The 737MAX crashes. Did the pilots do everything?..

Recently I read an article on the BBC.com named "What went wrong inside Boeing's cockpit?" After reading the very first phrase: "There was nothing more the pilots could have done " I couldn't force myself to read it further. Yes, they did everything… they could. But did they do exactly what was needed?

You will not find anywhere what I'm going to tell you in this article.

The 737MAX. What is wrong?

After the recent crash of the Ethiopian 737MAX8 I started to receive a lot of questions like "what's going wrong with the MAX", "what do you, Denis, think about this accident, shall I change my tickets to Airbus", "how to live now", and many others.

First, guys, I want to stress, that the investigation has just begun and at this moment there is a lack of official information.

However, this accident looks very similar to the first crash of the same model which happened half a year ago in Indonesia with a Lion Air 737MAX8. Both airplanes crashed just in a few minutes after airborne and before impact they were integral and the vertical speed and the air speed were so high, that almost no big parts of the airplanes remained, just small fractures.

Let's Go Around!

Hello, my dear friends! I wish everything is ok and you are having really nice times!

So, today I would like to talk about go arounds and I will use my recent video which raised an interesting discussion among my foreign viewers.

I will explain the tricks which, I believe, must to be known by a 737 pilot. 737 is an old bird but still a lot of misunderstandings exist among the pilots.

And, as a bonus, we will talk a bit about Boeing procedures philosophy and Boeing call-outs as it was one of the topics of discussions under the video.

Let's go!

Pilot stories: Departure from Sochi, Adler

Pilot stories: Landing in Sochi, Adler.

Landing and funny taxiing in Vladikavkaz

Hello, my friends! Nice to see you!

That was a flight from Moscow to Vladikavkaz, a town in the Norhtern Caucasus. My FO was rather young and didn't have a big experienc of flying B737-800. 

That was an NDB approach, I have to help him a bit, but overall he was good.

A funny situation arised during taxi. So, watch, enjoy, and...

Fly Safe!

Crazy windy approach on Saint Valentine's Day

Domodedovo airport is located far from seas and mountains, but rather often the air overthere is very turbulent that makes flying (and especially landings) be not easy trips.

We were prepared to face with large airspeed changes and discussed this possibility in the briefing, giving special attention to the stabilized approach awareness, but to be honest only after watching this video I saw how large were speed changes at  appx 500 feet AGL just after I had disconnected the autoflight.

This landing forced me to thought a lot about the modern view on stabilized approach criterias - according to them, this approach had to be terminated and a low altitude go-around had to be conducted.

But...