Slush Pile: Minor Malfunction Major Disaster

2008 Slush Pile

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Minor Malfunction Major Disaster

2008 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance

This is one I picked up at work from a Software Quality guy a few months ago. I think he is credible, and the story should be verifiable, although I currently know no details about place or time, nor whether the main actors qualify for a perfectly clean Darwinian, as we will see later.

The story starts with a harmless single failure of a piece of equipment worth, say, 1$: A small indicator light bulb, having died like light bulbs occasionally do.

There's nothing else wrong with the multi-million dollar machine it sits in, and although we're talking about some really huge hunk of metal currently travelling at several hundred mph to temporarily defy the law of gravity, and just preparing to yield to the law of "what goes up must come down", still there's really nothing to worry about. The machine in question is, as you probably guess, a big airplane - something like a passenger or cargo jet airliner - and big jet airplanes are designed with plenty of safety measures and their pilots well trained, to prevent a single dead 1$ indicator light bulb from being anything more than a nuisance, even during the "finals", i.e. when approaching the runway to land - like our airplane specimen is at this very moment.

There's really nothing to worry about this situation - that is, unless the two pilots carry a Murphy's Law gene PLUS a sufficient deal of carelessness with them, as these two obviously did.

So here we are, heading towards the runway to land, and it's time to extract the landing gear. The pilot operates the switch, we hear the familiar hydraulics sound, all three red gear indicator lights respond as expected, but only two green gear indicator lights turn on. The green nose wheel indicator light wraps itself in darkness.

A lit green light indicates that the respective gear has locked in extracted state and is safe to land on. An unlit green light, consequently, would normally indicate that the landing gear FAILED to lock, and might break when making ground contact. Landing, under such conditions, although not impossible, would definitely require special procedures and precautions.

So our protagonists do what any sane pilot would do: They inform the tower of their potential problem (who, as I guess, puts the firefighters on alert, just to be on the safe side for now), retract the landing gear again, and make a second attempt at extracting it. Same result: The green nose wheel indicator lamp still doesn't light.

Now the pilots do know that light bulbs occasionally just die, so they MAY have a perfectly fine nose gear after all - but they'll have to figure out a way to find out. Of course you don't want to risk a normal landing on a bad nose wheel, but on the other hand the maneuvers required to land with a bad nose wheel pose some risks of their own, which you don't want to take either if it can be helped.

Now there is some hatch leading from the pilots' cabin to the nose landing gear bay (I always thought this was a hollywood invention, but seems like it is there in real life too), and the co-pilot descends to visually inspect the landing gear. But with all the wind blowing in his face, he can't see properly, and comes back with the same result: The nose gear may or may not be working.

The pilot now decides to take a peek himself, while the co-pilot is preparing to take a different approach: He is about to use a multimeter to try and find out whether they have a defective bulb, and if so whether there is voltage to the bulb's socket right now.

So with both the pilot and the co-pilot busy working the problem, who is going to fly the plane? Easy, that's what autopilots are for. Until they find out their nose gear status, they won't be going anywhere special anyway, and tower will keep other air traffic out of their way. So the pilot switches to autopilot and heads for the hatch.

But, having obviously inherited a Murphy's Law gene, when he leaves his seat the pilot accidently shoves bis butt into the yoke.

Now a plane on autopilot is on autopilot, and just giving the yoke a tiny push won't do anything. Or so the pilot must have thought, and basically he was right.

But there is a safety measure implemented: In case the plane gets into an emergency situation while on autopilot, all the pilot has to do is yank the yoke with a certain force, and the autopilot automatically disengages. That's exactly what happened: The pilot had given the yoke just enough of a push to make the plane go to manual.

With an ironic twist reserved for people who are TOO god for Murphy to get head-on, neither pilot nor co-pilot noticed the fatality of their situation, because the plane was TOO well-trimmed: Even with nobody at the yoke it retained a perfectly stable and straight flight - except that the accidental push on the yoke had put it on a very, very slow descent...

The pilot was busy trying to assess the status of the nose gear, and the co-pilot was occupied with his multimeter, when without further warning their plane - until now having being perfectly fine except for a small $1 indicator light bulb - transitioned altogether to the state of being a mere assortment of scrap metal, with only flight and voice recorders surviving to tell the tale.

- It seems like simply swapping the unlit light bulb for one of the two other green indicator light bulbs, to see whether the problem was in the bulb or in the gear, never occurred to any of the pilots, nor that there may be a profound reason why there are always TWO pilots required on any big airplane although a single pilot COULD do the job if necessary. -

I don't know whether the plane in question was a passenger, cargo, or large military plane, so there might have been bystanders killed and the pilots therefore ineligible to a Darwin Award (although it can be argued that any sane person should know better than to strap himself down to an uncomfortable seat inside a thin metal tube held aloft in even thinner air at an altitude of thousands of feet only by the sheer power of the burning of tons and tons of CO2-generating fossile fuel), but it should be possible to find out.

In any event, I am told that this particular plane crash resulted in the introduction of the ground proximity warning system in modern civilian airplanes, aside from removing two carriers of a Murphy's Law and Carelessness gene from the pool.

Submitted on 07/12/2008

Submitted by: Christoph
Reference:

>> Moderator Scores <<

Bruce said:
Definitely Toss: Urban Legend
Thanks for an amusing writeup, Christoph, but since both pilots died I find it very hard to label them as guilty of extreme stupidity. How do we know that the auto pilot was disengaged by one of the pilots accidentally brushing the control? How do we know that a bulb had burned out? It's not the sort of thing that a data recorder (black box) would keep track of, and even if the bulb survived the crash you can't trust that it burned out prior to the crash. This story has all the earmarks of an urban legend to me. Thanks just the same.

Candi said:
Definitely Toss: Other
Unverifiable. Wikipedia's entry indicates that GPWS was invented in sometime in the late 1960's and was mandatory on civilian aircraft by the mid '70s. Also according the entry, the stimulus was controlled flight into terrain -generally obscured by clouds or fog- crashes, not a couple of pilots who, in that decade, probably wouldn't have been flying together instead of with more experienced personnel. Now, the links do lead to tales of crashes, but none like described. And while there is a lot of web info about GPWS, there are no stories like the one here. It might make a great urban legend or a skit on some comedy, but there is nothing to show it actually happened. Thanks, anyway, Christoph, and please remember the salt shaker next time.

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2008 Slush Pile

Minor Malfunction Major Disaster

2008 Reader Submission Pending Acceptance

2008 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance