And to the person who said they routinely slip Cessna landings... different bird my friend ;) Remember, the slower they get the less the hydraulic assist was working. It's a wonder they were even able to straighten out.
I hope there is some kind of 'case study' that pilots study about this.
It should not be up to the pilot to ground the plane; shouldn't that be up to the airline or chief engineer?
>It should not be up to the pilot to ground the plane; shouldn't that be up to the airline or chief engineer?
Aerospace engineer here. I've worked in airworthiness and maintenance ops, though never on the 767. "Grounding an aircraft" is usually a colloquialism, but there are several people who can declare aircraft to be unserviceable and that includes both pilots and maintainers.
For the uninitiated, what happens is the maintenance organization does what's called a Maintenance Release[0] which is the legal act of transferring the aircraft out of maintenance and certifying it is in compliance with what's called the Approved Type Design. Because of the real world being what it is, there are legal ways to accept an aircraft that isn't in compliance with the approved type design and these take the form of Minimum Equipment Lists (MELs) which are basically a list of pre-approved deviations from the Type Design for which risk management has already been carried out. For example in some aircraft you can take off without life rafts, if your aircraft carries a legal operating restriction to stay within $distance of dry land.
Upon accepting an aircraft for a particular flight, the pilots do their own acceptance checks, the common term for which is "preflight".
Anyways, the long and short of it is that yes, the pilots can and should ground the plane if it's U/S. But maintenance can and should as well. In this case, the pilots were sanctioned because they contravened the MEL for the 767 which was a contributing factor to the incident.
And to the person who said they routinely slip Cessna landings... different bird my friend ;) Remember, the slower they get the less the hydraulic assist was working. It's a wonder they were even able to straighten out.
Here's a video on the forward slip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxy2MnUnfUM
I hope there is some kind of 'case study' that pilots study about this. It should not be up to the pilot to ground the plane; shouldn't that be up to the airline or chief engineer?