Originally Posted by gums
Lost a friend at Cali back in 95 or 96 or...... Stoopid flight management system turned the jet the wrong way and they noticed the error but kept descending whle turing back to the approach fix. Not good.
A decade before his lifespan was abruptly terminated on the slopes of El Deluvio, your unfortunate friend won the accolade of USAF instructor of the year (IIRC he was flying Rhino at the time), which makes him far, far, far above average pilot in anyone's book. His captain was extremely experienced and well respected for his professional skills and knowledge. Yet they turned their aeroplane ninety degrees away from the arrival track which leads straight down the valley to Cali. They did not level off when realized they are lost but rather kept descending towards the mountain hidden in the darkness. Their deaths were not in vain altogether; we got EGPWS and terrain profiles on approach plates. Unfortunately, the shear ugliness of the spectacle made us turn our heads in horror, therefore a lot of us failed to realize the most important lesson of Cali: even the best pilots can underperform occasionally. Instead we distract & amuse ourselves with half-cooked theories, which do have some founding but very quickly and not entirely unintentionally develop into something without any appreciable connection to reality.
So goes the discussion about AF447 too. We let our imagination run wild and invent evil computers, megastorms, complete instruments failures etc just to turn our mind away of the picture that scares us because we can easily imagine our portrait in it: the pilot who forgets how to fly in the midair. For what is so far known, the final crew of the F-GZCP might have been one of the best on the fleet, or one of the worst or anywhere in between, the preliminary reports don't say a lot but few things are certain: 1) they have been deemed competent to perform the flight by their superiors and training dept 2) they have lost the idea of what is happening, what they should do and what is the aeroplane capable of. Saying they were incompetent (or worse) is just another nervous let's-get-over-this-quick proposition and just as its twin of let's-speculate-about-technology-we-don't-understand is the manifestation of the fear of grappling with the real issues risen (again) by the spectre of AF447.
At our level of technology, we can't have ECAM/EICAS procedure or signal light, or voice warning or whatever that would warn the crew of unreliable airspeed. It is not as simple as plain failures, speed signal and indication are there but it takes intelligence to compare them with known weight, thrust level and attitude of the aeroplane to decide which indication is realistic and which is not. No matter how much capabilities of our computers are increased they are still computers, they are capable of much faster operation but are not a mil closer to true intelligence then first pocket calculators. Now please, do prove me wrong. Not by infantile "Dear aeroplane systems designers, I don't know the principles behind it but I demand it should work in such-and-such manner" but rather go on about designing the device that will work as you propose. I'm serious here. One well designed system will do more good than a million complaints about badly designed ones.
Unreliable airspeed is basically loss of airspeed procedure, aggravated on the modern airliner by the false alerts, thrown up by computers unable to overcome their IF...THEN logic. PJ2 mentioned his experience on B767 which mirrors experience of Aeroperu 603 crew - with all static ports blocked there could be no valid measurement of airspeed and altitude and crew was bombarded by false failure messages such as "MACH TRIM" and "RUDDER RATIO". At one point they got stall and overspeed warnings going simultaneously. Yet they kept the aeroplane flying and only lost their battle when they failed to realize ATC was giving altitude from their C-mode altitude and not from elevation primary radar. Anyway, there were ASI failures since there were first ASIs and drill is the same on every fixed wing, be it Rans or A380: pitch+power=performance. Despite the exaltations of some, there is nothing indicating that either attitude or power information was lost at any time. It just wasn't utilized.
Proposed unusual attitude training will do exactly nothing towards eradicating AF447-type accidents. Issue was not botched recovery from high AoA, issue is recovery was not even attempted as stall was not recognized. Even more important issue is that aeroplane was actively pulled into stall, a factor missing at every other incident listed in interim2 that makes clear some crews managed to botch-up and get the stall warning. However, all of them pushed when warned, some loosing a chunk of altitude in the process.