Originally Posted by JD-EE
Lonewolf_50, sorry I phrased it badly. I was suggesting you might have been derelict not to mention that point to support your argument. It's a very telling point, at least to me.
Fair to say I left out an important point, particularly considering that on this forum, copilot and captain experience is frequently raised as a troubling issue for the current state of the airline industry. (See the Hudson River Landing, two experienced pilots did well in a tough situation ... the Buffalo crash / icing rather the inverse ... )
There was an old Aviation Safety Maxim that goes something like this:
Gravity and physics don't care how many hours you have in your log book, you still have to know your aircraft and fly it professionally ... experience is no proof against mishap, nor against the vagaries of Mother Nature.
@cuddieheadrigg:
Trying to look at this through inexperience eyes, and with as little speculation as possible, another few questions:
ACARS Timings: are they accepted as mirroring the duration of the event?
Probably not. I'd be careful in attempting to correlate too closely a text based maintenance message system (with a comparatively low baud rate) with a flight data system. You are asking for more than what that system is designed to give.
To give you some perspective: if the "wait in line" message interval is six seconds, a number of things can happen all at once (let's say four) and it takes 24 seconds to get all of the faults transmitted to the maintenance system. In the meantime the pilots have been busy dealing with malfunctions. For perspective: I could enter a training spin, let the aircraft spin for a few revolutions, and recover, in less than 24 seconds, (altitude reduced by a few thousand feet) when I was an instructor in T-34C's. I could also, in the same aircraft, in six seconds or less, be at the 90 (base) in the landing pattern, get into a skidded turn stall, and be dead on impact with the ground. A whole lot more than error messages would have gone on in the interim for both of the above events.
Weather: is this ABSOLUTELY determined to be THE or merely a contributory factor?
"Merely a contributory factor?" Weather is a contributory factor to a lot of what happens in flight, for fair and foul. You question makes zero sense as phrased.
The Aircraft:
As the commander has final authority for the safety of the aircraft - we have no indication of diversion or messages RECEIVED (or sent) regarding any such action.
That might be due to the CVR and FDR not having been found yet. Info from ACARS is intended to assist the maintenance crew in their trouble shooting and remedy of faults to some aircraft systems. Also, the protocol when flying, the iron rule of the sky, is Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. If and when things went all wrong, the last thing the crew is going to do is talk. They'll first address getting the plane flying, then getting on course/speed/altitude/route, etc, and then talk about it.
- is this in any way relevant to events? (That is IF a turn was implemented, or an intentional descent would this have ANY material bearing on events in terms of any contribution - or if it is a concurrent event demanded by the situation is it irrelevant to the outcome?)
This question makes no sense. Increasing your Angle of Bank will change your stall margin, but people turn aircraft left and right every day with no ill effects. You can stall from straight and level flight, or in turning flight. I did both with some frequency as an instructor pilot. It was a controlled situation, however. What has become clear to me in this family of threads and posts, in re AF 447, is how difficult it is to handle a big passenger jet that has actually stalled, rather than approached stall, and how many thousands of feet it requires to recover from that stall, if recovery can be managed. It has been a real eye opener.
Crew awareness: Assuming all crew alert - and weather a factor - is there any relevance to saying the crew 'should' have noticed via weather radar any anomolies, or were the general conditions not a factor of concern until 'too late'? (That is, there was no reason to be concerned and possibly no way to know what lay ahead?)
The reason weather radar is on modern transport aircraft is to allow a crew to avoid surprise, damage, and worse as a consequence of running into severe weather. How one uses that tool is a factor of training and practice. How one arrives at decisions based on info from the weather radar is a function of airmanship. "Should have" is a vague assessment, when lacking data. Numerous posts in AF 447 threads, and a few recently here, point out some of the nuances and limitations of weather radar.
People have keyed on weather as a contributing factor for a variety of reasons (see references to other posts on this topic about a pitot tube issue over the Pacific a few years ago) but the major reason is as follows: without significant phenomenon influencing AF 447, and given how well modern aircraft can be trimmed for level flight at altitude, and given the system redundancy designed into modern passenger aircraft, there is little rational reason for AF 447 to have done other than maintain altitude and course selected to eventually arrive in Paris. Something interrupted that, and given the weather in the area, and other flights using course deviations to avoid significant weather, that factor has been considered as a key to solving the mystery of AF 447's loss.
Finally: assuming rapid descent - if the pilots had a non respoding aircraft - there are obviously countless variations on the theme - but the question would seem to boil down to; Is there a possibility or indication of 'loss of control'?
The aircraft hit the water. An aircraft
in control most likely won't do that when the selected altitude is 35,000 or 37,000 feet. Between the pilots and the aircraft systems, being "in control" would avoid unintended water impact.
How and why controlled flight was compromised is the great unanswered question of this crash.
If control was lost or reduced - what is MORE responsible - mechanical action (by ice or any other damage) - or the Airbus computer system?
The answers to that question are pending retrieval of the CVR and FDR. Attempting to attribute a major cause by guesswork (as has been going on in the various speculative posts in this extended discussion, including mine) has limited utility.
The facts available to date do not lend themselves to the terse summation you require
without FDR and CVR confirmation.