EVERYTHING We Know About The Brazil Air Crash

aircraft just don't fall from the sky there's always a long chain of coincidences that leads up to any air incident and while that is still true the horrendous videos that we all saw on Friday the 9th of August from Brazil seems to tell a very different story now I never make videos about accidents with human casualties before the final report is out and this is no exception but given how many of you guys who are nervous Flyers I've decided to create this video to explain some of the basics behind the clips that you saw let's

start with what led up to this on Friday the 9th of August 2024 an ATR 72500 from weast L areas in Brazil was scheduled to fly a domestic route from cascavel at Alberto mendesa Silva airport over to sa Paulo the aircraft took off normally after 20 minutes Delay from ROM 15 and then climbed up to its cruising altitude of flight level 170 which is about 17,000 ft the block time for this flight is normally around 2 hours but something happened around the time when the aircraft would have normally started its descent adsb data showed the

aircraft first descending slowly then climbing again followed by an extremely rapid descend of between 12 to 14,000 ft per minute until it finally crashed into a residential area outside of Vedo the aircraft crashed into a house but there are no reports of any casualties on the ground but all 62 passengers and crew on board immediately perished in the accident and the recovery work is still ongoing by the taping of this video there were no emergency calls from the pilots and although adsb data showed erratic speed indications throughout the flight those indications had also been present

on previous flights which would indicate a problem with the data and not the aircraft now like I said before it's way too early to go into any type of specul about what actually caused this accident we'll have to wait for the interim and final report for that which will normally take around a month for the interim and 2 years for the final but let's instead now talk about some of the involved factors that we do know about the involved aircraft was a 14-year-old ATR 72500 owned by a leasing company called Nordic Aviation Capital it had

tail number Papa Sierra Victor Papa Bravo and its technical status before the flight is unknown as of the filming of this video but having said that the aircraft was clearly dispatched so it would have been deemed technically okay to fly during the last part of the flight the aircraft was flying through an area of forecasted severe icing which existed between 12 and 21,000 ft we know this because of a publicly issued sigmet which outlined the time geographical and vertical coverage as well as the severity of that ice Hazard this is something that will form part

of all Pilot's pre-flight briefing material but we don't know if these Pilots had been issued with this or not we also don't know if this icing had any impact of what happened but it is worth mentioning here that the ATR while it's generally a very reliable and good aircraft has had problems dealing with icing conditions before the first fatal accident that the aircraft was involved in happened back in 1994 with American Eagle flight 4184 in that case an atr72 entered into icing conditions while in a holding pattern and when the ice was removed using the

aircraft's boots Ridges of ice remained on the wings which caused aerodynamical disturbances over the aerons these disturbances were so strong that the aons entered into something called a reversal meaning that they were basically aerodynamically forced into an extreme position this reversal was only possible because the ATR like some other turbo props as well have manually powered aerons instead of hydraulic powered ones hydraulically powered aerons would have been strong enough to counteract those aerodynamical forces but in this case the controls were likely just ripped out of the Pilot's hands the result was a violent roll movement

which the pilots were then ultimately unable to overcome after that accident several changes to the aircraft's de icing boots which I will explain more about soon and updated pallet procedures for how to operate in icing conditions were introduced for all ATR aircraft but sadly on the 21st of December 2002 another ATR transasia flight 791 crashed due to a combination of icing and incorrectly executed procedures and this was Then followed by aerocaribbean flight 883 on the 4th of November 2010 also partially due to icing and finally on the 2nd of April 2012 u a flight 120

crashed shortly after takeoff due to incorrectly applied deicing procedures and as as you can see all of these accidents had icing elements in them even though they were not the only Factor so why is icing so dangerous then in general and especially for this aircraft well to start with icing has a tendency to build up rapidly on the most exposed aerodynamical surfaces of an aircraft like the leading edges of the Wings engines probes and flight controls when this happens the aerodynamical properties of these surfaces can start to change in various ways depending on the shape

that the ice takes which is impossible to predict the ice always adds drag which slows the aircraft down and it can also completely change the way a flight control performs making controlling the aircraft very difficult which like I mentioned is especially true if the flight controls are manually powered like the aons on the ATR on top of that icing also adds weight which further decreases performance and if the ice starts accumulating on the propellers or engine fan blades well then the engines will also become less efficient and therefore lose their ability to counteract increases in

Dragon weight so in short icing can be very bad and that's why you see aircraft always being properly deced whenever the icing conditions are encountered down on the ground and that's also why transport category aircraft are always equipped with deicing systems for the wings pilot Windows probes and engines the D or anti-icing systems used for Wing leading edges are of two different types for larger aircraft either a small amount of hot bleed air from inside of the engine core is being led out to heat up the leading edges or like in the case of the

ATR the air is instead used to inflate something known as Boots These Boots basically act as balloons who will expand and break off any ice that has built up and in theory the airst stream will then blow away the rest of the ice from the wings boots are known as deicing equipment since they only serve to remove move ice that has already built up the bleed a heating system that we use on the boing 737 is both a deicer and an anti-icer since it can also be used in anticipation of icing to stop it from

ever attaching in the first place the propellers or fan blades are generally either electrically heated or heated by bleed there and are always used as anti ice since we don't want chunks of ice to build up break off and then potentially get sucked into the engine now depending on how overpowered the aircraft is and how effective those anti-icing systems are the aircraft will be more or less sensitive to icing but common for all aircraft is that severe icing should always always be avoided the definition of severe icing is that the rate of ice accretion is

such that the anti-icing and de icing might fail to reduce the hazard which means that what severe icing for one aircraft might not be for another depending on their performance and equipment like I mentioned before the ATR was early on identified as an aircraft was quite sensitive to ice buildup and therefore it has very strict procedures that the pilots must follow in case moderate to severe icing is encountered these procedures includes an immediate increase of air speed to 30 knots above the icing bug which is typically a red bug set up on the Pet's primary

flight display this must then be followed by Max continuous trust set the power levels adjusted to increase power and then condition levels move to 100% to help shed any ice from the propellers now if the aircraft is high up or have already started recreating a lot of ice well then it might not be possible to increase the speed as much as needed and in that case the only thing to do is to immediately start a descent by doing that the pilot can start using the aircraft's potential energy to build up speed and this descent might

have to be initiated even without ATC clearance as this is basically an impending emergency so what can happen if this is not done then well as I explained before the eyes could start to mess with with the aerodynamic surfaces of the aircraft which provides the lift and controlability needed to fly this means that the aircraft stall speed meaning the speed when the wings basically stop Flying can increase very fast hence the need for that immediate 30 knot acceleration on the ATR now I will have to become a little bit theoretical here but it will make

sense soon I promise the wings will normally stall as a function of the Wing's angle of attack which is a measurement of the angle between the Wing's cord and the angle of the Oncor air the higher that angle is the more lift a wing can produce at a given speed up until a specific point which is known as the wings critical angle of attack if that is passed well then the air will stop following the wings curvature and instead start releasing from the wing leading to an abrupt loss of lift you can normally feel this

happening because of vibrations from the wings known as buffeting if the angle of attack is then increased further the wing will completely the stall which means that it basically stops producing much useful lift at all normally aircraft are built in a way where a stall leads to the nose dropping which means that the aircraft will then start building up speed again kind of like what you see a paper airplane do when you throw it but there are instances where this doesn't happen you see stalls can happen to any aerodynamic surface including the Rudders and horizontal

stabilizer who are controlling the ya and the pitch of the aircraft on an aircraft with a the conventional horizontal stabilizer the angle of attack of the wing will only slightly affect the airf flow over the stabilizer so even if the angle of attack is very high the air will still continue to flow over it but on aircraft using a tail horizontal stabilizer like the ATR there is a possibility that a very high angle of attack of the wing could cause a wake of disturbed air from the wings to wash over the stabilizer potentially stalling it

and therefore making it significantly less effective and because the horizontal stabilizer and the elevators on it controls the pitch that is very bad because that could lead to a situation known as a superstall a superstall is where the aircraft loses its pitch control and therefore its ability to get out of the primary stall it will basically just continue descending like a leaf but what we saw in those horrible videos on Friday was an aircraft that had entered something known as a flat spin and that's not a superstall even though it shares some of its uncontrollable

characteristics especially in large aircraft a normal spin generally happens if an aircraft stalls and then a sudden yo is introduced either by roders from the input of a pilot engine failure or something else this y causes the lift to temporarily increase on One Wing while it stalls the other even more causing the aircraft to start spinning around its center of gravity and this is generally accompanied by a very steep nose down attitude now in smaller aircraft there are relatively simple steps that can be taken to break the spin and it normally includes an acronym called

par power to idle aons neutral Rudder opposite to the spin Direction and elevator forward this combination will help the rotation to reduce while letting the air speed build up to reduce the angle of attack and then achieve a full spin exit it normally eats up some altitude but can be done relatively quickly now a flat spin is a more serious condition and as the name suggests it's include a spinning motion around the yo axis but with the nose attitude much higher than in a normal spin this flat attitude causes less air to flow over the

control surfaces making them less effective and therefore making it much harder to break the spin now a flat spin can happen due to incorrect exit procedures like opposite Aon inputs and increase of power instead of a decrease or things like a very aft center of gravity in any case it's a situation you absolutely do not want to be in in a large aircraft like a boing or an ATR you see bigger aircraft generally have heavy engines sitting far out on the wings creating potential asymmetric trust or even strong gyroscopic forces as it's spinning and that

can make a recovery almost impossible especially since the rudder might not be big enough to create enough opposite momentum and it might also be stalled due to the strong side forces created by the Spin resulting in an extremely high angle of attack of the Roder no transport category aircraft is to my knowledge certified for spin Maneuvers because of these factors that I just mentioned and during the certification phase drag shoots are sometimes used to help stop uncontrollable spins if they should develop something that regular aircraft of course does not have and this brings me to

my next Point what can be done about it well the fact is that the best way to protect yourself against super stalls flat spins and other undesirable Maneuvers is is pretty simple awareness training and avoidance I have previously pointed out the great importance of upset prevention and Recovery technique training uprt which has been mandated by almost all Airlines and flight schools for the last decade this training helps Crews understand the aerodynamics behind upsets and stalls which helps increase vigilance and leads to earlier recognition and then recovery all Pilots go through both initial and recurrent training

where approach to Sol and Recovery is a mandatory and an absolutely crucial part and uprt training has just taken this training to an even higher level when we first Learn to Fly we do so in smaller aircraft where we actually bring the aircraft into fully developed stalls just to feel how the aircraft reacts and then learn how to calmly recover from them and during our type ratings on larger aircraft it's drilled into us to never allow the aircraft to stall in the first place but to recover from an impending stall as soon soon as humanly

possible fully developed stalls are never trained since our simulators are not equipped to accurately reproduce the aircraft's response to it and might therefore lead to negative training if we would try so a fully developed stall should simply never happen on these type of aircraft to make sure of that modern aircraft have a range of Warning Systems and automatic reversion modes created to alert the pilots of an impending stall and even to intervene if needed the ATR have several warnings installed both to warn the pilots of impending stalls but also to warn them of a decreasing

overall performance of the aircraft that could be a first sign of ice buildup if those warnings are triggered the checklist and procedure that I talked about before must be immediately followed since icing can build up very fast now in the case of aircraft that could theoretically enter a superstall like the ATR these Warning Systems also includes a stick Pusher which physically pushes the control column forward to get the nose down before the CR iCal angle of attack is reached an Airbus aircraft normally don't even allow the pilot to get close to that angle in the

first place using its flyby wire technology and this brings me back to those horrible video clips from last Friday whatever happened on that flight it will as sure as I'm sitting here include a number of unfortunate connected circumstances which then led to the Pilot's ultimately losing control all the clips I've seen shows the aircraft in a full flat spin and it's likely that one once this upset had fully developed there was very little that the pilots could do to stop it now as soon as I saw the news coming out about this accident I did

an extra zo meeting with my Patron crew where I invited ATR training Captain magnard Nall to come and explain how the ATR worked and I will link to his excellent Channel below I fully realized the impact that these type of accident could have on nervous flyers and being able to provide in-person explanations and support is except the kind of things that I love to do for my patrons especially since they help me produce this kind of content so I can then explain it all to you and hopefully spread information to make Aviation safer so to

all my patrons out there thank you now it will likely take at least a month before the preliminary report comes out and that will only cover the most basic findings up until that point and then it typically takes between 1 and a half to 2 years before the final report is released once that happens I will obviously be back with a full video explaining all of the circumstances that led up to this accident over on the mentor pilot Channel but one thing that I can absolutely guarantee is that this accident just like all the others

that I've covered on my channels will eventually make Aviation even safer my team and I will continue to publish updates over on Mentor pilot.com so head over there if you want to stay up to date with the story or use ground. news/ Mentor now right now our thoughts goes out to the families and friends of the parish 62 passengers and crew on board flight 2283 and the entire country of Brazil which I know are hurting