenger has come forward on the record to relay what happened onboard LA800 and his conversation with the captain of the flight. Thus far, there are more questions than answers as to what caused the “blackout” onboard in the flight deck.
Interestingly, my Tesla does the same thing…sometimes the screen just goes black for a few seconds…and then reboots. It’s still scary. But that happening in a battery-operated car is a very different thing than on a widebody aircraft with 300 souls onboard.
> Read More: “Technical Incident” Sends Boeing 787 Into Sudden Dive
image: Brian Jokat
My internal combustion cars never shut off for a few seconds before starting again.
Also, the instrument panel shutting off should not have caused a nosedive. Assuming there are backup analog instruments, the pilots should have been able to keep wings level. Something else must have happened.
Lot of use of the word “should.”
@Chi Hsuan … +1 . My gas Jeep never shuts off .
When my 68 Karman Ghia shuts down, I pop the clutch into 2nd and it starts right back up. So much for advanced technology.
I’m curious to know how a screen going blank for a few seconds would cause the plane to plummet suddenly. Using the Tesla example mentioned in the post, the car still drives I assume. In this case, why can’t you still fly the plane, seat of your pants kind of flying? I am not speculating…I’m genuinely curious and would love someone who understands the 787 to explain this. If a computer going blank on an aircraft causes it to dive and lose control then this is crazy.
Autopilot failure or disengagement?
But one would assume pilots would be able to respond quickly to this without plummeting 500 ft in a violent fashion. I don’t know.
At cruising altitude the aircraft is very difficult to keep under control, nearly all flights that go above 30,000 feet are always on autopilot, if it had disengaged for even a few seconds it is not a surprise that the aircraft would go into a steep descent.
In the late 1990’s, an AeroPeru Boeing 757 Lima-Santiago Chile crashed, killing everyone on board. A maintenance man taped up the pitot tubes, the short stubbing antennas near the nose of the plane, and forgot to peel off the tape. This caused conflicting and wrong readings.
I just saw two cars damaged after a crash and the police are directing traffic. There are fire trucks. The 2 cars looked identical. 2 red Tesla Model 3 cars crashed into each other. That’s the first time I saw wreckage of 2 identical cars.
Associated Press article has mentioned the plane was briefly shaking just prior to the drop. That leads me to believe it was clear-air turbulence as initially reported. It’s not that I don’t believe the pilot, but perhaps he was mistaken at the rapid unfolding of the event, or it was 2 simultaneous events possibly related. Hoping the investigation quickly gives answers.
Agreed.
One of my old managers back in the late 1980’s told me a story about how ABM software was designed to use GPM coordinates in flight to control direction but when it crossed the equator, the engineers had a clever trick to fix the latitude numbers going negative was to simply turn the missile upside down. The guidance software was later adapted to civilian purpose.
They fortunately caught it in the simulator.
Since I heard this story nearly 40 years ago, it’s clear that software is not new in avionics but as of late there has been cost-cutting measures and methodology implemented in most corporations such as “Agile” and “stacked ranking” with the expression, I kid you not, “rebuild the plane while its in the air” style “incremental” changes to speed up development.
In the case of the 737 Max, “Agile” has literally killed people.
The argument goes that “waterfall” methodology is onerous and inefficient as compared to just building imperfect prototypes and “iterating” them until they work but this also encourages sloppy startup specifications with a “we’ll pull in the technical debt later on the backlog” (I’m not making this terminology up!)
Since workers are continually “refreshed” in stacked ranking, it’s not uncommon for incomplete specifications that were meant to be addressed later to be forgotten as different team members that owned them are pushed out the revolving door.
Documentation was also one of the cost cutting measures I’ve noticed in the past 40 years. One of the characters in Dilbert is “Tina” the technical writer. (I just talked to someone who claims to have physically met “Alice”, “Wally”, “Tina”, and “Pointy Haired Boss” at Pacific Bell years ago). “Tina” largely doesn’t exist anymore as the coders and engineers are supposed to “self document” but who wants to document something you just slaved away trying to figure out and explain it to others, particularly if it will be “iterated” away in any case?
We’ve become accustomed to this sloppy engineering in modern times. There was this joke that goes that Bill Gates told the CEO of GM: “You know, if we developed cars the way we developed computers, we would have cars that get 1000 miles to the gallon” and GM responded: “Yeah, but they’d crash and need a reboot every few hours”.
On my recent UA 787-10 flight from ORD-HND the entire plane ‘blacked out’ for ~10 mins while over Alaska. Sitting in Polaris, the entire cabin was dark except for the glow in the dark emergency lights. No power, pitch black due to the darkened windows, and eerie silence left my palms pretty sweaty even as a seasoned flier. Once the plane seemed to regain consciousness, no announcements were made and flight attendants seemingly brushed it off even thought it was the entire aircraft. Wondering if this is a component of a wider OS ‘reboot’ issue.
This guy has been talking. A lot. He’s on every interview. His experience was truly harrowing. He is though no expert and this is all hearsay at best. Also surprising the pilot would just volunteer that information so candidly. Let the experts figure this out.
It appears the pilot lied to cover up pilot-induced seat movement that caused the nose down.
https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/pilot-seat-movement-at-center-of-latam-787-9-dive-investigation/
That’s an interesting development…would be good news for Boeing if true.
I still don’t get how any of these speculative reasons would ALONE cause this so quickly. But perhaps a combination of two factors would? Which might also explain the statement that the screens went blank. Screens go blank. Captain was standing t0 stretch or use the loo. Rushed back and during the scramble of getting his seat back hit the yoke which had autopilot disconnected due to the system reboot.