Originally Posted by
CONF iture
Dozy, don't lecture people when you know that little ...
I did say "theoretically". And as for what I do/don't know...
What do you know about being PNF on a FBW Airbus after all ?
It doesn't matter - the PNF's verbal reactions to the PF's handling are all in the CVR traces - down there in black and white (along with red, blue and green in this case):
"You're going up, you should be going down"
"Above all, don't make lateral inputs so large"
- to give but two examples.
Originally Posted by
CONF iture
Except that alpha floor was inop due to the altitude, nothing was done to disconnect the alpha floor function. Do you have a quote from the report that states otherwise ?
You're being selective with semantics. What he did was permanently disable the autothrottles in order to get the aircraft into position for the flypast despite the fact he was too high and off course (because AF's briefing sent him to the wrong runway) - by the time he crossed the threshold of the grass strip he was too low and too slow (and getting slower!). Disabling the autothrottles meant that his thrust setting commanded the engines to spool down and also that the automatics could no longer apply TOGA power if the aircraft got too far into the low/slow corner of the envelope (in effect *partially* disabling the alpha-floor protection). To my mind this could be explained in two ways - either he didn't fully understand the parameters of the very safety feature he was supposed to be demonstrating, or he had complete faith in his ability to execute the manouevre with the safety feature partially disabled. Please feel free to PM me with your thoughts on that.
One last thing - reading the actual BEA report in that case reveals that it was not simply the PF and crew that came in for censure - AF's p*ss-poor preparation of the flight plan, and the discrepancy between AF's guidelines for airshow displays and the national regulations are also explicitly referred to, but the press chose to ignore that, because the PF's Quixotic war of words with Airbus made for more sensational copy (and also arguably because said PF became their primary source for leaking information on the investigation so far - crossing him would mean losing their "exclusive"). As such, it has become received "wisdom" that the BEA focused on pilot error to the exclusion of all else when this was not in fact the case.
Habsheim has never been done to death, actually I cannot find a single thread dedicated to Habsheim ...
Using the search function (thread titles with term "Habsheim") reveals two threads dedicated to Habsheim, one of which was in the last year. Doing a search for threads and posts with the terms "A320 trees" reveals about a hundred threads that are partially or completely dedicated to Habsheim over the past few years, including one called "Airbus technology defects" by "the shrimp", who was either one of Jacquet's devotees, or even the man himself - you even posted in that thread, so you're being completely disingenuous.
Anyway, no more discussion of Habsheim here - we're already outside the main thread of discussion anyway.
Originally Posted by
MountainBear
I understand your desire to shill on the part of the airline manufacturer as it seems your livelihood is attached to it.
Not at all, and I have explicitly stated that several times. I slacked off too much at university to be accepted into the safety-critical real-time module which is necessary to do the kind of work required in aeronautical informatics.
I find it slightly bemusing that you believe in order to have the viewpoints I have I must therefore have some part of my livelihood connected to the manufacturer (and indeed consider me to be a "shill", which under most circumstances I would take as a deep personal insult), so let me just be clear - I do not, I am about as neutral as it is possible to be on this subject, and even if I did, I would still be neutral because I take pride in my work as an engineer and as such I believe it is of the utmost importance that anything which is universally perceived as a problem must be fixed - and I have in fact done my career more harm than good on more than one occasion by speaking up about policies that I believed would lead to an inferior product at the end of the day.
Nevertheless, this accident is primarily a manufacturer's problem, not an operator's problem. That's the historical trend. For more than 75 years the liability of the manufacturer has been increasing, not decreasing.
I argue that is more to do with the fact that manufacturers have the deepest pockets, and as such it is in the interests of the lawyers acting on behalf of the affected to go after them primarily. I'm not saying that the manufacturers are or have ever been blameless - they've all done things for which they should be less than proud.
You can blame that history on the pilot's union, you can blame it on the press, you can blame it on whatever you like but casting blame doesn't change the underlying reality it just evidences your irritation at it.
Let me be clear again, I'm not interested in blame and never have been. I'm interested in finding as many factors as possible that *actually* led to the loss of this aircraft and want to discuss what it is possible to do to prevent it.
The underlying reality that Airbus (and Boeing for that matter) can't escape is this. In a matter of 30 seconds the PF managed to kill 200+ people and cost the people of France hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's not the first time that has happened and sadly it probably won't be the last. A poor repair by Boeing engineers killed 520+ people in one go in Japan, yet you don't hear arguments on this board that the idea of repairing the pressure bulkhead, or indeed pressurising airliners in the first place was a bad one. I could make the argument that is is in part because the introduction of pressurised airliners didn't bring with it dark accusations of trying to replace pilots in the way that the introduction of automatics going all the way back to the stick pusher devices of the '50s did*.
I'm not going to make that argument though, because it is counterproductive to what I'm trying to get out of this discussion.
As a cultural matter in the Western world we expect technology to solve our problems. Right or wrong, good or bad, that is the expectation. And the person responsible for the technology and the hardware in the airline business is the manufacturer.
I disagree - it is an accepted fact that technology has it's limitations - the continued weary complaints about home and business computers crashing at inopportune times and being difficult to fathom a lot of the rest of the time are but one example of that.
I believe that the attempt to blame automation in general (and that of the Airbus FBW philosophy in particular) is also counterproductive. The analogy I'd make would be akin to blaming the manufacturer of the Stanley/utility/boxcutter knife for all the crimes committed with it over the years. Both aircraft automation and the Stanley knife are simply tools. They have legitimate uses and in such cases are very good at what they do. The problems occur when they are abused for purposes for which they were not really designed (cutting aircraft handling training to the bone in the case of automation, use as an offensive weapon in the case of the Stanley knife).
[* - This information comes from Davies' HTBJ, which is one of the bibles of airliner literature.]