This really isn't news fresh off the presses, but the the incident mentioned in the thread "An other AF 447 avoided?" over in Rumours & News has resulted in a BEA report on the incident. For those English speakers who have not seen the BEA report, there is an repost of an informal translation by Simon Hradecky here:
http://www.pprune.org/7199637-post311.html
Retired F-4 has already plucked out the salient facts and the implications are chilling.
http://www.pprune.org/7200167-post314.html
The thing that really gets me is this statement:
53 seconds after the upset began the aircraft reached its maximum altitude at 38,185 feet at a mach speed of 0.66.
The pilot flying realised at that point they were at 38,000 feet and queried the pilot not flying whether they weren't assigned to FL350.
The thing that helped save the day here is that the aircraft was still in Normal law.
The crew of AF447 was even more confused than these guys and were flying in Alt2.
In my day, I had to develop a mental mechanism to cruise at my assigned altitude. A part of my brain was continuously noting altitude and continuously striving to work out a strategy to "lock on" to the assigned altitude. This mechanism ran at a subconscious level. Not really very different than the effort to keep the wings level and nose at cruise attitude which also ran at the subconscious level.
It is clear that some pilots are losing this mental mechanism, or even worse, not developing it in the first place. There is only one way to keep this mechanism active, you must exercise it regularly.
Do we really just want to put another squawking computer nag in the cockpit just to declare this problem solved? Wouldn't it be better if we just insisted that pilots actually fly their aircraft for a percentage of the time aloft.
I've heard the explanation that the requirements of RVSM airspace preclude pilots from actually handling their aircraft. Maybe that should be reviewed. I could hold within 200 feet of assigned altitude while hand flying about 99.9% of the time, and the worst I ever saw was 300' off due to distractions, and this was in a single pilot fighter. Is that good enough for RVSM airspace?
A pilot should never be so mentally disengaged from the aircraft that it takes almost a minute for him to realize he is seriously off altitude. This was the initial piloting problem leading to the downfall of AF447.
Am I being unrealistic?