Aviate, Navigate, and Communicate!

These words you probably never heard before if you were never interested in flying.  These are common to hear in practicing to fly or training to fly.   There are many acronyms you probably never rarely heard about in your lifetime.   Pilots have bunch of acronyms that if you were to listen to while they said it to the ATC(Air Traffic Control), you wouldn’t be able to keep up with it.   Just like Piosee(Problems, informations, Options, Select, Execute, Evaluate).   It can seem daunting if you were needed to figure out what they can say or what they want the pilot to do sometimes.

With the Airbus 330 Transatlantic Flight 236, the problem the pilots didn’t know about was they had a fuel leak.   Having a fuel leak can be hard to evaluate or even execute if there isn’t any major ways of knowing it.   Just like a car, we can have oil or even gas leaks and no one would know about it until someone would be looking for it.   The incident in question has was not even very well known in the early days because flying was almost so brand new that there wasn’t even checklists for some of the things we have checklists for now.   I’ve tried to find the checklists that they might of had in 2001 and I couldn’t find it, especially the Fuel Imbalance Checklist.

I emailed a friend who is an actual pilot and he couldn’t find it either.    So the report from the FAA says that it wasn’t prominent or not located on the FCOM(Flight Crew Operating Manuals).  In which case that was something they changed in the coming years to make it easier to see and remind pilots that it’s not a good idea to hit that switch to balance the plane unless you know there isn’t a fuel leak.

How they handles the Problem and tried to get Information to come up with Options, can be quite different in today’s reality unlike in the early 2000’s because so much has happened from then until now.   We’ve had flights that crashed and even flights that almost didn’t make it.   The Piosee is one of the acronyms that is most used in case of any malfunction or problem in the cockpit.   They have way more reundantacies than they did before even the FBW(Fly By Wire) aircraft have ways to fly the aircraft even when nothing is working.   This is also a good point to make that Peter forgot to mention about the RAT.   Wait they have a RAT on board?  No not an actual RAT but  a RAM Air Turbine which provides barely enough power and hydraulics for a plane to land with no engines or APU’s(Auxiliary Power Supply Unit).

Air travel is a lot safer than it used to be.

Just before I leave you, Let’s talk about flying in today’s society.   I know watching those videos can make people nervous to fly because well let’s face it could happen to you while you are flying.   We’ve seen many times where planes have landed due to emergencies due to bird strikes, to mechanical failures, and even pilot errors.   It’s so important to understand that the FAA requires planes to have  many redundant systems to give the pilot the chance to land the plane as safely as possible.

So the next time you fly, remember you’re in good hands because the pilots love their job and want you to make it to your destination on time and safely.

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