AF 447 Thread No. 6

[GarageYears]

Refocus?

There seems to be a tendency to let the mass of opinion become fact...

- Autotrim did not stall the airplane, the PF did that quite successfully and then held the SS NU for a good long time, resulting in the NU trim eventually. The stall would have occurred with or without autotrim. My opinion is this is a distraction and something for the anti-Airbus brigade to fixate on. That the PNF did not notice the eventual trim demand seems to be a topic that has received scant attention - I believe those trim wheels would have been rotating for a good while. But no comment???

- The stall warning system worked and sounded at one point for, what was it, 53-54 seconds continuously, with no comment from PF or PNF? Eventually the damn thing gave up since the airspeed dropped below the 60kt cutoff, but come on!!!... From then on the vertical speed and pitch attitude should have told ANYONE with half an understanding of the basic laws of aerodynamics that the airplane was no longer flying in the true sense and was stalled.

- I am also surprised that the PNF never seemed to really comment on the initial zoom-climb? Why not? Nothing like "Hey, we're at FL380 what are you doing?"

There seems to a lot that the PNF didn't do? Question the climb, question the stall warning, the pitch/VS combination. Unfortunately, he seems to have been somewhat fixated on the necessity to call the Captain back to the cockpit, just at the time when his full attention should have been on what the aircraft was doing.