Report: Co-pilot moved seat, sent jetliner plummeting

The co-pilot of an Air India Express 737 sent the jetliner into a terrifying 7,000-foot plunge in May when he accidentally hit the control column while adjusting his seat, investigators report.

According to the report from India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the co-pilot panicked and was unable to execute the proper procedures as the jetliner dropped from 37,000 feet at a 26-degree angle. The plane and its 113 passengers were saved when the pilot, who’d gone on a bathroom break, used an emergency code to get into the locked cockpit, jumped back into his seat and grabbed the controls to bring the plummeting plane out of its dive.

The aircraft would have broken apart if the descent had continued, the aviation agency report said. The aircraft was not damaged and no one was injured, the report said.
<snip>

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/30/report-co-pilot-moved-seat-sent-jetliner-plumetting/?hpt=C2

Oops :yoiks:

do they mean before impact?

...exceeds design limitations such as Maximum Airspeed which is easy to exceed in a steep dive.

For which it is not designed

while the car is moving. Get it adjusted before you take off."

And an airliner has neutral static stability, meaning that once the control input is removed, it will return to it's configured flight path. On top of that, he was probably on auto-pilot.

Now, maybe if he had a flight attendant bent over the control column for a while, it might happen.



And stop calling me Shirley.

Unless he had his trim function disengaged?

:shrug:

wikipedia

The elevator will return to neutral, not the plane. Also the autopilot will disengage with a significant control input.

Unfortunately, airplanes don't fly themselves, contrary to urban legend. If a pilot doesn't know what he is doing, or makes a serious enough error, the aircraft most definitely can be destroyed.