Originally Posted by
Lyman
Let's not get carried away. Shortly after the wreck, the airframer published a bulletin advising pilots to review their Stall recovery procedures.
Rather an oblique admission of disconnect...
Not really - taking the eye off the ball as far as high-altitude stalls went was an industry-wide problem.
The industry had collectively suffered what renowned test pilot and astronaut Frank Borman once described (referring to the Apollo 1 fire) as a "failure of imagination". Stall training focused almost exclusively on low-altitude situations, where the advent of high-bypass jet engines meant that with 5 degrees pitch and full power it was possible to get out of it (and every manufacturer trained almost exclusively for this scenario). The prospect of bleeding off speed towards the operational ceiling (where thrust was far less effective) was to all intents and purposes disregarded by all manufacturers and airlines.
Modern previous UAS-induced stall incidents happened during the climb phase - Birgenair 301 being the most notorious example, and that was a single pitot tube failure that would not have presented a problem to Airbus's design. The West Caribbean 708 MD-80 (not UAS, but rooted in failure to diagnose stall) should have been more of a red flag, but because the root technical cause was a little-understood issue with the anti-ice system, it seems that the industry was happy to leave it there. Colgan 3407 should have been a warning too, but the industry focused on the fatigue levels of the pilots involved (which was understandable) rather than questioning why the Captain would pull up into a stall.
Every Thales AA pitot tube-related incident prior to AF447 was successfully recovered by the crews, and as such it's somewhat understandable that notification to crews of the issue and a procedure for dealing with the temporary UAS situation would have been considered enough prior to AF447.
Let's not beat about the bush here - most pilots on here were incredulous when AF447 IR#3 came out and it transpired that the PF got locked into a "pull-up" mindset throughout the accident sequence. I last flew a real aircraft in 1993 and even I remember that pulling up at or near the safe operational ceiling is a big no-no. However, I'm also acutely aware that when the fit hits the shan, reason can go out the window no matter how competent you are. I've seen it in myself, I've seen it in my friends and I've seen it in colleagues. Thankfully I've never been responsible for the lives of a couple of hundred people at the time I temporarily lost the plot, but I can still remember the cautionary lesson I took while cleaning the metaphorical egg from my face.
I don't consider this crew incompetent and never have. In fact one of the first things I said when I joined this discussion almost two years ago was that I consider them to have been incredibly unlucky and to some extent poorly-prepared by the industry that employed them. This isn't a zero-sum game - you don't have to try to prove the aircraft design deficient in order to honour and respect their memories, we simply have to honestly assess what went wrong and make sure it can't happen again.
As far as I'm concerned the industry as a whole deflowered the canine here - Airbus and AF included - but they weren't alone.