Air France 447

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec...really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877

Straight and level with no airspeed in a storm. Varying opinions on the cause of this accident, It appears that Airbus automation was attempting to initiate a climb (due to frozen pitot tubes).

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Great video, I had not seen this one before. . However, I've seen this debated in the past. . It can get pretty contentious in professional pilot forums.

Two camps.

One camp, the school of thought that leans instinctively and philosophically towards a finding of: pilot error. A US military and old school mindset from my experience. (I'm the pilot, the buck stops here. I can "fly" anything. I'm good enough to overcome this situation, and I should have if it was, in any way, possible to do so.)

The other camp, a school of thought that leans instinctively and philosophically towards a finding of: NOT pilot error (It was mechanical and computerized systems failure. The computer flies aircraft of this complexity, the accident was reasonably beyond the pilot/ FMS operator's responsibilty. It's all governed by control laws.)

The rest of their story.

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I would say it's not that cut and dry. It started out as a strange weather phenomenon, made worse by lousy pitot tube design that was not replaced, was exacerbated by the airplanes computer, and was not dealt with appropriately by the captain. This is the typical formula for aircraft accidents, a chain of events that lead to tragedy. In this case it was natural phenomenon, design flaws, and human error all rolled up into one.

I think it should be a requirement for all airline pilots to have worked as a flight instructor and have at least 1000 hours dual given instruction. Why? Because a lot of aviation accidents could have been prevented, or outcomes altered for the better by going back to the basics of piloting an airplane. For instance the Colgan DHC-8-400 crash in Buffalo. All the captain had to do was a simple stall recovery, something instructors do thousands of times. When you do it that often it becomes second nature.

With Air France 447, it would have been tough to maintain control at night in turbulence for sure. But I think going back to the basics would have saved this flight from disaster.

What I don't get is how three pilots can calmly ignore the stall warning for so long. Is it remotely possible for the audio on the warning to have been inop?

I don't think any of them realized the aircraft was out of normal law.

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I've studied this accident at some length because it falls somewhere in my field of aviation Human Factors. To me, it's a symptom of a struggle between competing corporate philosophies. My own, shared by Sully Sullenberger and perhaps Turk "... I think going back to the basics would have saved this flight from disaster." . Versus those corporations, avionics mfgrs., and even some civilian pilots who say automation is the future of aviation, with newer "pilots" trained to monitor (at lower rates of pay) the corporation's automated people/cargo moving systems.

What happened here is that the automated systems got so confused, and sent so many confusing and contradictory warnings to a crew conditioned to rely on them, that like the New York Colgan crew, the pilots got confused and set aside the basics. As I recall, the stall warning was not inop, it simply contradicted other automated systems and indications. Truly a tough situation. I wouldn't call the pilots incompetent. This was tougher than the Colgan situation. But it may not have been insurmountable with the right old school crew at the controls. (Just academic speculation on my part. I don't mean to trash the memory of these pilots.)
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Sullenberger is a former Air Force fighter pilot and current glider pilot. An old school, seat-of-the-pants, hands on the controls aviator.

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Thanks for expounding, Qutch. It makes a little more sense now.

At my company they don't even want to teach pitch and power. You learn on the line but they 100% absolutely hate it when you don't follow the FD, even say doing 160 kts with 200 bugged and the FD is telling you to go to 20* pitch up. It's asinine, I saw an FO get berated in a PC over it. The training programs are designed nowadays to teach us (monkeys) to operate a video game not operate a aircraft.

I think we can only speculate what any other crew would have done in this situation. It was someone here on JC who summed it up best "How would anyone properly react when you're suddenly faced with hand flying an A330 with no speed reference at night, over the ocean in stormy conditions?"
I agree that a back to basics approach could have possibly helped the situation. There is a reason it did not. My opinion is they may have been in some sort of denial that anything was seriously wrong that couldn't be auto corrected. When they suddenly realized there was a problem, they went into panic mode and their brains stopped processing information for logical solutions.

Sorry you lost me on that one!

Do you think Airbus will ever change it so when auto-thrust is engaged, thrust levers will move?

When we had our research planning discussions in R & D we were always reminded that the long term corporate goal in civilian aviation was to replace or minimize the role of the pilot. Robotics, with human attendants. Get by with lesser and lesser pilot proficiency. Drones eventually. Follow the money. We actually had developed techniques in which our test pilots could mentally outperform any FMS. Greatly outperform them, as in doing aerobatics and high G navigation manuevers on existing instrumentation, just for fun and demonstrations. No need for the expensive avionics with a trained pilot. Pretty simple really. There was interest for use with fighter pilots, but not for civilians. So we kept that stuff in our files, never released to civilians.

What I think is embarrassing is that this has now become a topic for Fox News.

"Pilots forgetting how to fly?" Geez!

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AA903 is instructive. While pilot actions led to the issue, the question is not that, but rather, what is the probability that another crew would do the same given the same circumstances. The answer to that, quite simply, very probable.

No. Having flown the Airbus, thrust levers are not an issue.

Thank you.

And as I understand it, when they pulled back on the stick, the airplane got so slow that the Air Data Computers decided the AOA inputs were invalid so it stopped saying stall. So when they pushed forward, it started saying stall, when they pulled back it stopped. Not very logical, but in a panic situation, the absence of a warning is probably enough to make you go "sweet, we fixed it."

One of the big issues I would have liked to see addressed in the report is the "control input averaging" my term, not Airbusses'). If one pilot puts in full forward control stick and one pilot puts in full aft control stick, the airplane will remain level flight (example ONLY, the rigging is not quite equal)
One of the things that happened here is that one pilot (RT) was correcting for the stall and one pilot (LT) was pulling back. The LT seat pilot had more aft stick than the RT had forward so the plane remained in a nose up attitude. If you're flying the plane, there is no way to know (based on aircraft systems) that the other pilot is flying too. [these are side sticks and they don't move in unison like a traditional control yoke]

Sad deal all the way around. Penetrating that huge storm, at night, was the "pilot error" in my opinion. Everything else was a cluster of bells, whistles, confusion, and stress; would have been tough for anyone.

I do recall a Quantas A-380 shutting down engines due to 'heavy vibrations"....Also it is rumored Airbus knew that RR Trent Engines were leaking oil and they sold Quantas eight A830 that had leaking engines. What amazes me is Quantas kept quiet for 100 million dollars and all (A-380) engines have to be replaced on their fleet. Additionally Air France Pilots Union declared the A330 is a dangerous aircraft due to defective pitot tubes.