The future of flying

Lufthansa flight flew for 10 minutes without conscious pilot, investigation reveals​






Not much that can be done to prevent this happening at least occasionally. It's an unusual combination of circumstances, but certainly possible.

Modern airliners are coming close to the point where they could do the whole flight from takeoff to landing by autopilot. The pilot is still needed to react to emergencies, but in a case like this, the risk of flying on autopilot for 10 minutes was pretty low.
 
Of course it's preventable.
Anytime one of the 2 pilots leaves the cockpit, a flight attendant should go inside and wait until they return.

I believe this is SOP in the USA. Not sure if it's different in Europe or if they were disobeying procedure.
 
Via ZeroHedge article
Notice the pilot only used half of the runway for takeoff?

2025-06-12_06-36-00.png







GtPJLrAWUAAIkTx




 
Last edited:
Judging from the audio, the emergency fan electric generator might have been deployed. Power failure? No redundancies?
 
There's some YT videos where some airline pilots are giving their opinions: one said that, soon after take-off, the co-pilot might have accidentally retracted the flaps rather than retracting the landing gear. Because in the videos, you see the flaps are up but the landing gear is still down.

It's a bit like that Korean airliner disaster (on Jeju island ?) where, after a birdstrike, they make it down but didn't lower the flaps so the plane pummeled into a wall at the end of the runway. Not related, I know, but it shows the importance of flap position both during take-off and landing.
 
Back
Top