“ . . . he made a terrible decision to leave the flight deck at all, considering the weather up ahead. He should never have been out of the loop at all.”
And:
“Is it the considered opinion of the majority, that the one person who would have brought AF447 through this event was the Captain? So why bother with the other two? Were they there as highly paid seat warmers? I presume A/F figured they were competent crew. “
Both opinions have been expressed before. I have no view, preferring to leave it to ATPLs to opine.
If there is not unanimity, what then?
I also believe that somebody said that the commander HAD to take a break to stay within permitted hours on duty. I wouldn't know.
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[Hampster wheel/o-bird.]
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FWIW, my take on the whole thing is that:
AF FO trainee selection might need looking at;
AF (and other majors?) training definitely needs revision. Some has started.
Regulation of training may need a look, too.
Manual flying practice needs more attention, particularly at high FLs, cruise speed,
SOP/QRH at high FLs, cruise speed needs more attention.
AF CRM needs thorough review and retraining.
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Two psychological factors are still open, and I see no easy way to overcome them, nor have the experts here put forward solutions that I have seen:
Highly stressed people can be oblivious to audible warnings. What has been described as the “cavalry charge” happened when the FOs were handed control manually which they had never practiced and in circumstances they didn’t understand, or agree about (PNF showed some sign of awareness);
And the reason I followed this from the outset through all threads – when a stressed pilot forms the wrong conclusion, he/she tends to stay with it regardless of ineffective attempts to correct the wrong problem. I have seen this in my field (gliding safety and accident analysis) – only test pilots, or rare individuals, can keep a clear head and systematically fault find.
A wild suggestion – DW will probably shoot me down, as well as all the professionals.
After the system gives up and hands a basketful of trouble to the pilots to hand fly their way out of it without any training (or only inappropriate training), the “system” should know enough that it then stalled and stayed stalled, even when speed fell below 60 (it thought). How about for one second out of every 4, the glass screen blocks out everything else and displays;
” STALL! You are staying stalled! Get out of it!”
Would it be beyond the wit of man to even devise a “computer knows best mode – it will recover as the pilots have not realised” before it’s too late?
Told you it was wild.