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Old 17th Aug 2011, 22:12
  #3012 (permalink)  
The_Steed
 
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Aberdeen
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I'll declare myself as SLF up front, so apologies if this is way off, but I've been following this thread since Day 1 and was wondering if my understanding of the developing explanation for the crash is correct...

Essentially, flying into a storm meant the pitots froze, and the UAS meant the Autopilot disconnected, and instead of flying roughly level, they used a drill meant for the take-off phase which meant nose-up attitude. This in turned led to speed decay, and then a stall. Because of the UAS and the flood of ECAM messages, they didn't really know what was going on and so kept the nose-up which meant that the plane eventually was going about 60kt and dropping I'm guessing almost vertically? They didn't notice that they were losing altitude because there were no outside visual cues until they started scanning instruments, but by that point it was too late to pull out of the stall and they couldn't recover.

So I guess my point is this. Is this a typical 'swiss cheese' affair where a combination of bad decisions, bad luck and some below par flying skills resulted in an avoidable crash?
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