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This is the spitting image of old pre-CRM thinking:

If I try to force the captain to go around, (or follow procedures or whatever), then i am exceeding my authority and will probably be fired. Some cultures have this sort of mentality a lot stronger than others, and it has zero place in the modern cockpit.

While a captain can pull rank, they really should only ever do it with respect to the first officer if: an inexperienced first officer is trying to insist on something dangerous or forbidden by law or policy, or if the captain fully understands an FO's concerns, is fully accounting for them, and as the person ultimately responsible for safety, has determined from experience and training that the current action is safer than alternatives, and would explain but cannot explain right now for workload/emergency status reasons.

That's it, the only two reasons.

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This seems like a no win situation for the subordinate pilot. Grabbing the wheel of an aircraft while landing must have its own set of risks. We also only hear about the times when the subordinate pilot didn’t prevent a crash. Never hear about the times they were mistaken and did nothing.

An overcautious go-around is a non-event though.

A big part of the monitoring pilot's job is noticing when things have gotten too far and taking over controls. This does very much include scenarios when the pilot flying has fallen to tunnel vision, subtle incapacitation, and the continuation/sunk cost fallacy.


“Go around. My controls.”

Four words said by the pilot monitoring that any pilot flying will understand and react automatically to.


He doesn’t need to “grab the wheel”. Simply saying “go-around” would have been enough, it’s highly highly unlikely that the captain would have ignored that.

lol! OP writes:

   PM finally said "too fast, go around" but PF ignored him (or likely did not hear)

I don’t see this in the official CVR transcript from the NTSB. Only mention of “around” is the go-around called on the ground, 15s before CVR stopped

Yes I was wrong. Looking at the transcript that go-around call out was likely from the PF; that's where the data recorder indicates the brakes were released the throttle set to max for the go-around (and go back to braking only 4 sec later).

Still, the PM notified PF that they were going too fast many times during the approach. All warnings were ignored.



Thanks, I was wondering why they would be using Salesforce in the cockpit

Is this legislated, required policy, or is this something that you believe should be the case?

The reason I ask is, case in point, do you think the PM is going to be penalized in some way?


I don't think there's a law mandating it, but CRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) has been used and trained by all major airlines since the 1980s. The reason is simple: it doesn't really help to have two people in the cockpit if only one of them is making all the decisions.

And all Military air forces AFAIK. The military of course also takes rank very seriously, but there was existing understanding that Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about rank and so CRM makes sense in that same practical vein.

Also, you'll see that says "Crew" not just "Cockpit". Turns out that from the cockpit of an airliner you've not always got the best possible view of the problem. If the steward who has no idea how to fly a plane insists it's the right engine that is on fire, her input is valuable, from back where she's serving customers with coffee she can see the engines, the fire is on the right, whereas you're just looking at sensor outputs and you were maybe about to turn off the left engine.


I don’t think it’s required, but my friends who do flights for remote mining operations in SE Asia use the same concepts — so it really is pretty standard for commercial flying, even down to remote private operations.

A bad bump on a commercial plane can be hundreds of thousands to millions in damage + downtime + inspection/repairs. And tens or hundreds of millions if you wreck a big plane. Companies may be evil, but most would still prefer you waste $2k in go around fuel than $200k because you decided to set it down badly or $20M+ because you drove their plane off the runway.


It was instituted after Tenerife where hundreds died because of this exact same problem.

I'm pretty sure it's FAA policy, but not 100% on that.


A pilot friend once told me that the Tenerife crash was a turning point for this sort of thing. I believe that was the origin of CRM training.

The ~"positive" side of that, the UA flight 232 disaster is often noted as an event that demonstrated the effectiveness of CRM as a strategy.



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