Why the crew couldn't solve the problem?
Earlier on in this thread one poster said
"Sadly, the (non adequately trained) crew of AF447 were:-:
Surprised by the System output and worse: Had to process garbage generated by the System. And failed in their decision making. Actually, worse than that, never realizing (in time) what was going on..."There has to be some reason for this.
OK, some of the crew might have been relatively inexperienced or under-trained but they certainly weren't stupid. They were bright, skilled and well-qualified. Yet somehow they just couldn't get their heads around what was happening to their aircraft .Could their thinking-power have been impaired by breathing insufficient oxygen?. Has anyone even bothered asked the question?.(.Exactly the point I was trying to make in the “SLF” thread "Can Pilots REALLY concentrate at 35,000 feet?". We know that none of the crew of AF447 had done what they really needed to do - don oxygen masks.
Their blood oxygen levels after four hours at 35,000 feet would have been severely depleted. They wouldn’t have been aware of it. Most pilots aren’t. They could still perform the mundane routine stuff just fine - most crews can. But in all probability is was simple lack of oxygen that prevented them from firing up the extra brainpower they desperately needed to get them out of the aeronautical elephant-trap they were falling into.
Chief investigator Alain Bouillard says that the pilots simply needed to “properly react” to in-flight circumstances. “When it comes down to it, safety will always be based on the capacity of the pilots and the signals which they are given, which they have to understand and react to,” he said.
He’s right - but if you feed pilots air at a cabin altitude of 8000 feet (much lower in oxygen content than air at a real altitude of 8000 feet) then when the chips are down crews will make mistakes - and they did.