Multiple instrument failure on a 777?

I had a friend who flew for them in India for a year on a contract. I am sure someone will be held to account. May not be someone involved but someone will answer for it.
He couldn't wait to get out of there.

 

Odd. Every ILS at JFK has RNAV (GPS) overlays. Not any different than they would have at Newark.

 

I'm quite certain they didn't fly back to India VFR.

 

Maybe VMC, but not VFR.

 

I don’t think anyone will be “taken to task.” Stuff breaks. I’m not familiar with 777 systems, but if you loose an electrical bus or AC/DC transformer, you can lose multiple systems. Shoot a different approach if available or divert. Nothing to see here...

 

LPV approach minimums are 200 ft. Maybe they didn't want to get to a fuel critical situation if they missed.

 

Alot of this does not surprise me as Air India has had some questionable mtx issues in the past. More about them than the airplane. They also are very tight on cash flow right now so do like most Indians try their best to do, avoid flying on them. I have heard some pretty wild stories about them and even brand new 787's sitting at their mtx hangars in India waiting for someone to fix them for months(not Boeings fault) .

 

I believe the very first 777 that was scrapped, and not a result of a major accident, was from ................................ Air India. The structure looked in very good shape, well, except for the slight bend in the flange of the header beam over the lower lobe cargo door.
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I highly doubt that as well. Just the additional fuel flying at FL280 or below would pay for whatever repairs they needed in the New York area many times over.

 

??? They could very well have flown the entire flight in visual meteorological conditions at normal flight levels (above FL280), but they would be operating under an IFR flight plan.

 

MNPS, RVSM, etc would make that very difficult. And those all have specific equipment requirements.

I mean, sure, it could be done, but it would make no operational or economic sense to do so.

 

I'm not saying they would do it on purpose, i.e. maintain VMC, just that it would not be THAT unusual. I have been a passenger on normal service across both the Atlantic and Pacific where we were VMC the entire flight.

 

It wouldn't be unusual to be in VMC the entire flight. It would be extremely unusual to try to operate, even as a ferry flight, a jet aircraft without the appropriate and required equipment operational.

 

Don’t you mean 18,000?

 

Of course positive control airspace is above FL180. I was just replying to the remark about inefficiency of a large airliner ( or any turbofan) below FL280.

 

RVSM and MNPS kick in at FL280. If you have sufficient equipment to fly in that airspace, you'll be able to fly IFR.

 

Interesting thread...

I had to google all the terms and got to thinking...

Can modern airplanes land with total instrument failure?

Can all airports accept this type of landing?

 

Good questions.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

What does "total instrument failure" mean to you? Are you including loss of two way communications?

The short answer is, sure. It helps (a lot) if the weather is decent, or you can get somewhere where the weather is decent.

I'd much rather have a loss of navigation and communications than a major primary flight control failure, for instance.

If you are talking about total electrical failure, then in an Airbus you get both a loss of navigation and communication and a major flight control issue! However the odds of that are quite low. I don't know that there has ever been an Airbus of any variant which has had a total electrical failure, after millions of hours.

 

That’d be an odd thing considering the presence of the ram air turbine.

 

By total instrument failure I mean you still have throttle and steering along with landing gear, but no GPS, no speedometer, etc...

If the radio goes out with ATC I assume there is a back up protocol?

 

You’d squawk 7600. And if the cockpit couldn’t send and receive text messages I would think they’d descend to an altitude that allowed regular cell phone reception to call their corporate office. After all that the plane would probably still get light gun signals prior to landing.
There’s plenty of planes flying around without gps and radios.

 

We have a few possibilities. 7600 is the first thing, we have comm-failure protocols in place for most phases of flight (mostly variations of 'proceed on flight planned route'). Total failures are very rare, and ATC will move all traffic out of the way.

Light guns are basically useless for anything but small airports. I don't think you could see ours from more than a mile away, if you could even distinguish it from all the other lights in the airport environment. We use it as a $10,000 flashlight mostly when we drop things under the desks.