Originally Posted by
Blueskies21
NewsDaily: Faulty altimeter played part in Turkish crash
On the same page... A radar altimeter malfunction causes a 737 AP to shutdown the engines? Does that really mean that it was on autoland or something and the AP idled the engines? Anyone know, or is this another case of the press being nuts?
From what I understand the CA’s Radar Altimeter had been written up several times and during the approach & landing with the Auto-Throttles engaged the RA glitched, reporting -8’. Somewhere around 25-27’ (737 pilots could probably give you the actually number) the auto-throttles are programmed to retard to idle for flare. Since the auto-throttles where engaged they reacted to the incorrect RA sending them to idle. The pilots obviously didn’t recognize the error until it was too late.