Shortly after takeoff from Douala, Cameroon, on a dark night with convective activity in the area, the pilots of Kenya Airways Flight 507, a Boeing 737-800, lost control of their aircraft. The captain experienced confusion and spatial disorientation while trying to manually recover. His inputs greatly exacerbated the bank angle, and the aircraft entered an unrecoverable spiral dive.
The Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority determined the probable cause to be “loss of control of the aircraft as a result of spatial disorientation … after a long slow roll, during which no instrument scanning was done, and in the absence of external visual references on a dark night. Inadequate operational control, lack of crew coordination, coupled with the non-adherence to procedures of flight monitoring, [and] confusion in the utilization of the [autopilot], have also contributed to cause this situation.”1
This accident was the result of missed oppo…
