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A321 Image: Richard Vandervord http://www.airliners.net/photo/Airblu...



This is the story of air blue flight 202. On the 28th of july 2010 one of air blues a321s was to fly from karachi to benazir bhutto international airport near islamabad . In the morning at 2;41 am UTC the plane was being prepped for departure. Within a short span of time the 146 passengers were settled in and at 2:52 am utc or 8 am local time, the plane took off. As the plane climbed into the cloudy skies of Pakistan the passengers were severed warm tea and croissants, in the cockpit the captain started quizzing the first officer on his flying knowledge. This didnt go too well. The captain was quite harsh with his reprimanding and used quite a snobbish tone with the first officer. Look a bit of quizzing is probably good it keeps everyone on their toes with respect to procedures and facts about the airplane and the route that they were flying. But this went far beyond that, the report calls what the captain did a humiliation session their words not mine. This cycle of quizzing and then berating the first officer went on for a bit, an hour to be precise. After all of that the first officer was quiet and submissive.

When they were 155 NM from islamabad, the pilots tuned into the ATIS a broadcast that constantly broadcasts important information about the airport, in this case they got to knew that the runway in use was 12, the crew then discussed the waypoints that they'd use to get to runway 12. They also checked the weather at the airport and at their diversion airports. The captain was then told that hed have to do whats known as a circling approach. In this case the captain would line up with runway 30 using the ILS then once near the runway he would turn to the right then circle the airport by making left turns which would put them exactly where they needed to be to line up with runway 12. That sounds quite simple but this circling approach was an intricate dance of timing precision and speed. To make this approach happen you had to break off from the approach to runway 30 to the right at just the right time, then you had to fly for exactly 30 seconds after that turn left to fly parallel to the runway for exactly 20 seconds then when youre abeam of the threshold of runway 12 you had to turn left and line up with the runway. Mess anything up and youd end up far away from the runway. The thing is you had to have the airport in sight at all times when you made these left turns. If you lost sight of the airport you had to go around no questions asked. The flight path is more of a wonky rectangle than a circle but I guess the term works. The captain decided that tonight hed be flying the circling approach with the plane in the nav mode. In the NAV mode the plane just follows the flight path that youve programmed into the computer and so the captain asked the first officer to program in a few waypoints into the flight management system, the thing is they weren't supposed to use these waypoints it was not authorized, the planned flight path was much wider than the prescribed approach but the beaten down first officer never protested.

At 3:57 am the captain briefed the landing procedure with the first officer he wanted to land using the right hand downwind procedure, the landing procedure that was much wider than the correct procedure. As the descent progressed the captain requested a right hand downwind approach to runway 12. The controller rejected his request because of limitations at the time the captain acknowledged this. Soon the plane was on the ILS for runway 30 and the controller cleared them to descend and to perform the circling approach to runway 12. The captain asked about the right hand approach again, the controller again told him that a right hand approach was not doable at the time.