The battle between our 'DNA of flying' and machine management
This is my first post on this AF447 thread and one of the few I’ve made on PPRuNe. I am a private pilot with around 700 hours collected intermittently over a 25 year period. My experience is all single engine by day from C152 through to C210, Mooney 201, Piper Comanche with an aero endorsement, tail wheel and floating hull. My only air transport experience has been as SLF (on many business trips all over the world) and as an SLF that managed to talk my way into many cockpits to ride on the check /observers seat (in the glory days pre 9/11) so I am grossly unknowledgeable about the world of the commercial cockpit and the complex aircraft many of you here fly. The most amazing and wonderful flying I’ve done by far has been in a Lake Renegade amphibian. This go anywhere machine (for me) is the ultimate freedom aircraft and blends aviation and marine skills in a unique fashion that brings a whole other dimension to flying. If you’ve never experienced the wonder of a flying boat and all the amazing places you can go with one, you can’t begin to comprehend what it’s like.
Likewise, I can’t begin to comprehend the tragedy and chaos of the final moments of these pilots’ lives. I’ve read this entire thread from the beginning and would like to thank all the contributors for bringing a dozen salient points to the table. There’s much passion on display, much insight into what might have happened and much disbelief that this crew flew this aircraft into a stall and had no comprehension that that’s what they’d done and stalled it all the way down to the sea at 10,000 feet per minute. What’s been mentioned here, but perhaps not entirely clearly articulated, is the fundamental glaringly obvious issue with the Airbus’ FBW system’s entirely different approach to the control of an aircraft against the backdrop of everything most commercial fixed wing aircraft have been up to this point.
Does anyone remember those early computer video games from the late 70s/early 80s where you had a space ship that had to shoot other objects on the screen and you had to ‘”steer” the craft using keyboard arrows (or a joystick if you had a really swish setup)? I think it might have been called Spacewars. The “space ship” was represented as an arrow on the screen and you could rotate it through 360 degrees, and move around by using positive or negative thrust. It took some time to get used to how to move it because every control input required a counteractive input to stop the movement that was started (i.e. rotate to left required some rotate to right counteraction to stop the rotation. Move forward required some ‘reverse thrust’ to counter and stop the movement. Thrust movement plus rotation resulted in strange oversteer or understeer which could see you careering out of control). In fact the entire control of the spaceship was in effect what one might consider would truly happen out in space where Newton’s 3rd law is perfectly on display and not hampered by other things such as airflow. It took considerable time to conquer the techniques to move around and the ‘no gravity, no friction’ movement of the space craft was almost impossible for some people to get their minds around.
Now, all professional pilots, A & B drivers, please feel free to shoot my observations down in flames, but if the side stick of an Airbus behaves (sometimes, always or only occasionally such as perhaps when the aircraft is fully stalled) in a manner not dissimilar or even a little bit like the old video game I’ve mentioned above (i.e. the pilot makes an input such as ‘stick fully back’ and a substantial forward stick counteracting input is required to negate the state that the first input leaves the aircraft in) then this is just the most fundamentally different flying quality to virtually every other fixed wing aircraft, be it a large commercial jet or the tiniest recreational micro-lite. The many posts in this thread that are indicating the AB’s computers are recognising pilot input much like a ‘request’ for a certain pitch angle or for a certain G loading takes the manner in which an aircraft is controlled into an entirely different realm which would require a wholly different mode of thinking (no news here….but hear me out for a moment). In fact, the simple stick-position/attitude/power concepts we’ve all learned and are the currency of basic flying skills are not relevant for the skills required to fly an AB (if this concept of the operation of the control stick being so completely different is actually how it is).
My point is that EVERYTHING we have ever learned about how a fixed wing aircraft flies and the use of the control wheel/stick throughout all phases of flight, our ‘DNA of flying’ if you will, is embedded and inculcated into our ‘flying thinking’, our skill-sets, our survival instincts, our love of flight and our automatic reactions. Our ability to spatially conceptualise ourselves in space and time and to extend our bodies to the control surfaces of an aircraft is all tied to our first few experiences of flying. Just like taking our first few steps as a toddler, riding a bicycle as a youngster, learning to hit a ball with a bat or racquet, taking to the wheel of a car, those first few lessons when we started flying have gone into the subconscious and the feelings, sensations and sounds have formed an unchangeable and immovable level of ‘knowing’ about how to fly. For anyone that learned in a Cessna 152 or 172, who could forget those early experiences of stalling? The sound of the wind howling and ‘wailing’ through the vents up near the corners of the windscreen as your instructor encouraged you to keep holding the control wheel right back and keep it straight with rudder whilst waiting for the buffet and nose drop? The feeling and sensation of the aircraft struggling to fly and its nose drop demonstrating it was effectively ‘giving up’ is something you don’t forget as you ease off holding the control wheel back and add power (whilst, as a new student, frantically using rudder to prevent a wing drop) with your instructor either admonishing your good handling or castigating you for losing hundreds of feet!
And it’s this ‘DNA of flying’ that is most likely in a battle with the analysis/machine-interpretation skills that appear to be all important when flying these FBW airliners that are, in effect, very complicated computers with a whole raft of rules and ‘laws’ that keep the machines safe for 99% of the time but expose the operators to a baffling and overly complex environment for that 1% of time when conditions and malfunction take them outside the norm.
These AF447 pilots (and I would hazard to guess a substantial number of current AB drivers) can’t possibly have been trained well enough to deal with the conditions they found themselves in that night (dark, IMC, turbulence), the complexities of the flight data systems being compromised by the pitot malfunction and responses of the aircraft to the extremity of the a/p & auto throttle disconnect. It’s just so easy to blame them and say things “like the PF held the nose up at 35 degrees all the way down! Who would do such a stupid thing…!?” I would reckon many ‘would do’ the same (and the PF in fact may not have ‘held’ the stick back anyway) as there was clearly way too much complexity, way too many possibilities of the AB’s system’s reporting incorrect situation (and them needing to consider that simplistic conclusions are likely to be wrong because of the system’s compromise) and they had to deal with potentially just the most basic of fundamental conflict between their ‘DNA of flying’ knowing and the ‘laws’ and rules that the Airbus 330 had been keeping them safe with and then suddenly dropped them outside of the cocoon to fend for themselves.
I think we owe it to the memory of these guys to be aware that the situation they ended up in was just so confusing, so hopeless and so desperate, their loss (and our ability to know something of what happened) is likely to be the start of a major initiative to deal with the need to bridge this great divide between the art of flying (as it has been for the first 90 or so years) and this relatively new world of machine management that requires so much more knowledge and ability to get into the mind of the designer/programmer in order be ahead of it and not come unstuck.
Unfortunately this is the world we’re all moving into more and more. Technology is creating wonderful benefits for ordinary people where the users of the technology don’t need to understand the underlying operatives. And business leaders see great efficiency and profitability in building complex machines where technology that’s getting closer and closer to the goal of artificial intelligence keeps us safe and ‘inside the envelop’. The problem is that as this technology takes more and more hold, generations of users, proponents and ‘visionaries’ start to misunderstand man’s need to still be one step ahead of it and maintain the skills and knowledge to take back control when the technology fails (as it inevitably does because it’s just a reflection of our human condition).
I hope post has made sense; sorry for it being so long winded . I’m less than thrilled about travelling in these complex machines as I can see that this is about man-machine interface psychology, economics, politics and big business needing to come clean and invest more dollars into research and training rather than just about this particular crew's lack of ability, perceived or otherwise.