DW
@jcjeant - Fair point, but you're forgetting that engineering is the art of compromise in order to achieve specified goals
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True enough. But with the authority to make compromises also comes the responsibility to take the heat and bear the costs when those compromises come back to bite you on the ass. Your recent responses in this thread are the perfect illustration of what critics of the airline industry mean when they refer to "engineering by gravestone."
I think the flight crew made compromises; I think Air France made compromises; I think Thales made compromises; I think Airbus made compromises. All those compromises seemed, I am sure, rational and logical and reasonable compromises to the decision makers at the time the decisions were made. The problem is that those rational, reasonable, logical compromises aligned with each other in a way that produced an outcome that was not rational, not logical, and not reasonable. AF447 should not have crashed....
but it did.
While the final report is not out yet and so my mind might change, as events stand now I think that in 20 years AF447 is going to be studied as a classic case of system failure. Everyone shares part of the plane from the pilots to the airline to the the manufacturer and its subcontractors. Regrettably, no one really cares about that at this stage; all they want to do is point fingers and shift blame so that when all is said and done it is not they by some other sap who bears the financial cost of this disaster.