REFLECTIONS

    THUNDERSTORM AND WEATHER RADAR             My first aircraft, the De-Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter (1940s design which first flew in late 1951), was the simplest aircraft with few basic instruments. I flew it extensively, single pilot mostly, all across the Western and Northern sector of the country. Weather posed the greatest challenge where we had only our eyes and luck to rely upon. So I was very excited, on my conversion to AN-32 (1993), to have weather radar which would tell me, through color codes, the areas to be avoided. My joy, though, remained short-lived as I frequently got tossed around in weather which my radar showed as benign.   During those early days when I was still at sea with weather radar, I cannot forget a sortie from Agra to Jamnagar. The initial picture painted on the weather radar displayed a continuous 10 mile thick green arch followed by black (no weather) beyond 10 miles. I pressed o...

  WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW: DUNNING AND KRUGER EFFECT   “The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it”- Osho              About three and a half decades back two young pilots, with limited experience were on takeoff roll at an international airport with the younger of the two (holding D/White) as captain. The Copilot (holding C/White) decided, for inexplicable reasons, to simulate Engine Failure after takeoff (EFATO). Short of unstick he reduced power on one engine and subsequently retracted the undercarriage prematurely causing the aircraft to sink and skid on the runway on its belly. The runway remained shut for a significant time. Why would someone do such a thing?            The copilot’s exposure to such simulations would have been limited to few in training exercises with instructors. He would have handled them well and concluded that the entire...

    LEFT- RIGHT CONFUSION “Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons (120,000) that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand.”--- Book of Jonah (4:11)                         While carrying out a tight anticlockwise turn in the IL-76 on a small turning pad I opened asymmetric power to assist the turn. After switch off the copilot, fairly junior, asked me the reason for opening the power on inboard engines during the turn. I was surprised as I thought I had opened power on the outer engines. Only a few months later I was doing the same exercise and wanted to open power on one side to aid the turn. When I advanced the throttle, the copilot promptly informed me that I was opening the wrong side power. The incidents exposed me to one more of the many human limitations I was vulnerable to. On 04Feb 2015 Trans As...

  VISION AND AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS   INTRODUCTION   (In the recently released film Drishyam the hero’s family murders a boy inadvertently. To deceive the Police the family plants a visual image in the mind of potential witnesses to show that he and his family were in a different place on the date of the crime. He manages to create this illusion by repeatedly narrating certain incidents which had actually taken place and cleverly juxtaposing them with certain imaginary happenings on falsified dates. The listeners mind is thus tricked into amalgamating both the fact and fiction and made to supply the end product i.e. the family is at a different place on the day of the crime. The witnesses testify for the family without realising that their brains have been tricked into creating a picture which was only partly true. The science of vision supports the possibility of such a deception. The brain subconsciously supplies details based on the experience thus filling in the g...