WORST Possible Combination! The Startling Tale of Wizz Air Flight 801

over 1,000 ft below the height of the surrounding Terrain in clouds and with no clue that they're heading straight towards a mountain terrain ahead stay tuned have you ever heard the phrase rubbish in rubbish out well this refers to when you enter something faulty into a computer which then causes you to get something equally faulty back and in the world of Aviation with its ever more complicated computer systems this holds a special significance back in 1995 one of the deadliest disasters involving a US carrier took place when the crew of American Airlines flight 965 failed

to spot that they had program the wrong Waypoint into their flight management computer this was a single innocuous error but one that led the aircraft onto a track toward High terrain without the pilots even noticing it until it was to late now the aviation industry learned a very hard lesson on that day so after that strict confirmations of way points and computer inputs have been drilled into all Pilots so that should mean that a similar accident shouldn't be possible today right well this brings us to today's story which took place on the 10th of November

2016 this day was supposed to have been a standby Duty for the two involved Pilots but late in the afternoon on the 9th of November the whair operations controller had called them up and informed them that they would need to operate four flights on the following day the first of those flights was going to be a positioning or Ferry flight from Budapest in Hungary over to NIS in Serbia and these kinds of Ferry flights are occasionally required when an aircraft needs to be brought from one airport to another for technical or operational reasons what it

means is that basically the pilots will position the aircraft themselves and sometimes their cabin crew without any passengers and this can often lead to a more relaxed atmosphere on board so when the pilots eventually turned up to their crew room in Budapest on the 13th of November they likely looked forward to this first flight it's always fun to do something slightly different now neither of them had flown to this airport before so when they started going through the pre-flight material they probably looked a bit closer at the arrival and approach short to try to figure

out what they could expect as well as of course the overall weather and not but everything looked reasonably straightforward so when they were happy with the preparation they just went over to brief their four cabin crew colleagues who were likely also looking forward to a very relaxed start of their day now as they all walked out to the aircraft a shiny Airbus A3 2200 the pilots decided that the first officer was going to be Pilot Flying for this first Fair flight leg and the captain would therefore be pilot monitoring but this makes sense to me

as they were flying to a new destination and when you're a captain and it's always nice to do that as pilot monitoring because that gives a better overview of the general operation and enables you to spot any potential issues early and then plan for them or at least that's the idea now there might of course be situations where the captain have to be Pilot Flying especially if the runway is short or there are other operational limitations but this was not the case here even though the approach looked a little bit tricky when they entered the

cockpit the captain first checked the technical status of the air craft which was perfectly fine there was no technical issues open so he quickly then went outside to start a walk around while the first officer started setting up the cockpit as he was doing so one of the flight attendants asked if she could stay in the cockpit for the flight and the pilot agreed or maybe it was the other way around and it was the pilot who asked we don't really know for sure but this is Not Unusual on positioning flight since it gives the

cabin crew an opportunity to both enjoy the views from the flight tech but also to get a better understanding of the workload that the pilots are facing during different phases of flight something that is otherwise pretty hidden nowadays behind the locked cockpit door for us Pilots it's also nice to get a chance to talk to our cabin crew colleagues a bit something that short Hall Pilots rarely get a chance to do nowadays but it can also create an environment which can become a little bit too relaxed and therefore lead to distractions if it's not managed

well so who were the pilots of this flight then well the captain was 62 years old and very experienced he had flown over 22,000 hours in total with nearly 5,500 on those on the Airbus A320 family on this day he said that he felt all right but that he had not gotten much quality sleep during the previous night so he also felt a little bit tired his co-pilot was 49 years old and also relatively experienced with nearly 5,000 hours of Total time and just over 2,000 hours on the Airbus A320 and 321 he had just

returned back from some annual leave and had therefore not flown at all during the preceding 10 days but he was feeling great and mainly that fact the fact that he was feeling rested was another reason for him to fly the first leg in any case the pilots continue to set up the aircraft according to their standard procedures the first officer completed the departure briefing and after that they would have briefed their cabin crew colleague on how to use the jump seat headset and oxygen mask something that we have to do every time that we have

someone traveling on the jump seat after everyone was ready the first officer asked for push back and startup clearance and once that was received with airf flight 801 push back started its engin and was soon on its way out towards the runway everything was running smoothly as the aircraft continued to taxi out and they had soon lined up on the runway and received their take of clearance the first officer then set take off trust the aircraft started accelerating and proceeded for a normal takeoff they were now on their way toward n climbing like a rocket

due to the aircraft's low weight without passengers now before we go any further it's worth explaining a little bit more about the destination that these Pilots were now flying towards n Constantine the Great airport is the second largest airport in Serbia it's situated in the southern part of the country near the star planina or old mountains which form part of the western end of the Balan mountain range right on the border between Serbia and Bulgaria and that is one of the biggest threats at this the very high Terrain surrounding the airport as it's actually situated

in kind of a valley while the elevation of the runway is only 650 ft it is surrounded on nearly all sides by very high terrain with minimum sector altitude msas reaching as high as 7,000 ft the msas is altitudes that are highlighted on our navigational chart and they always gives a minimum terrain clearance of 1,000 ft and it's one of those things that we Pilots have to be constantly aware of now if you're on an instrument flight plan which all big aircraft are you can of course descend below the MSA but only if you're following

a pre-approved track or procedure and the high terrain around this airport meant that accurate track keeping was really really important because of this all the arrivals approach and M approach procedures into Niche were planned with strict altitude constraints and that's worth keeping in mind now the risk of flying into mountains might not be a very high concern for you but some something that I definitely think should be is the risk of your personal data being bought and sold for malicious use you might not realize it but every day your personal information like your name home

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get a whopping 60% discount of their annual plan thank you incog now let's continue remember I was just talking about the importance of keeping track of all minimum and Route altitudes when we're flying another thing that will become really important soon is a system that you might have heard me talking about in some of my other videos the enhanced ground proximity warning system or egpws this system is super clever and likely one of the most safety and haunting things that have been fitted to aircraft lately it utilizes a database called wgs84 along with inputs from

the global positioning system to make sure it always knows exactly what the aircraft is in relation to surrounding terrain obstacles and man-made structure it can provide a range of warnings and cautions to crew in order to alert them if for example the aircraft comes too close to the ground while having the landing gear in the incorrect position or if the flap configuration is not correctly set it can also do the same if the aircraft fails to achieve a positive climb of the takeoff or if its syn rate on approach is too high in addition to

alert the egpws system can also provide terrain information which can be selected to Overlay the navigation display and show what kind of Pi of the terrain around the aircraft in that setting it color coordinates terrain to show anything below the aircraft as green or if it's really far below black anything between the same level to 1,000 ft above as low density yellow blocks anything above that as high density yellow and terrain more than 2,000 ft above as red now the pilots must choose between showing either the weather radar or terrain display since both can't be

shown on the same screen simultaneously and when operating in areas with high terrain like this airport in this case it's generally a good idea for One Pilot to have terrain display than for the other to have the weather radar now Airbus uses a Honeywell egpws which contains six different modes which are worth knowing about the first five modes provide cautions and warnings for excessive descent rate excessive terrain closure rate altitude loss off the takeoff or go around unsafe terrain clearance when not in landing configuration and excessive deviation below the glass slope and the sixth mode

just provides advisory call outs like Bank angle and minimums but the one that will become really interesting in this story is mode number two excessive terrain closure rate this mode includes cautions like terrain terrain which changes to pull up warnings if the aircraft comes within the warning range and here comes a difference between the all gpws which the crew in the Cali accident had and the enhanced system which we're talking about here you see me the enhanced system it doesn't just react to terrain it can also look ahead effectively predicting a conflict and therefore providing

a much greater alerting time it does this by projecting ribbons ahead of the aircraft which shows where the aircraft will be during the coming minutes with its current trajectory and speed it then Compares this progress prediction with its terrain database and if that prediction shows that the ribbons will risk running into Terrain well then it starts issuing an alert the caution alert typically sounds when the aircraft is predicted to be around 40 to 60 seconds away from Impact and the pull up warning then sounds approximately 30 seconds before 30 seconds is still not a lot

of time but because it's based on a forward-looking predictive function it should be enough if the correct responses are followed now once the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude the crew relaxed a bit they then completed their paperwork and it's fair to assume that the atmosphere on board was quite relaxed and pleasant at this point possibly with the cockpit door open and with more cabin crew coming in and visiting but as the aircraft eventually started approaching the top of the sand the crew started to concentrate and prepare for the arrival with the expected terrain threats

fresh in their minds it was particularly important to do a thorough Brea here since neither of the pilots had ever operated into this airport before now without experience of the airport and what clearances traffic control might give them the crew decided to set up the arrival and approach suggested on their Flight Plan the sac 1 Romeo Alpha arrival and after having checked the weather they also saw that Runway 11 was in use with a VR approach now the Airbus A320 has an FMC a flight management computer in which the crew can program the route also

things like the expected arrival and approach procedure so the crew here just selected the soc 1 Rome Al arrival and then added the VR1 approach from the approach drop-down menu the FMC also gives an option of selecting a transition or via point and for the soc 1 Romeo Alpha the November India Sierra nade was the final point before transitioning into the procedural VR approach so they likely would have selected this as well now when we're using the FMC program the rivals and approaches the compact display unit or CDU also shows any relevant speeds and altitude

constraint coded into those procedures for example in this case the requirement was to be at or above 4,300 ft until it passing rebar Lov and a navade called Juliet Sierra Tango and once selected this information would have also been visible on their navigation displays now when everything was set up the pilots also spent some time discussing potential threats for the approach including the fact that the VR Glide path was steeper than usual which might require them to configure early to get the speed down and also the fact that this was a non-precision approach which always

requires higher concentration diligence and adherence to procedures now including potential threats in the briefing is a relatively recent concept because it's been found that by visualizing and coming up with strategies for dealing with anticipated threats many errors can be avoided and Crews become generally more resilient this is similar to you planning for a busy traffic situation and therefore leaving your house earlier for work but at a much bigger scale now the VR approach into Runway 11 in this case also involved something known as a procedural turn starting at November India Sierra VR and then turning

via Lov to rebar and to the Final Approach point at Juliet Sierra Tango with the sosc 1 Romeo Alpha arrival the crew would have had to fly this whole procedure but there was actually a better arrival available for them which would lead them in a straight line towards re bar and Juliet sier Tango for a straight in approach this approach was called Sac 2 Alpha but since the crew were unfamiliar with the airport they just went with whatever was in their flight plan instead now it is worth pointing out here that there was also a

transition from the Juliet sier tangu and the B beacon on that arrival to allow entrance into the VR approach from other directions as well and that Juliet zerat Tango transition will soon become important the crew likely didn't spend so much time looking at different arrivals because like I mentioned before there was also additional threats with this approach including the fact that the approach was steeper than normal but also that the inbound course on the approach was 115° but the runway Direction was 109° meaning an offset by 6° that might not sound like a lot but

it would have meant that the runway would not be directly in front of them when they became Visual and they would therefore also require to do some late stage maneuvering so the pilots discussed how they intended to fly all of this and would have covered elements like how and when they would slow down and configure the aircraft if the weather was okay for the approach and what they expected to see once visual but that brings up the question what was the weather like well while the conditions on the ground was relatively good with only light

and variable winds a q& ag of 1013 and a temperature of 6° C higher up the picture was slightly different there were several layers of clouds at altitude which would obscure the view of the terrain so during The Descent the crew would be flying almost entirely inside of cloud preventing any visual orientation at all and that's also worth keeping in mind anyway the crew soon received clearance from the area controller to start to descend down towards the destination and soon they also approached Sac which was the starting point for their arrival procedure but when they

were almost over that point the controller suddenly C them up and cleared them to follow the sac 2 Alpha arrival instead of the sac 1 Romeo Alpha now as I mentioned before this was actually a better routin for them overall but it was not the one that they had actually briefed it isn't uncommon that there are several arrivals starting from the same point and going to the same Runway the reason for that is that the different ones can then be used depending on which navad are working or for traffic separation purposes and if you find

yourself having programmed and briefed one arrival and then you are suddenly cleared for another you can always try to make your life easy by asking a controller if you can fly the one that you've planned for and they might actually approve that but if that's not possible or like in this case it would mean a significantly longer routing well then it's super important that the pilots enter the new arrival into the flight management computer checks it thoroughly and then brief it all over again since both the rooting and the altitude is restrictions can be very

different but in this case the crew seemed to be in a little bit of a hurry so they just entered a new arrival into the FMC and executed it without ever going through and briefing it properly and that even though they had plenty of time to do so at this point now if they would have looked at it they would have noticed that the soc 2 Alpha would like I mentioned before bring the aircraft in on a more direct routing via rebar and then toward the Juliet Sarat tangu and the B for the approach but

you remember the Juliet Tango transition that I talked about earlier well this transition created a procedural turn from Julet zerat Tango via a point called n 308 rebar and then back to Julet zerat Tango but from the direction that flight 801 was now coming there was no reason to fly that they were already coming from rebar directly towards ulango and could therefore proceed straight in for the approach but that procedure turn was still in there as an option and when the pilots just quickly entered this new arrival reselected the approach via ulat Tango and then

executed it stayed in there if they would have selected the no via option instead that would have solve the problem remember rubbish in rubbish out now a minimum altitude that all aircraft had to maintain until reaching Julia tatango was 4,300 ft this was through both from the direction of rebar and for the procedure turn of Julet Tango if coming from the other direction the earliest time anyone could descend from 4,300 Ft was after passing Juliet Sango and established on the 115 degree final inbound track toward your VR and that is going to be very important

soon the pilots continued to descend according to the minimum altitudes on the arrival and after they passed the rebar they should have set 4,300 ft which was the platform altitude for the VR approach but in instead the first officer now selected 1,000 ft in open descend which caused the aircraft to start descending below the minimum altitude way too early he didn't mention this mode change to the captain which is a serious breach of procedures especially when flying in mountainous terrain but luckily the captain quite quickly realized this error and told him to immediately climb back

up to 4,300 Ft again now we don't know why this mistake happened but 1,000 ft was their minimum descent altitude on the VR approach run it up from 970 ft and it is possible that the first officer being a little bit stressed about the coming steep offset approach simply made a mistake here and it wouldn't be the last one this hiccup would have likely increased the workload for the first officer since the real descend Point Julia tatango was less than three nautico miles away when this happened and this might also have had an impact on

what happened next as the aircraft passed Julia tatango the first officer expected to Now find finally be able to start descending down towards the airport there were a lot of other configurations that also needed to be made and all of this would have formed part of the mental picture he now had for the approach ahead but here something completely baffling happened the aircraft suddenly started turning left now of course it did so because of the route that was loaded into the flight management computer but the first officer who was flying did not want that to

happen so he now pulled out the heading track button to take control of the direction manually and keep the aircraft continuing straight ahead and he also quickly initiated a descend down towards 1,200 ft the captain who had caught the earlier altitude mistake the first officer had made now told him to instead allow the aircraft to complete the full procedure turn in his view they had already deviated from the approach radial at this point so he likely thought that although annoying a turn wouldn't be a disaster and they could just start the approach once they they

reached the NDB again after the turn but somehow he missed that the first officer had also started descending remember the minimum altitude was 4,300 ft until passing the Juliet Sango and the be inbound on the approach and that was for very good reasons there were several high mountains in this area including a peak of 3,152 Ft quite close to the approach track now instead of allowing the first officer who was still Pilot Flying to take care of the turn the captain instead intervened and simply turned the heading bug around himself and then re-engage the lateral

navigation and as he was doing that the first officer was simultaneously reducing The Descent rate from 1,100 ft per minute to 700 I would just like to point out here that it's never a good idea to have both pilots inputting on the flight controls or the mode control panel at any point it's super important that we keep to our designated areas of responsibility in order to avoid confusion of who is in control and this is especially true when the first officer is Pilot Flying as the captain overriding can cause the first officer to completely lose

initiative and situational awareness so what was now happening was that the two pilots had two completely different views on how to solve their current situation the captain wanted to complete the turn whilst maintaining 4,300 ft until over the Julet tatango again was the first officer had intended to just manually continue bound and therefore started to descend and the result was the worst possible combination of those two plants at an altitude of only 2,200 ft the aircraft was on a heading of 158° to rejoin the track towards jul Tango but that also meant that they now

had a huge mountain towering 1,000 ft above and ahead of them at this point the captain must have suddenly realized that the aircraft wasn't maintaining its altitude and he therefore called out oh why are we descending whilst also telling the first officer to immediately go around and start turn left but by this point they had descended even further down to 1,880 Ft and they were now so close to the mountain that the enhanced ground proximity warning system activated and started blaring out terrain ahead pull up now when that warning is heard there is a very

clear procedure that must be followed immediately and without hesitation and that's known as the terrain Escape maneuver in the airb that maneuver includes turning the outo pallet Off Pitch pull to full back stick thrust levers full TOA speed brakes verify down and Bank Wings level or adjust it's super important that the pilot flying execute these items immediately from memory and it's the job of the pet monitoring to make sure that everything is done correctly to monitor the aircraft's performance and to call out any Tendencies towards terrain but what instead happened here was that as the

captain called for the first officer to go around and to climb the first officer reacted by engaging the autopilot in full climb even though the autopilot should be immediately disconnected in this case and after that both Pilots started pulling back on their respective side sticks but none of them moved the trust levers into the toga d0 so the trust just stayed in normal climb as instructed by the autopilot and the AO trust again following standard procedures and adhering to designated roles would have likely captured these mistakes but a feeling of panic was now starting to

spread and with that the communication was also breaking down even further meaning that the trust was left unchanged now when two pilots pulled back on their Sid sticks at the same time without anyone taking priority the airbuses fly by wire system will take both of those inputs into account in this case this meant that the nose of the aircraft rapidly Rose to a pitch up of almost 21° and what happens if the no attitude is suddenly increased without full trust selected yes the speed now started washing off at the same time as the angle of

attack also started Rising now remember how I mentioned the American Airlines Khali accident earlier on and how they had been tricked to fly towards a mountain due to a mistake they had made in their FMC well that's very similar to what had happened here and now the similarities became almost Eerie as this crew also initially mishandled the terrain Escape maneuver but this is where Decades of technical advancements finally came to the Pilot's Aid because not only did this crew get their terrain warning significantly earlier than the crew of American Airlines flight 965 they also had

the awesome protections of the Airbus A320 at their disposal you see the Airbus contains numerous protections known as hard protections and those are non overridable actions taken by the out oflight system to keep aircraft within a safe flight envelope and they are available as long as the aircraft is operating in normal law one of these protections is known as Alpha floor and it kicks in when the speed of the aircraft start to fall below the minimum selectable air speed together with a high angle of attack all of this was happening in this case due to

the extremely high pitch angle combined with a turn away from the terrain and a dropping air speed when this is sense one of the things that happens is that it causes an outo engagement of Maximum toga thrust and it then locks that trust in using something known as toga lock this function will as the name suggests keep the trust output in toga until the crew unlocks it by disengaging the AO throttle so as these Pilots were now pitching up and turning with a speed dropping the aircraft itself actually gave them full thrust despite them not

initially setting it now they did eventually move the trust levs into the toga d0 but at that stage toga lock had already engaged and it would have been visible on their fmas in their primary flight displays and as we will see this was soon going to give them a whole new problem you see having gone from a potential controlled flight into terrain event where aside from a loss of situational awareness the pilot had at least been in control of the aircraft they now started to really fall behind the airplane which essentially meant that instead of

them flying the airplane the airplane was now flying them throughout this whole ordeal the crew had not been in contact with the N approach controller but the last time that he had heard anything from them was when they read back their approach clearance but now they called him up again explaining that they had gone around the controller responded and asked the crew to maintain the gore on altitude of 4,300 Ft but at this stage that altitude was already well below them now they overshot that M approach altitude likely because of a combination of their very

low weight and the fact that they were prioritizing the terrain Escape maneuver which I completely understand but once they felt sure that the Trin was no longer a factor the first officer started to lower the nose to try and level off and what do you think happened then yes since the outo throttle was still in toal lock it didn't matter that the crew pulled the thrust levers back the engines would just keep producing maximum trust until the pilots fully disengage the outo thrust and an interesting tidbit here is that togal loock actually would disengage on

other Airbus types but not on the air A320 anyway this High trust now caused the light aircraft to quickly accelerate and it soon reached an astonishing speed of 331 knots only 19 knots away from the maximum certified speed of the aircraft at around 6,500 ft the pilots finally managed to disengage the AO trust and get the speed back on the control and around 30 seconds later they also managed to level off reaching a maximum altitude of 7,640 Ft 3,3 40 ft above the cleared altitude and 81 knots faster than the highest speed allowed in this

airspace fortunately though there were no other aircraft in the airspace so it didn't lead to any traffic conflict but this is a great example of how quickly things can start to get out of hand when one mistake leads to another and strict cockpit discipline is not adhere to on a private note I also think that this point yet again to the problems with airbus's idea of not having active s side sticks and sell of moving trust levels to give tactile indications of what's happening to the pilots in this case again both Pilots were inputting on

the controls at the same time and even though toga lock was annunciated on their flight mode annunciator it took a long while for the pilots to actually realize it something that would have been obvious if the trust lever actually showed what the trust was doing on the other hand the Fantastic Alpha floor protection and togal loock probably saved their bacon during the Escape maneuver so I will still Lodge this as a win for the Airbus Safety Systems once the situation had calmed down a bit the pilots rejoined the published Mis approach procedure and descended back

to 4,300 Ft after this another procedural approach was flown this time to a successful Landing without any further incidence but I'm guessing that the poor cabin crew on the jump seat probably had a few more gray hairs and also a few stories to tell her colleagues after this now the crew obviously reported this but it took a few days for the authorities to realize just how serious of an incident this actually was at that point the cockpit voice recorder had already been lost so this story is based on the flight data recordings interviews and other

retrievable data the investigation found that the incident was caused by the incorrectly executed reclear arrival route which had not been properly briefed by the pilots this then LED them to descend at the wrong Point directly towards terrain which was followed by an incorrectly executed terrain Escape maneuver and subsequent level and speed busts the root cause for all of this was inadequate communication and work distribution between the pilots which led to a loss of situational awareness as the emergency escalated and on top of that the pilots were not always aware of what the automatics were doing

and all of this was made worse by the weather the low weight of the aircraft and possibly also by some distractions caused by having another person in the cockpit but what I think was left out here was the obvious onset of something known as the startle effect that's what happens when something genuinely unexpected happens which quickly raises the stress level and often leads to a few seconds of surprise inaction before we start doing something and when we do it's super important that we follow trained procedures because if not mistakes like this can easily happen now

it's super hard to train startle response especially in the simulator since it's often becomes very obvious that we're setting a crew up for a Terrain Escape maneuver for example and therefore real startle is an experience for the first time in an actual real situation that's why diligent training of procedures High technical knowledge and strict cockpit discipline is so so important now whair took this incident seriously and reviewed their training syllabus regarding terrain Escape Maneuvers non-precision approaches and adherence to cockpit areas of responsibilities information about this event was then sent out to all pilots in the

company to make sure that everyone can learn from it and the involved Pilots received some extra training and was then allowed back on the line again and this is exactly how this industry stays as safe as it is you see mistakes will happen we're all human but as long as there is honesty and transparency it shouldn't lead to disciplinary procedures instead we can all learn from it and hopefully avoid similar mistakes in the future now this video was made possible by my fabulous team and the support we are all getting from the members of my

patreon crew if you want to see these videos early and help produce them then join my crew by going to patreon.com jooin Mentor pilot or click on the link in the description below have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye-bye