It was bleak winter day. Little bird was lying still in the middle of the road, half frozen. It seemed that even its minutes were numbered, when there appeared a cow, and dropped a dung right on the top of it. After a while, heat from dung permeated the little bird's body and it felt blood running again through its veins. It was so delightful to feel alive again that the little bird started singing with the greatest of joy. Alas, along came very hungry kitty, heard the little bird's song, dug it out of dung and ate it.
There are three morals to this story:
1) those who $h*t upon you are not necessarilly your enemies
2) those who pull you out of $h*t are not necessarilly your friends
3) when you're buried in $h*t, don't sing - kepp your mouth (or beak) firmly shut
Misfortunantly, this story was either never translated into French, or, if it was, capt. Asseline has never heard of it. Othervise he would have been familiar with moral3 and would never, ever sit down and write his book. Just take a look at the video of Habsheim flypast. A320 makes slow and dirty flypast, at around 50ft, over surface that's everything except suitable for landing and has trees on its end! It's like playing russian rulette with all chambers full and hoping for bullet to go dud! Of course, when things go wrong, it's freshly certified airplane's fault and not his. There are reasons for doing low and slow flypast with gear down, over runway suitable for your airplane, be it F-15, B737 or super-cub. First, low flypast is purely visual manuevre, you don't have time to check radalt and baroalt is too insensitive to be of any use. Runway also provides you with good height cues. Second, in case you get it wrong, you might get away with touch and go and climb away. Third, no obstacles on and around runway reduces chances of hitting anything solid if your height maintaining discipline is lacking. There is possibility that engines were slow to spool up, that A/THR was unservicable, even that baroalts were misreading but these are irellevant for the flight that was executed poorly and ended in disaster. I'll stop short of calling captain Asseline any derogatory term, I'll say that the fact that two trainning captains didn't recognise their manuever as potentially dangerous isn't stupid, it's tragic! Also it speaks volumes about systemic deficencies in both airline and DGAC. But then, PNF uttered the name of their safety pilot twice, as he was obviously uncomfortable with his PF's handling of flight but didn't stop him. I guess he thought that while what they were doing was dangerous, they would live through it. And they did, unlike 3 of their pax.
I'm not entirely convinced that there was conspiracy to cover up airplane defects. If there was one, then it might have more to do with covering capt Asseline's first part of
prenom. As for cutting down trees to cover up evidence of engine stall - that's mightily streched. Could it be possible that locals cut them in anticipation of further AF flybys?
Along comes Norbert Jacques,
B747 pilot, who knows disturbing things about Airbus, which he doesn't want to reveal as they'd be too much to swallow and afterwards accuses European court of human rights with conspiring with Airbus industrie. What d'ya call the person who is in possession of flight safety critical information, but refuses to share it? Crackpot doesn't cut it, provided that you hold his claims to be true.
XetroV, I hope you were vrong too, when you mentioned that even professionals can get fooled. I'd say that aerospace professionals participating in PPRuNE tend to fill out their additional info with at least some of their biographies. Posers, pretenders, flamers and other trolls tend to leave all fields except mandatory ones blank.
I don't say that this works all the time, but it did help me with better understanding of this thread.
