Originally Posted by
Organfreak
1. Air France, for not changing the substandard pitot tubes fast enough
2. The regulatory agencies responsible for rule-making in reference to the above.
3. Air France training
4. The entire industry, again for the failure to provide proper upset training
5. The pilots themselves, both their, uh, flying skills, and their poor decision to fly into that storm
6. Deficiencies in the Airbus design in terms of lack of tactile feedback in the controls (all of the defifiencies posited by contributors to this thread).
7. Deficiencies in the Airbus instrumentation and control design in terms of stall warning behavior, angle-of-attack display, auto-trim, and the list is long.....
Some additions maybe:
1.1 AF for (possibly) failing to evaluate adequacy of training and procedure for a
known risk (pitot fail) they chose to run as a result of (1). Allegedly when they did in the sim post-447, their crews crashed.
4.1 regulatory authorities (or entire industry) promoting
negative (wrong) upset training - one opinion here:
The big stall recovery debate - Learmount. To quote:
So the FAA, seemingly without noticing, had authorised a line training technique different than the one they required for type certification.
...and opinions:
6.
Mmm, no fbw should ever be certified then - back to the regulators who approved it. Fbw means only artificial feedback possible, and then can't have proper control feedback in the absence of airspeed info, since proper feedback is dependent on airspeed.
7.
AoA: separate display is designed and implemented by airbus, blame the airlines (inc. AF) who ask for it not to be fitted. And the regulators who have ignored (several) past accident reports recommending it be made mandatory.
SW: same logic might turn out to be common throughout the industry - comments on these threads have alleged that it is there on boeing at least. Just that no one on other types has managed to get measured airspeed below the threshold whilst stalled. Based on info posted here, I think the Airbus BUSS option already "fixes" this issue - unless you get the speed so low the AoA vanes physically stop working. AF of course decided that their crews didn't need no backup speed tape...