This seems not to have been covered here yet from what I can see. A few weeks ago a UTair 737-500 on approach to Moscow Vnukovo suffered a serious upset, confirmed on 1st November by Rosaviatsiya.

With the autothrottle still engaged, the engines powered up to 95% N1. This caused a pitch up momentum to +45°. The airspeed dropped to less than 100 knots and the stick shaker activated.

The aircraft rolled 33 degrees to the right, then -34.8 to the left. The pitch supposedly decreased to 30 with the speed dropping to 60 KIAS.

The aircraft is then thought to have rolled 96 degrees to the right, pitching -14 degrees (nose down). It then banked 45 degrees to the left with speed increasing to 150 KIAS. The flight crew then regained control at an altitude of about 1100 feet and reported to ATC that they were going around because the approach was unstabilised.

Full details at https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=200545

Video, presumably from the FDR data: https://youtu.be/zmg-tLuMmJo

Scary stuff. I'm not sure which is more astonishing: that the crew managed to lose control to that extent, or that they managed to regain it before arriving at the ground.

V/F

Should never see that sort of nose up attitude on approach

Thanks for posting this.
I would guess that some of the rolling and pitching movements were deliberate stall-recovery maneuvers made by the crew?

Watched the video but though it was some rookie amateur sim jockey until I saw the same thing linked on Aviation Herald.

Very scary and some very lucky people.

Russian 737 Go-Around Syndrome... that's what we have to call this. How many times has this happened now? 3? Though this is the first successful recovery that we know of... the other two crashed.

redzeppelin wrote:

Thanks for posting this.[...]

Thanks from me, too. I came across that topic a few days ago, when there had been a thread about the new UTair livery. But the whole thing had been much too complicated for me in order to translate it from one foreign language (Russian) to another (English).

However, I should now add one of many Russian reports claiming that UTair tried to cover-up the near catastrophy from the authorities.

Computer translation (as bad as it is) of an article from Tyumen, home town of UTair:

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... edit-text=

VirginFlyer wrote:

The flight crew then regained control at an altitude of about 1100 feet and reported to ATC that they were going around because the approach was unstabilised.

That’s quite the understatement...

chrisair wrote:

VirginFlyer wrote:

The flight crew then regained control at an altitude of about 1100 feet and reported to ATC that they were going around because the approach was unstabilised.

That’s quite the understatement...

It was technically correct, however... It was, after all, an unstabilized approach.

I strongly recommend to all the people on board that flight to buy lottery tickets...
As Siren correctly stated there is some sort of trend with Russian crews and 737s at low energy phases of flight. Rostov crash was probably a very similar inflight upset at the beginning but they hadn’t the luck of this crew, possibly due to different visual conditions outside the cockpit. Let’s hope better training and procedures will avoid this in the future, although the rumour of the airline trying to cover up this incident makes me wonder if that is a realistic scenario...

Siren wrote:

Russian 737 Go-Around Syndrome... that's what we have to call this. How many times has this happened now? 3? Though this is the first successful recovery that we know of... the other two crashed.

So it must be contagious then, because the same thing happened with the FlyDubai crash.

There is a very concerning report about these accidents by Rosivyatsa, will try to find it and share it with you.

Wayfarer515 wrote:

Siren wrote:

Russian 737 Go-Around Syndrome... that's what we have to call this. How many times has this happened now? 3? Though this is the first successful recovery that we know of... the other two crashed.

So it must be contagious then, because the same thing happened with the FlyDubai crash.

There is a very concerning report about these accidents by Rosivyatsa, will try to find it and share it with you.

Oooops....you are right, Rostov crash wasn’t Russian crew, in fact captain was from Cyprus and F/O was from Spain...other weird thing in this last incident is why the engines accelerated to almost full power while A/T was engaged on approach... I’m assuming this was an uncommanded engine thrust setting, and if that is the case, maybe this crew deserves all the credit for recovering the aircraft.... the unstabilized approach message doesn’t help anyway...

Rgds.
G.

But all these incidents have happened in Russia. It was another 737-500 that lost pitch control during a go-around, almost identical circumstances to the Rostov crash... Tatarstan flight 363, which crashed in Kazan in 2013. Same thing as the Rostov crash, and apparently this one... loss of control after application of go-around thrust.

As I recall, the Russian government attempted to pull the 737 type certificate because of that accident, owing to issues with the 737 pitch trim system.

Automation complacency?

wjcandee wrote:

Automation complacency?

Could be. There's also Aeroflot 821 in 2008, another 737-500 where the crew lost control during the go-around and crashed... the accident report blamed the crew's lack of familiarity with the Boeing type attitude indicator and artificial horizon, stating that the crew was more familiar with the Russian units on the Tu-134, and had recently transitioned. I don't really buy that. Any idiot can decode the artificial horizon.

So, the definitive list as I know it, for Russian 737 Go Around Syndrome:

Aeroflot 821 at Perm, 14 September 2008, 737-500
Tatarstan Airlines 363 at Kazan, 17 November 2013, 737-500
FlyDubai 981 at Rostov-on-Don, 19 March 2016, 737-800
UTAir 588 at Moscow, 13 October 2017, 737-500

So, UTAir is incident #4. And the only one that didn't crash, so they get a cookie. But there's something seriously wrong. FlyDubai is just the luck of the draw, but 3 Russian operators having this happen in the span of 10 years stinks.

Siren wrote:

the accident report blamed the crew's lack of familiarity with the Boeing type attitude indicator and artificial horizon, stating that the crew was more familiar with the Russian units on the Tu-134, and had recently transitioned. I don't really buy that. Any idiot can decode the artificial horizon.

Spatial disorientation can be quite insidious, more so when your primary source of horizon instrumentation is a small instrument where small movements of it translate into large movements of the actual aircraft.

When I fly I'm used to seeing the wing bars remain level with the flight deck, and the horizon line of the attitude indicator move with the horizon outside. I can quite easily see myself getting disoriented if I were to be in lumpy IMC with an attidue indicator where the horizon line remains level with the flight deck, and the wing bars move around on it. I don't think it's implausible to say that relative unfamiliarity with the nature of an attitude indicator on an aircraft would be a contributing factor in a loss of control accident.

V/F

Well, I'm fairly certain that would be absolutely terrifying for passengers. I can't believe those maneuvers occurred and he still managed to save it. Clearly they weren't paying attention to their instrumentation and A/T settings.

From my MS Flight Sim experience, same situation happens in Boeing planes when the autopilot is off but the altitude selector is on - the plane still tries to stay at that altitude.

No matter what caused that ''unstablized approach'', the crew deserves a ton of credit for recovering like that.

Three things that puzzle me in that video. Why pull harder on the stick if you are already pointing at the sky? Why did the spoilers keep deploying? Do you really need that much forward pressure to keep a 737 flying level at full thrust?

StTim wrote:

Watched the video but though it was some rookie amateur sim jockey until I saw the same thing linked on Aviation Herald.

Very scary and some very lucky people.

i don't even think a rookie amateur sim jockey would fly a 737 like this...

Regarding unstabilized approach:

This was the reason for the go around in the first place. After this they started doing some aerobatics, not before.