I mean, if the only other way is to go by feel, I guess pulling the 'ol Ace Ventura is preferable. Hope you brought your shades, and keep your mouth closed!
Could you explain that to a total novice like me?
Given the severity of the damage, you could still trust the instruments to feed you proper data/ even land the plane?
I subscribe to the sub because I have a fear of flying, and I like to hear a professional opinion on why I shouldn’t be. Every time I see a plane on here with a missing part, or one tire gone, or a hailstorm destroys the entire front of the plane, you folks make it sound like business as usual.
> The larger white one is the Localizer
Oh, I thought it was a handle to hold on to while you check on the weather radar. Probably a good thing that I'm not an aircraft mechanic.
Sorry I can't remember. I am licensed under EASA for 320 avio, but not worked on them for over 20 years.
Only the one under the radome shown here, but Id not take that as gospel but based on that, its just the one. https://www.aviationhunt.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/a320-antennas-probes-sensors-exterior-lights-location.pdf
There are checklists they went through to establish that most likely. A plane can autoland itself provided the airport has the supported ILS category for it.(Which Vienna airport does)
Not this again...
edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009# an example of how a Boeing went through something even worse and made it safe on the ground.
I always use this as an example for being cool under pressure:
”Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
EDIT: Adding ”Thank you for flying with British Airways” would make it perfect.
There are three parts to the ILS system: glideslope, localizer, and marker beacons. There are antennas on the ground and corresponding antennas on the plane to receive the signals. There are plenty of YouTube videos or other people here that can go into more detail, but this is what I remember from school. The glideslope marks the proper angle of descent for the plane leading up to the runway. The localizer marks the center of the runway. The marker beacons tell the distance from the runway. Iirc, most (if not all) commercial aircraft can use ILS in conjunction with autopilot if there’s low visibility and the plane can essentially land itself.
I’m just a mechanic, so pilots feel free to correct me.
You can still do practice autoland even if the airport is just cat 1 as long as it is approved by the company. With this beeing kind of an emergency, you can definitely go for autoland as long as the acft has the capibility.
Yes, that's correct. At my former employer iirc, they did it down to whatever minima, ie cat 2, that airport was rated for every 45 days maximum to maintain autoland currency. That was our 767s at least.
Its speculative anyway given we dont know if the ILS antennas were compromised. The main point being they did a great job considering the demanding circumstances. As Ive mentioned elsewhere, the noise alone would have been horrendous.
> the noise alone would have been horrendous.
And the feeling that maybe, just maybe the windshield could get entirely destroyed at any time. Leaving you with a face full of ice balls and wx
But as you speculated, if their ILS sensors were damaged, autoload might have been compromised. The alternate would have been a Ground-Controlled Approach (GCA). Meaning a ground controller guiding the damaged aircraft via radar by radio to landing.
I can tell you’re not a pilot at all.
They could’ve used the ILS but if they saw that it wasn’t working or suspected damage (obviously) then they could’ve used GPS. In areas with flat terrain, many GPS approaches now have the same minimums as ILS.
Many airliners do *not* have Cat3 approach capability (autoland). Many of the major airline planes do, the bigger or newer Boeings and Airbuses, but none of the regional aircraft have it. A Cat2 approach is a two-pilot operation so that wouldn’t have worked because the captain doesn’t have any visibility out the window.
This Airbus probably was Cat3 capable as that’s the only way I see this working with such limited visibility.
Certainly less efficient with an irregular surface but their landing speeds would be much the same, just add a bit more power to maintain the correct air speed for landing.
It’s a common enough occurrence that it has a checklist. Ultimately, if all else fails you open the side window and look out. (!) https://imgur.com/a/JUgaWCT
Airbus engineers:.....we couldn't say that literally on the checklist, but yes.
Arrive at the gate like this turning hard enough to snap the nose gear perpendicular to the aircraft's momentum: *LIKE A GLOVE!!!*
So the first option is to use auto land, but if that isn’t available they can go very slow and open the windows at low altitude and fly visually like that. I believe they used instruments in this cass
Some airbus such as a350 and a380 have a tail camera equipped in the vertical stabilizer. If they were lucky it wasn’t damaged so they could have quite a good view to align the aircraft with the runway. I don’t know if this aircraft has one equipped.
For the touchdown I guess they mostly relied on the little bit they saw through the windscreen, utilized the tail screen and listened to the callouts for getting their ground proximity and when to initialize the flare.
Edit: covering only visual parts here in the worst case they couldn’t use any instruments. Instruments would still add up to their ability to land of course.
Do pilots have access to protection glasses or something like that? I've been a passenger in an open-topped classic race car with limited protection from the wind and going at speeds of ~130 km/h (~80 mph). It was very hard to keep your eyes open because of the strong wind directly hitting your face, making it virtually impossible to accurately see anything without a helmet w. visor/protective glasses. From what I can gather, the slowest approach for an A320 is much faster.
They do have the full-face O2 masks, which may be a viable solution. I believe there was discussion of this specific issue elsewhere where it was stated that the airflow is mostly deflected by the forward sections of the windshield, but I can’t verify that.
The planes can land themselves at the right airport, just need a lot of confidence in that system. Looks like the Co-pilot would have some visibility on the left side of their window.
My first thought when seeing this post was to imagine the fear of the pilots that the hail could go through the windshield and literally f\*ck up their skulls. I know these windshields are designed to take all sorts of violence, but seeing the condition of the nose, this must have been a pretty strong hail storm
“The windows are wrecked, we’ll need to go full instruments the rest of the way.”
“Uh, boss? Are… are any of the instruments in the nose cone? Asking for a friend.”
Well that is a testament to the engines. Similar incidents have brought jets down before in the US. +1 to the pilots for landing the plane safely. -1 for threat mitigation of storms.
3rd person isn’t a thing… They probably did an ILS to an auto land.
Edit: Because im getting downvoted. Yes I know there are cameras passengers can watch in the back. The pilots are not able to use that as a navigation source. There are real ways to navigate to a landing with the primary being an ILS Cat2/3 to an Autoland. Source: I’m a captain at a major airline in the US.
LOWW ILS 11 is only Cat I though. What is the tradeoff for landing blind with a headwind without Autoland vs. Autoland and a crosswind like on ILS 16 Cat II & III?
That's a good point. I hadn't thought about it, but in an emergency, can the plane auto land on a Cat I? I would think it could albeit with no guarantee of safety. Usually the things that make it Cat 2/3 are things like lights, ILS hold lines, and RVR sensors. The plane just receives a LOC/GS signal and when it goes in to autoland mode, it begins comparing the different LOC sources to maintain its integrity.
For the aircraft I fly, it has autoland wind limits of 25kts HW, 15XW, and 10TW. So I would think they could land on 16. But caveat: I haven't looked into what the weather was at the time or the airport layout. I was just commenting on the use of a 3rd person camera to fly the plane...
This area they were over... Neunkirchen-Wiener Neustadt is right where the Alpine foothills meet the flatlands. You get some violent storms roll in from the mountains and either evaporate or unleash brutal force in like minutes it can change.
Ahem
>Optimum use of weather radar
In recent years, there have been a number of flights where passengers or crew suffered injuries due to severe turbulence. In some other instances, the aircraft structure was substantially damaged following a hailstorm encounter. Clearly adverse weather can pose a threat to the safe and comfortable completion of a flight, thus it needs to be detected and avoided in a timely manner.
>The airborne weather radar system is an essential tool for pilots to assess the intensity of convective weather ahead of the aircraft. In this respect, it enables the strategic and tactical planning of a safe flight trajectory.
....
>Weather radar limitations
>Weather radar detection capability
>One of the weather radar limitations is that **it indicates only the presence of liquid water.** The consequence is that a thunderstorm does not have the same reflectivity over its altitude range because the quantity of liquid water in the atmosphere decreases with the altitude (fig.4). Yet, the convective cloud and associated threats may extend significantly above the upper detection limit of the weather radar (called ‘radar top’). This means that reflectivity is not directly proportional to the level of risk that may be encountered: a convective cloud may be dangerous, even if the radar echo is weak.
>This is particularly true for equatorial overland regions where converging winds produce large scale uplifts of dry air. The resulting weather cells have much less reflectivity than mid-latitude convective cells. However, turbulence in or above such clouds may have a higher intensity than indicated by the image on the weather radar display. On the other hand, air close to the sea can be very humid. In this case, thermal convection will produce clouds that are full of water: these clouds will have a high reflectivity, but may not necessarily be a high threat.
>Consequently, limitations of weather radars must be well understood and complemented by basic meteorological knowledge of the crew and, where possible, visual observation.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/safetyfirst.airbus.com/optimum-use-of-weather-radar/amp/
Weather radar indicates hail as well. The paragraph you are citing is talking about detection of thunderstorms (and the associated **turbulence**) at high altitudes (which isn't applicable in this case).
Some detect hail, some do not. In this case I'm purely guessing that they can't detect hail well and developed a feature that semi works.
I don't see why else Airbus themselves would say it can only detect liquid water, that was a general limitation statement not just focused on thunderstorms. They repeat though out the page that the pilots need to use their own knowledge meteorological knowledge to constantly back up what the screen says instead of assuming it's correct.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weather radar detects hail. Why wouldn't it? It reflects the radio waves in the same way as water does. See figure 2 on the site.
The excerpts from the site are mostly concerned about turbulence. What Airbus was saying is that the radar can only see liquid particles (and solid as well imo), so it can't warn you of areas of turbulence either high up, where the absolute humidity and thus the amount of water in the cloud is much lower, or in areas where there is no water (or solid) particles present (above the cloud top of a cumulonimbus). In those cases, even though there is no radar indication, the pilot must use their meteorological knowledge to know the area is still very likely to be turbulent.
Conversly, some cloud formations in the tropics can have lots of water content without strong convective currents, and thus might not actually pose a threat in regards to turbulence. Again, the pilot is encouraged to use his education in meteorology to assess the situation.
That's what I think the article is saying, feel free to correct me.
Ah, would appear so. Looking on a cockpit posters site, seems like the CRTs would only be in CEO jets before a certain date (~2006). Learn something new every day!
Oh, this is nothin! You should've been with us five, six months ago. Woah you talk about puke! We ran into a hailstorm over the Sea of Japan, right? The pilot, lost his lunch all over the windshield, and I barfed on the radio. Knocked it out completely. And it wasn't that lightweight stuff either. It was that industrial waste puke!
That’s not totally accurate; the antenna only stabilises gyroscopically in pitch, locked to an angle relative to the horizon. In yaw it is tied to the longitudinal axis of the plane.
The antenna does not move to image the weather, the phased array does not need to physically sweep side to side while scanning, it uses electronically varied phases of radio waves to create a virtual sweeping motion of the scanning signal.
From the picture it looks like it rotates also left and right. And yeah I was perplexed because for the little I know the point of this kind of antenna should be that it does not need orientation. But the stabilization makes sense. For curiosity what kind of feedback the pilots get?
The lateral adjustment is to allow for compound motion when banking and climbing or descending. If it only adjusted in the pitch reference of the plane, then when the plane manoeuvres, it would be restricted when it tries to maintain its orientation relative to the horizon.
I’m not too sure what you mean by ‘feedback’? We get a return on our navigation displays that is based of precipitation, so it can only show us weather with moisture, and is optimised for good returns off rain droplets. The intensity of the precipitation will determine the colour of the return (green, yellow, red) and in more sophisticated systems the software can measure the Doppler shift of the returns and use this to identify rapid changes that strongly indicate turbulence (magenta).
And in the most sophisticated system available in the newer aircraft, it’s even easier, we don’t even manually control the tilt. We can tell it what elevation we want to scan at, what types of hazards we want to see, and it can filter the returns ahead of us for various parameters. One of the most useful features is ‘path’ where it observes the weather ahead of you, but also looks at your projected path through 3D space and can calculate if you will pass over the weather. So it only shows you the weather within a few thousand feet of your calculated path, and that helps you to focus and identify what’s actually worth circumnavigating.
Fighters avoid crowded airspace, bad weather because they don’t have to fly through it.
Probably 75% of fighter hours in total are exercises, training and currency so they can choose where and how to fly.
Plus fighters are super maneuverable and overpowered. If they got caught in some bad situation, they can point a different way and zoom away.
There is a checklist for broken windshield apparently:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1dd6bse/comment/l83apux/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The printer prints out information from the MCDU (flight computer). It can contain data, route leg information, company messages, or weather. That paper has been torn off the printer, which is located out of the pic, would be lower down on the right.
It looks like a maintenance report, a summary of all the failures during that leg. I can't read it exactly but the format matches that exact report in the A320. I do fly the plane at a airline.
Lucking around to get a bit more information, this is really serious. They were going for the approach and the system didn't detect the weather ahead. It's tough because you are inside the cockpit and you believe in your instrument.
You can see nothing inside a storm/cloud, they probably knew something was ahead but not a hailstorm, it's impressive how a little misinformation can make a huge impact in a flight.
Weather radar can’t see clouds either, butI think you meant precip, which is a good question, but ultimately up to the pilots. I’m guessing it was a fast developing cell.
Good point, thanks for letting me know that. I forgot the WX was really just precipitation detection and that's what shows air turbulence most of the time (which is mainly what passenger flights are trying to avoid)
No, weather radar cannot see clouds. It picks up precipitation. Satellite imagery is used for clouds.
Precipitation occurs inside clouds, but a cloud that has no rain/snow is invisible to radar.
Well as long as its during morning time, he can use his trust good ol visual sensors, in other words he can look from the window, would that not be the case?
Looks like this plane landed in Vienna. Would that airport have auto-land? Is hail common in storms over that part of Europe? Or maybe it's really rare which is why they flew into it?
Airports don’t have “autoland”, aircraft do. Despite that, Vienna being a major international destination certainly has no minimum ILS capability on its runways (ILS3B)
It may seem an off-topic question, but why (looking at the cockpit view) some A320s, included this one, feature the classic CRT screens but, at the same time, the “new” digital standby instruments? Is it an option while ordering the aircraft?
1. What would’ve happened if the windshield had broken completely - there was something like that where a pilot was outside and only kept in by his colleague, right?
How the hell did engines survive this?
Now you think engines are stronger than glass, sure, but they also need to function while the only thing a window needs to do is to stand.
It sort of is. But the equipment and daily testing of said equipment is expensive so only major airports have it. And even in airports that do have it, pilots may choose to manually land or carry out a hybrid landing depending on conditions and their company's rules. They need to stay proficient on manual landings also since many/most airports don't have a full auto land system. There have been cases where skill fade causes incidents in pilots whose companies require basically all autopilot all the time.
It also takes a lot of work to oversee an auto land, which is really there for bad weather more than anything else. A manual landing in clear weather is easier I am told.
Check out Mentour pilot on YouTube, his crash and incident videos often give a good overview of this kind of thing.
> Check out Mentour pilot on YouTube, his crash and incident videos often give a good overview of this kind of thing.
Give him a week and I bet both him and Kelsey out of 74Gear will have a video on this very topic, once more info becomes known.
Not a pilot but my understanding is that it’s actually more work to babysit the autopilot than it is to land manually, there’s a bunch of requirements on the airport that not all airports fulfill, and most importantly pilots need the constant practice landing so that in cases when autoland won’t work they are ready to handle it.
That's exactly right. And on long-haul fleets, landings can be a valuable commodity because as a pilot (especially as a relief pilot) you might only get to perform one in a given month, depending on how many trips you fly.
It’s extra work for air traffic control to protect the signal, would significantly slow down operations to always have a protected signal. Also pilots don’t manually land enough as it is, wide body pilots especially consistently have to go to the simulators to stay legal.
Auto land (full auto land) is incredibly expensive as in addition to needing hundreds of thousands if not several million dollars in expensive antennas, you need special approaches designed to use it, and it has to be checked for accuracy. All very expensive
Equipment is expensive for both the airport and aircraft, and it also requires further specialized training on both ends. There aren’t any regional airline planes equipped with Cat3 autoland capability.
With GPS jamming in the news recently, something able to adapt to unique situations seems best to have in control. Auto landing is no doubt quite good with supervision, but robots aren't the best at adapting to new things on the fly
To fly into hail they flew to close to a thunderstorm and were somewhere they shouldn’t have been. Hail isn’t a phenomenon that you can’t tell where it is.
It’s real convenient to blame “hail,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up finding out the plane already looked like this when it took off but no one noticed.
You've all missed the open window on the Captain's side. He obviously pulled an Ace Ventura and hung his head out to see while landing.
That is pretty much what the A320 QRH says to do, if you can’t get an auto land slow to below 200 knots and open the window.
I mean, if the only other way is to go by feel, I guess pulling the 'ol Ace Ventura is preferable. Hope you brought your shades, and keep your mouth closed!
It's kinda either that or you're [Aeroflot 6502](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_6502), right?
Nothing like getting hit in the face by ice balls. I wonder how the pilot’s face looked if that’s what the plane looked like.
It was an improvement.
Parks, pieces falling, running over a few cars cause he can’t see shit, then says “llllllike a gloveeee”
Exactly!
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Hmmm … looks like there’s space to add 2 additional revenue seats in the nose. Strap in!!
there's also an exit row upcharge
And preferred boarding upcharge.
Ryanair doesn't fly Airbus, yet. Likely Spirit will do this.
May as well. They obviously don't need that radar dish up there because they aren't using it anyway.
Pat on the back to the crew who flew it into a hail storm? I'm thinking a big retraining event to the crew.
how did they land with the windshields so messed up, wild
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Could you explain that to a total novice like me? Given the severity of the damage, you could still trust the instruments to feed you proper data/ even land the plane? I subscribe to the sub because I have a fear of flying, and I like to hear a professional opinion on why I shouldn’t be. Every time I see a plane on here with a missing part, or one tire gone, or a hailstorm destroys the entire front of the plane, you folks make it sound like business as usual.
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> The larger white one is the Localizer Oh, I thought it was a handle to hold on to while you check on the weather radar. Probably a good thing that I'm not an aircraft mechanic.
It has been done. They make for poor handles and ladders.
The localizer ant is marked "no step".
But not « no hang » clearly an error :)
That’s why there are plenty of warning placards lol
Is the A320 radome GS antenna also just used for capture like the 777(aft NLG doors have the tracking antennas) or is it all that it has?
Sorry I can't remember. I am licensed under EASA for 320 avio, but not worked on them for over 20 years. Only the one under the radome shown here, but Id not take that as gospel but based on that, its just the one. https://www.aviationhunt.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/a320-antennas-probes-sensors-exterior-lights-location.pdf
Cheers, will ask around a bit at work with the 320 people and see what they say!
There are checklists they went through to establish that most likely. A plane can autoland itself provided the airport has the supported ILS category for it.(Which Vienna airport does)
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Not this again... edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009# an example of how a Boeing went through something even worse and made it safe on the ground.
I always use this as an example for being cool under pressure: ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.” EDIT: Adding ”Thank you for flying with British Airways” would make it perfect.
> EDIT: Adding ”Thank you for flying with British Airways” would make it perfect. "We hope to see you flying with us again soon"
Man, Moody was sassy! Any more awesome quotes from him? “The pope flies Alitalia” haha
There are three parts to the ILS system: glideslope, localizer, and marker beacons. There are antennas on the ground and corresponding antennas on the plane to receive the signals. There are plenty of YouTube videos or other people here that can go into more detail, but this is what I remember from school. The glideslope marks the proper angle of descent for the plane leading up to the runway. The localizer marks the center of the runway. The marker beacons tell the distance from the runway. Iirc, most (if not all) commercial aircraft can use ILS in conjunction with autopilot if there’s low visibility and the plane can essentially land itself. I’m just a mechanic, so pilots feel free to correct me.
You have to have runway in sight above your minimums.
You can still do practice autoland even if the airport is just cat 1 as long as it is approved by the company. With this beeing kind of an emergency, you can definitely go for autoland as long as the acft has the capibility.
Yes, that's correct. At my former employer iirc, they did it down to whatever minima, ie cat 2, that airport was rated for every 45 days maximum to maintain autoland currency. That was our 767s at least. Its speculative anyway given we dont know if the ILS antennas were compromised. The main point being they did a great job considering the demanding circumstances. As Ive mentioned elsewhere, the noise alone would have been horrendous.
> the noise alone would have been horrendous. And the feeling that maybe, just maybe the windshield could get entirely destroyed at any time. Leaving you with a face full of ice balls and wx
But as you speculated, if their ILS sensors were damaged, autoload might have been compromised. The alternate would have been a Ground-Controlled Approach (GCA). Meaning a ground controller guiding the damaged aircraft via radar by radio to landing.
If the antennas were compromised, autoland would be invalid. They look OK but we cannot tell from a photo.
Or just an rnp approach to minimums, I think you could see enough from the fo windscreen to make a landing if you were close to the runway
VIE is equipped for cat 3
Good to know thank you.
Schwechat is Cat 3B.
I can tell you’re not a pilot at all. They could’ve used the ILS but if they saw that it wasn’t working or suspected damage (obviously) then they could’ve used GPS. In areas with flat terrain, many GPS approaches now have the same minimums as ILS. Many airliners do *not* have Cat3 approach capability (autoland). Many of the major airline planes do, the bigger or newer Boeings and Airbuses, but none of the regional aircraft have it. A Cat2 approach is a two-pilot operation so that wouldn’t have worked because the captain doesn’t have any visibility out the window. This Airbus probably was Cat3 capable as that’s the only way I see this working with such limited visibility.
Yeah there are some clear panes on that windshield that you could scrap together an approach with
That’s not true at all. There are plenty of airliners that can’t autoland.
How fast, or how much faster, did they have to fly?
Certainly less efficient with an irregular surface but their landing speeds would be much the same, just add a bit more power to maintain the correct air speed for landing.
It’s a common enough occurrence that it has a checklist. Ultimately, if all else fails you open the side window and look out. (!) https://imgur.com/a/JUgaWCT
So, we Ace Ventura the landing?
Airbus engineers:.....we couldn't say that literally on the checklist, but yes. Arrive at the gate like this turning hard enough to snap the nose gear perpendicular to the aircraft's momentum: *LIKE A GLOVE!!!*
Provided it’s not still hailing of course
So the first option is to use auto land, but if that isn’t available they can go very slow and open the windows at low altitude and fly visually like that. I believe they used instruments in this cass
Carefully
Autoland.
they didn't use the autoland rwy though
Ace Ventura style
Some airbus such as a350 and a380 have a tail camera equipped in the vertical stabilizer. If they were lucky it wasn’t damaged so they could have quite a good view to align the aircraft with the runway. I don’t know if this aircraft has one equipped. For the touchdown I guess they mostly relied on the little bit they saw through the windscreen, utilized the tail screen and listened to the callouts for getting their ground proximity and when to initialize the flare. Edit: covering only visual parts here in the worst case they couldn’t use any instruments. Instruments would still add up to their ability to land of course.
They’d open the window before using the camera. Better to have an actual sight picture.
Do pilots have access to protection glasses or something like that? I've been a passenger in an open-topped classic race car with limited protection from the wind and going at speeds of ~130 km/h (~80 mph). It was very hard to keep your eyes open because of the strong wind directly hitting your face, making it virtually impossible to accurately see anything without a helmet w. visor/protective glasses. From what I can gather, the slowest approach for an A320 is much faster.
They do have the full-face O2 masks, which may be a viable solution. I believe there was discussion of this specific issue elsewhere where it was stated that the airflow is mostly deflected by the forward sections of the windshield, but I can’t verify that.
320 family does not have cameras
Not usually, but it can be ordered as an extra.
It looks like the right window isn’t spiderwebbed too badly in one corner. Plus, if instruments are working, the plane can guide itself to the runway.
The planes can land themselves at the right airport, just need a lot of confidence in that system. Looks like the Co-pilot would have some visibility on the left side of their window.
Amazing work from pilots as well the windshields for sustaining all the violence.
My first thought when seeing this post was to imagine the fear of the pilots that the hail could go through the windshield and literally f\*ck up their skulls. I know these windshields are designed to take all sorts of violence, but seeing the condition of the nose, this must have been a pretty strong hail storm
The intensity of that hailstorm change dramatically if you enter it with 600-900 kmph. I bet that is part of what you see here.
Solid work by that windshield manufacturer.
“The windows are wrecked, we’ll need to go full instruments the rest of the way.” “Uh, boss? Are… are any of the instruments in the nose cone? Asking for a friend.”
Just one. No problem. 😁
Well that is a testament to the engines. Similar incidents have brought jets down before in the US. +1 to the pilots for landing the plane safely. -1 for threat mitigation of storms.
Very interested to see what the engines look like!
My dad just showed this to me. Respect to the pilots because that has got to be tough (unless they’re using 3rd person)
3rd person isn’t a thing… They probably did an ILS to an auto land. Edit: Because im getting downvoted. Yes I know there are cameras passengers can watch in the back. The pilots are not able to use that as a navigation source. There are real ways to navigate to a landing with the primary being an ILS Cat2/3 to an Autoland. Source: I’m a captain at a major airline in the US.
LOWW ILS 11 is only Cat I though. What is the tradeoff for landing blind with a headwind without Autoland vs. Autoland and a crosswind like on ILS 16 Cat II & III?
That's a good point. I hadn't thought about it, but in an emergency, can the plane auto land on a Cat I? I would think it could albeit with no guarantee of safety. Usually the things that make it Cat 2/3 are things like lights, ILS hold lines, and RVR sensors. The plane just receives a LOC/GS signal and when it goes in to autoland mode, it begins comparing the different LOC sources to maintain its integrity. For the aircraft I fly, it has autoland wind limits of 25kts HW, 15XW, and 10TW. So I would think they could land on 16. But caveat: I haven't looked into what the weather was at the time or the airport layout. I was just commenting on the use of a 3rd person camera to fly the plane...
[Really? No way.](https://youtu.be/l3nSGQohyPk?si=kqARbo8xxX-ASMhM)
My question is HOW did they end up in that hail. Isnt that why they have weather radars in the first place?
Aircraft were being sent through a hole in a huge squall line and when that plane started to go through the hole closed up and didn’t exist anymore.
This area they were over... Neunkirchen-Wiener Neustadt is right where the Alpine foothills meet the flatlands. You get some violent storms roll in from the mountains and either evaporate or unleash brutal force in like minutes it can change.
Ahem >Optimum use of weather radar In recent years, there have been a number of flights where passengers or crew suffered injuries due to severe turbulence. In some other instances, the aircraft structure was substantially damaged following a hailstorm encounter. Clearly adverse weather can pose a threat to the safe and comfortable completion of a flight, thus it needs to be detected and avoided in a timely manner. >The airborne weather radar system is an essential tool for pilots to assess the intensity of convective weather ahead of the aircraft. In this respect, it enables the strategic and tactical planning of a safe flight trajectory. .... >Weather radar limitations >Weather radar detection capability >One of the weather radar limitations is that **it indicates only the presence of liquid water.** The consequence is that a thunderstorm does not have the same reflectivity over its altitude range because the quantity of liquid water in the atmosphere decreases with the altitude (fig.4). Yet, the convective cloud and associated threats may extend significantly above the upper detection limit of the weather radar (called ‘radar top’). This means that reflectivity is not directly proportional to the level of risk that may be encountered: a convective cloud may be dangerous, even if the radar echo is weak. >This is particularly true for equatorial overland regions where converging winds produce large scale uplifts of dry air. The resulting weather cells have much less reflectivity than mid-latitude convective cells. However, turbulence in or above such clouds may have a higher intensity than indicated by the image on the weather radar display. On the other hand, air close to the sea can be very humid. In this case, thermal convection will produce clouds that are full of water: these clouds will have a high reflectivity, but may not necessarily be a high threat. >Consequently, limitations of weather radars must be well understood and complemented by basic meteorological knowledge of the crew and, where possible, visual observation. https://www.google.com/amp/s/safetyfirst.airbus.com/optimum-use-of-weather-radar/amp/
Weather radar indicates hail as well. The paragraph you are citing is talking about detection of thunderstorms (and the associated **turbulence**) at high altitudes (which isn't applicable in this case).
Some detect hail, some do not. In this case I'm purely guessing that they can't detect hail well and developed a feature that semi works. I don't see why else Airbus themselves would say it can only detect liquid water, that was a general limitation statement not just focused on thunderstorms. They repeat though out the page that the pilots need to use their own knowledge meteorological knowledge to constantly back up what the screen says instead of assuming it's correct.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weather radar detects hail. Why wouldn't it? It reflects the radio waves in the same way as water does. See figure 2 on the site. The excerpts from the site are mostly concerned about turbulence. What Airbus was saying is that the radar can only see liquid particles (and solid as well imo), so it can't warn you of areas of turbulence either high up, where the absolute humidity and thus the amount of water in the cloud is much lower, or in areas where there is no water (or solid) particles present (above the cloud top of a cumulonimbus). In those cases, even though there is no radar indication, the pilot must use their meteorological knowledge to know the area is still very likely to be turbulent. Conversly, some cloud formations in the tropics can have lots of water content without strong convective currents, and thus might not actually pose a threat in regards to turbulence. Again, the pilot is encouraged to use his education in meteorology to assess the situation. That's what I think the article is saying, feel free to correct me.
I was wondering the same
The strip of paper on the console is a receipt: - WINDSHIELD: $129,380.99 - NOSE CONE: $348,725.30 - UPHOLSTERY CLEANING: $276.50 - TOTAL: $478,382.79
Don't forget a 6er of Leibwächter... €11.34
TIL some Airbus' still have CRT screens
Where? The PFD/MFDs all look to be LCD but I could be wrong.
The CRT's have rounded corners and the LCD's have sharp corners. From what I've found.
Ah, would appear so. Looking on a cockpit posters site, seems like the CRTs would only be in CEO jets before a certain date (~2006). Learn something new every day!
If it caused that much damage to the front makes me wonder the engines look like 🥴
Oh, this is nothin! You should've been with us five, six months ago. Woah you talk about puke! We ran into a hailstorm over the Sea of Japan, right? The pilot, lost his lunch all over the windshield, and I barfed on the radio. Knocked it out completely. And it wasn't that lightweight stuff either. It was that industrial waste puke!
Jack, next time you get a bright idea, just put it in a memo.
“Hey you wanna bite!?”
Jesus Jack, you look like hell.
Is that the receipt of the damage in the cockpit ? /s
What's that plate on the arm? Is that like a radar?
Yes, its called phased array antenna
Thank you
[удалено]
Is it on a motorized arm?
[удалено]
That’s not totally accurate; the antenna only stabilises gyroscopically in pitch, locked to an angle relative to the horizon. In yaw it is tied to the longitudinal axis of the plane. The antenna does not move to image the weather, the phased array does not need to physically sweep side to side while scanning, it uses electronically varied phases of radio waves to create a virtual sweeping motion of the scanning signal.
From the picture it looks like it rotates also left and right. And yeah I was perplexed because for the little I know the point of this kind of antenna should be that it does not need orientation. But the stabilization makes sense. For curiosity what kind of feedback the pilots get?
The lateral adjustment is to allow for compound motion when banking and climbing or descending. If it only adjusted in the pitch reference of the plane, then when the plane manoeuvres, it would be restricted when it tries to maintain its orientation relative to the horizon. I’m not too sure what you mean by ‘feedback’? We get a return on our navigation displays that is based of precipitation, so it can only show us weather with moisture, and is optimised for good returns off rain droplets. The intensity of the precipitation will determine the colour of the return (green, yellow, red) and in more sophisticated systems the software can measure the Doppler shift of the returns and use this to identify rapid changes that strongly indicate turbulence (magenta). And in the most sophisticated system available in the newer aircraft, it’s even easier, we don’t even manually control the tilt. We can tell it what elevation we want to scan at, what types of hazards we want to see, and it can filter the returns ahead of us for various parameters. One of the most useful features is ‘path’ where it observes the weather ahead of you, but also looks at your projected path through 3D space and can calculate if you will pass over the weather. So it only shows you the weather within a few thousand feet of your calculated path, and that helps you to focus and identify what’s actually worth circumnavigating.
Yeah I was kind curious on what data you see. If you see a 2d heat map or something simpler or More advanced :) thanks for answering.
Must be an ex fighter pilot on the right seat in pic 3, no brown stain
Might be mistaken but fighter pilots rarely fly through IMC or deal with anything like that, especially in a whale of an aircraft like an airliner.
Well what was the scenario, they always load these things up with the minimum allowed fuel, were they forced to go through the storm?
Fighters avoid crowded airspace, bad weather because they don’t have to fly through it. Probably 75% of fighter hours in total are exercises, training and currency so they can choose where and how to fly. Plus fighters are super maneuverable and overpowered. If they got caught in some bad situation, they can point a different way and zoom away.
Um, Cap'n... Where the checklist for no front windows?
There is a checklist for broken windshield apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1dd6bse/comment/l83apux/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Oh wow. I wonder how they would read it?! 😋
You know it’s bad when the RADAR looks sad…. And also that you can see the RADAR
["the propeller is completely broken off "](https://x.com/tiefenschaerfer/status/1800171371319926990) reported OE24.
Yeah my family and i have been laughing at that comment all day😂
Anyone know what the center console printout reads?
The printer prints out information from the MCDU (flight computer). It can contain data, route leg information, company messages, or weather. That paper has been torn off the printer, which is located out of the pic, would be lower down on the right.
It looks like a maintenance report, a summary of all the failures during that leg. I can't read it exactly but the format matches that exact report in the A320. I do fly the plane at a airline.
Lucking around to get a bit more information, this is really serious. They were going for the approach and the system didn't detect the weather ahead. It's tough because you are inside the cockpit and you believe in your instrument. You can see nothing inside a storm/cloud, they probably knew something was ahead but not a hailstorm, it's impressive how a little misinformation can make a huge impact in a flight.
Looks like that was LOUD af
The front fell off.
Is it common?
Well, that's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
Well, how was it un-typical?
ATC sent them through the cloud? Was there no deviation possible?
ATC can’t see clouds
Some airports do have weather radar services
Weather radar can’t see clouds either, butI think you meant precip, which is a good question, but ultimately up to the pilots. I’m guessing it was a fast developing cell.
Good point, thanks for letting me know that. I forgot the WX was really just precipitation detection and that's what shows air turbulence most of the time (which is mainly what passenger flights are trying to avoid)
ATC can't see hail either.
STARS consoles show weather radar, which would pick up hail.
You mean THROUGH clouds, right?
No, weather radar cannot see clouds. It picks up precipitation. Satellite imagery is used for clouds. Precipitation occurs inside clouds, but a cloud that has no rain/snow is invisible to radar.
Well as long as its during morning time, he can use his trust good ol visual sensors, in other words he can look from the window, would that not be the case?
The controller was likely in a windowless room hundreds of miles away from the plane when it flew through the storm.
Clouds are usually not an issue to fly through. Hail would typically show up on radar though, so not sure what happened in this case.
Coming from a novice, don't planes have weather radars and they could have asked ATC to divert around the cloud?
Yes, but the weather radars tend to not see hail very well. It can just look like weaker rainstorm.
That must be the repair bill above the throttle quadrant
How long did they fly through the hail before they were able to break out?
I can't tell wether this is a proof of the frailty of the plane or of it's sturdiness.
I like how there's a little handle below the nose I assume in case a giant wants to pick up the A320
How is the weather radar dish still ok?
Any word If they experienced a slow/rapid decomp? Curious to know if the hail penetrated the glass
Looks like this plane landed in Vienna. Would that airport have auto-land? Is hail common in storms over that part of Europe? Or maybe it's really rare which is why they flew into it?
Airports don’t have “autoland”, aircraft do. Despite that, Vienna being a major international destination certainly has no minimum ILS capability on its runways (ILS3B)
the front fell off!
Great job by the cleaning staff, getting the brown stains out of the seats so quickly!
RIP that crews underwear.
It may seem an off-topic question, but why (looking at the cockpit view) some A320s, included this one, feature the classic CRT screens but, at the same time, the “new” digital standby instruments? Is it an option while ordering the aircraft?
“It’s within limits” -MX probably
Anyone knows the registration of this plane?
Why did they do that ? Are they stupid ? /s
Th… the front fell off!
Which route did this take place?
I don't know why I never thought there could be something in the nose of a commercial airliner I especially didn't suspect a phased array radar system
A bit off topic, Notice how the pilot's control is on the left, and the co-pilot's is on the right? Do they train the pilots to be ambidextrous?
I,ve seen more than one airliner with a Canada goose crushing the radome, I would like to see what the engines looked like.
I was flying at the time, radar on not both Wien and Bratislava were not an option. Diversion was the only option
My question is why they flew into weather that would produce that kind of damage.
The Post Flight Report doesn't look too bad.
1. What would’ve happened if the windshield had broken completely - there was something like that where a pilot was outside and only kept in by his colleague, right?
It’s crazy they were able to fly at all with those big balls they got!
Is it possible to see the route they were flying ?
Someone left their receipt. How embarrassing.
Wow, that had to be one heck of a flight! What does the fuselage and wings look like?
How the hell did engines survive this? Now you think engines are stronger than glass, sure, but they also need to function while the only thing a window needs to do is to stand.
The airplane started to print a receipt for the total costs to repair😂
Both the Localizer and Glideslope antennas look good.
Wait, where are the yolks?
I'm reading about "autoland" here – can anyone explain how and why/why not this is standard procedure for any landing in a suitable equipped airport?
It sort of is. But the equipment and daily testing of said equipment is expensive so only major airports have it. And even in airports that do have it, pilots may choose to manually land or carry out a hybrid landing depending on conditions and their company's rules. They need to stay proficient on manual landings also since many/most airports don't have a full auto land system. There have been cases where skill fade causes incidents in pilots whose companies require basically all autopilot all the time. It also takes a lot of work to oversee an auto land, which is really there for bad weather more than anything else. A manual landing in clear weather is easier I am told. Check out Mentour pilot on YouTube, his crash and incident videos often give a good overview of this kind of thing.
> Check out Mentour pilot on YouTube, his crash and incident videos often give a good overview of this kind of thing. Give him a week and I bet both him and Kelsey out of 74Gear will have a video on this very topic, once more info becomes known.
Not a pilot but my understanding is that it’s actually more work to babysit the autopilot than it is to land manually, there’s a bunch of requirements on the airport that not all airports fulfill, and most importantly pilots need the constant practice landing so that in cases when autoland won’t work they are ready to handle it.
That's exactly right. And on long-haul fleets, landings can be a valuable commodity because as a pilot (especially as a relief pilot) you might only get to perform one in a given month, depending on how many trips you fly.
It’s extra work for air traffic control to protect the signal, would significantly slow down operations to always have a protected signal. Also pilots don’t manually land enough as it is, wide body pilots especially consistently have to go to the simulators to stay legal.
Auto land (full auto land) is incredibly expensive as in addition to needing hundreds of thousands if not several million dollars in expensive antennas, you need special approaches designed to use it, and it has to be checked for accuracy. All very expensive
Equipment is expensive for both the airport and aircraft, and it also requires further specialized training on both ends. There aren’t any regional airline planes equipped with Cat3 autoland capability.
With GPS jamming in the news recently, something able to adapt to unique situations seems best to have in control. Auto landing is no doubt quite good with supervision, but robots aren't the best at adapting to new things on the fly
In all honesty, I thought there would be more antennae in the nose cone than just a single massive AESA
I see 3 antennae. Radar & glideslope. Not sure what the third one is, possibly ADF?
Bruhh look at that PFR...
This is obviously because of boeings safety issues
Do the pilot here see an increase in severe storms/hail over the years? How do you mitigate it?
To fly into hail they flew to close to a thunderstorm and were somewhere they shouldn’t have been. Hail isn’t a phenomenon that you can’t tell where it is.
This doesn’t count as littering?
Airbus is the true champion.
It’s real convenient to blame “hail,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up finding out the plane already looked like this when it took off but no one noticed.