Sensor_validation:
BEAs statement is a careful selection of established facts which must have been checked out carefully by legal opinion - so I think I think it is worth looking carefully at the words used - albeit in the English translation - does the French read the same? Maybe reading in too much?
Quote:
the Captain woke the second co-pilot
Suggesting he was asleep, and could have been for a couple of hours - but within 5 minutes he was in front of the controls as PNF.
I totally agree that the BEA "note" has more information than may appear if simply read as a document.
The BEA probably has a very good idea of the facts -and- causes of the acciedent chain at this point. Given the legally influenced approach (good post many pages back I can't find at the moment) i would propose this:
A: Every fact in the document has a stong consensus to be true.
B: Every given fact will match up with the final report as one of the "holes in the cheese"
C: Ommited data such as what happened after the dual control input are still in analysis as to either certainty or relevance.
Given the above here are 2 observations:
1: I suspect the narrative was ended at the point (~10K feet) where it is not yet known if the aircraft was recoverable.
2: On the cpt waking the relief pilot, not only was he asleep he was deeply asleep. This can be inferred from "waking" the pilot as opposed to calling him. (I welcome native French speakers to commnet, this could be a translation artifact.)
On waking from a deep sleep the recovery time to full attention is much longer than if one wakes naturally at a normal point in the sleep cycle.
<< releavant personal story, skip if skimming posts>>
The only car accident I have had in 40+ years of driving occured while I was driving my brother in law's hot air ballon cross country.
The trailer had no (effective anyway) brakes, I had been sleeping in the back of the small pickup truck and we had just swapped drivers.
Time was early morning, light rain had just started. I was going down the ramp from the rest area and concentrating on picking a gap to merge with the moderate traffic. The rig did not have much acceleration so this was fairly important.
The big buick in front of me stopped at the bottom of the ramp.
The brakes were clearly not going to stop the rig in time so I aimed squarely at the back. A swerve could well have rolled the rig even if there was room.
Fortunatly no injuries and once we pried the fan out of the radiator the pickup was driveable.
The point of this is that while there were a large number of factors, brakes, weather and the idiot 16 year old driver who stopped suddenly it was still very much my fault and I strongly suspect the narrow concentration (picking my merge) was a result of not being fully awake.
BTW: I think the poor kid got the worst of it, the entire time we were waiting for police to finish reports etc his father was yelling at him that he had warned him not to do that in the past...