Originally Posted by
Lyman
Who wants favour? Who wants the truth?
Everyone wants the truth*, but in some cases the best that can be managed is an informed supposition.
In this case, the Captain's order to level the wings followed by reference to the horizons is neither followed by a comment to the effect of "but we have no horizons" from the crew, nor does the Captain say that the horizons are out. We know that the altimeter was working from the callouts and we know that it's likely that attitude indications were displayed too ("you're going up so go down"). The idea that the flight deck displays went entirely dark is not supported by the evidence we have.
He did not refer to the plural, did he? Yet you would have us believe he did? That is simply dishonest.
Not at all - we have an earlier instance of his speech pattern where he refers to things sequentially :
"There I don’t know there it’s going down". If he'd been implying that either or both the PFDs were unreliable then he'd likely have mentioned the ISIS ADI only. Instead he says
"the horizon the standby horizon". I ask again - if any of the ADIs weren't working, why did he or either of the F/Os not say so?
CVR reading can be a very subjective game, which is why the people that do it tend to specialise in that area to the exclusion of all else. Picking the AF447 CVR apart is relative child's play compared to a case like TE901, in which two very different readings have split opinion on the accident for decades, or Palm 90 - where the NTSB's specialist spent literally months trying to determine whether the response to the Engine Anti-Ice call-out was "On" or "Off" (eventually it was determined to be "Off").
[* - EDIT : not only including me, but *especially* me. Given that 99.9(rec)% of all the flying I'll ever do is as SLF it is not in my interest to defend a problematic or dangerous design on the part of any manufacturer. This is one of the reasons I get extremely vexed when I'm accused of "defending" Airbus.
But at the same time I have no truck whatsoever with the propagation of misinformation and falsehood for the sake of political point-scoring, and the fact is that the amount of hot air I've seen talked about Airbus over the years would be enough, were it to be harnessed and pumped into the fuselage, to put every airframe they ever made into the stratosphere in perpetuity.]