Pilots Jailed, For Praying During Emergency
 

I just read this news today and thought, what??! I'm not sure what kind of comments will follow. That's not why I'm submitting this post. It's just a strange story and thought that I'd share.

NewsDaily: Italy convicts crash pilot who paused to pray

I'm curious what they were charged with. Negligence?

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?

Hmmm not knowing details of the accident, but based on that short blurb, I say good. You have a resposibility to fly the plane first and until you can't anymore. We as professional aviators are not afforded the opportunity to pray during an emergency. Do it each night and CYA that way.

That is strange.

And also it says he elected to ditch rather than try to land at a nearby airport. !e don't know how far or how high he was from the airport, but if he attempts and can't make it he risks killing more people, the artivle doesn't mention that.

Really strange.

Bad precedence to set, allowing courts/juries to evaluate how emergencies are handled. I thought CRV data was not to be used in dicipinary action. Perhaps Europe is different.

Criminalization of negligence is much more common overseas. In the US you would have to do something unbelievably reckless to get charged, or break a law in the process (ie DUI).

So far US prosecutors have not attempted to to criminalize honest mistakes in aviation.

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.

Sounds like the Tunisair ATR that crashed in the med a few years back (2005?).

I remember hearing the black box tapes and for the last 5 minutes straight they were running checks and/or trying to restart, for the last minute occasionally one of them would say something like "god help me", so I don't see where they would have been "praying" and "panicking".

If that would have happened in the United States, it would have gone one of two ways:

#1: Christian praying - life sentence
#2: Muslim praying - we can't get in the way of that! no charges, job kept