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Embarer 190 Picture: Myroslav Kaplun
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Our story begins on the 2nd of october 2018, An air astana embraer 190 was due for some major maintenance and for that it was ferried to the military airbase of Alverca do Ribatejo, in portugal. They had some complex service bulletins to go through. They had to do a basic inspection, remove and check the avionics and a lot of things like that. On the 9th of october they started work on the wings of the plane. The control cables that controlled the ailerons, needed some work as there was too much friction. Ailerons are small control surfaces on the trailing edge of the wing and it helps the plane to bank. They swapped out the stainless steel cables for cables made with carbon and steel. They also did some general maintenance on the plane, greased a few pulleys, adjusted a few things, that sort of stuff.

On the 26th of october, the fixes were done and the plane was powered on, but there was an issue. On the engine indicating and crew alerting system or EICAS was an error, the error read FLT CTR NO DISPATCH, the computer was telling the mechanics that the plane was not ready for dispatch as there was something wrong with the flight control system. They carried on with the other tests that they needed to carry out before the plane was to be delivered back to air astana. So they carried out their inspections and they did a few engine run up tests. The plane was delivered by the maintenance team to the area manager but the error on the EICAS was still there, something in the flight control system needed fixing. The manager put together a small team to try to find the issue and to fix it. They didnt have much time. The plane was to be back with air astana on the 24th and they had extended that by a few days to the 31st of october, but their trouble shooting went well past that deadline. On the 11th of november the plane was to be flown back to minsk from alverca airbase. The flight crew went over the airplane to see if all was in order. The flight crew found an issue with the ventilation in the avionics system and a small glitch with the hydraulics system. This was fixed by the maintenance crew and with that they taxied out to the runway to begin their flight to minsk. The plane had 6 occupants including the 3 pilots. It was a rainy day the clouds were low to the ground. There was a layer of clouds at 500 feet and another one at 1500 feet.

The Embraer took off into the skies at 1:31 pm, right after take off the pilot flying had a hard time engaging the autopilot, it just wouldn't engage. Moreover the plane started oscillating side to side very slowly, but these oscillations started to build up. The pilots knew that something was wrong and the plane was not behaving the way that it should. They tried to activate the autopilot many times and they kept getting an autopilot fail error. Right after take off they declared an emergency. They knew that they needed to get this plane back on the ground and they needed to do it fast. The plane was excecuting uncommanded roll and yaw inputs. Realising that they had little to no control of their plane they began to troubleshoot their aircraft. The plane just would not behave in the way that they expected it to.

Things were so bad that the crew asked Lisbon control for a heading out to see where they could attempt a ditching and to minimize damage should they lose the little control that they had. Things were so bad that they had a very hard time flying in the general direction of the sea.
At this point they needed a plan, the pilots consulted with the technicians onboard to see if they could offer some advice, The crew had been switching between the direct and normal modes of the flight control system and they found that they had a bit more control in the direct mode, In

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