Community Discussion > Flight Operations

How an A318 became an A007

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EHM-2765 Luis:
Hi guys
Just want to share with you what happened during the Leg 3 of James Bond event. The flight was a very calm one, the weather was fine, clear, 8) and nothing seemed to go wrong until I approach San Francisco. After obtaining landing instructions and checked auto pilot, fine, auto throttle, fine, glide slope alive, approach button on, and full landing configuration I decided to change to spot view for some screenshots of the approach. And then everything went wrong... Unexpectedly the a318 began a furious descent straight to the ocean like goldfinger plane. if you saw the movie ??? ,diving like a kamikaze plane. After the surprise of that behavior I change to cockpit view as fast as I could, disengage auto pilot, auto throttle, full throttle and hard back on the joystick  :o. As you know an A318 takes some time to respond (except in James Bond movies  ;D) and before I could go up I even touch the ground somewhat like a touch and go situation fortunately with full landing configuration and so I was able to climb again and after a couple of stalls( yeah I'm not that good as 007  ;))I manage to get it under control and fly the rest of the approach manually and landed safely at KSFO  :). I don't know if this has ever happen to you but I don't think I did anything wrong on the approach and may be this is another of those strange things that happen with FSX or may be FSX, Fraps, FDC,Flight logger and scenery settings were just too much for my machine at that occasion because normally it performs very well but what it seems was that auto pilot suddenly stop functioning though it was engaged and the plane was just on his own, naturally heading down. Any comments will be appropriated and after all we have to fly the event with a James Bond spirit so some surprises are welcome.(I did have Fraps in movie position so I have a film of the all situation. If one of these days I manage to get the time and knowledge I' ll try to make a movie of it and uploaded here).
Anyway just keep enjoying your flights 

EHM-2758 Peter:
Hi Luis,

What did happen exactly, I don't know, but from my own experience I can do some guessing: first of all... you survived and I hope that your passengers did too! When this kind of occurences take place when I'm flying, it usually has to do with moving the yoke by accident, what results in a disengagement of LNAV or VNAV, which depends on the move you made on the yoke. Another problable cause can be the use of the keyboard for other objectives, like you discribed in your message. You just have to try it out if yo really want to know what caused the dive!

On the other hand those situations make clear that the roll of a pilot, especially during approach, is to keep highly concentrated on the movements of the plane. It's not that odd to imagine that most crashes and nearly crashes happen during landing procedures.

Peter

EHM-2765 Luis:
Thanks Peter I think you probably right about those two things first we all did survive and for the second one may be trying to take good screenshots while landing going in and out of the cockpit and having to push keys on keyboard certainly is not going to be compatible with a good landing. I' ll keep your advices in mind next time.

EHM-1465 Dominic:
Peter's absolutely right here Luis - there's no easy way to know what caused the sudden descent other than to set it up again and see what happens. The likely candidates are loss of airspeed leading to a stall - perhaps the autothrottle was switched off without you realising - or a sudden change of elevator trim. Either of these could be caused by accidentally hitting the keyboard while doing other tasks ;)

EHM-2097 Andrei:
Yes, that happened to me too a lot of times, and I finally changed all the keyboard shortcuts in such a way that no single key pressed means anything to FS. Typically, on PP flights I used to type something into my FMC (actually just BELIEVING I was typing into the FMC), something that contained a "L" => lights go down and I get a penalty that is zapping the entire flight.

Also it depends on the very aircraft add-on you use. The Wilco Airbuses have a rather bad record when it comes to following the glideslope, especially when confronted to wind changes.

Andrei

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