Ttex, the article comes from a magazine called aerosafety world. If it comes across as laying blame, then that's a shame... The magazine has always espoused just culture and bottom up safety management systems.
I read the article differently. I interpreted it to mean that the individuals involved lacked the skills training or experience to deal with the situation they were presented with and highlighted "startle factor" that was recently cited in the Canadian transatlantic upset when the co misidentified a star for another aircraft.
Yes, I also agree there are human-machine interface issues, for example, insufficient visual and physiological cues of approaching stall, or cues that could be confused with overspeed (stick shaker perhaps rather than audio cues), the stick input logic summation rather than one seat overriding the other). All of this can be dealt with through providing crews with relevant experience of these scenarios (as I believe most large carriers are doing with high altitude stalling sim training).
One question I have, (admittedly I have not gone through the hundreds of pages on here regarding air France) the captain takes a lot of flack due to poor briefing. Yet the effect of the circadian low on all pilots performance is not mentioned to my knowledge in a ny formal report. They must have been close to their circadian low bearing in mind the time of the accident, which can cause greater risk taking, complacency, poor judgement etc. I am guessing the crew had a 1 to 2 day layover, with probably a 24 or 48 hour crew rest period.
I fly a wide body Efcs controlled aircraft (aircraft captain) and Was truly horrified at the BEA report when published. It demonstrates that despite the best efforts of some of the worlds best engineers, a chain of events can lead to not only a complete loss of protection, but also that those systems designed to maximise SA acted to do the complete opposite; a full breakdown of CRM and SA amongst a crew with many thousands of hours of operation. Despite the af447 crash my own fleet still has not modified it's training programme to encompass such a scenario. We are military, so don't buy any of this crap that we are handling gods because this dumbing down of training and multiple failure sim scempnarios does not just include the civilian world. The over reliance on automation is affecting all of us, not just the civilian world.
Last edited by VinRouge; 19th August 2012 at 13:34.