Originally Posted by A de M
bubbers44 - It is always better to counter arguments by refuting what was said rather than what was not said. No one said 'it is ok for your pilots to lose airspeed and pull up into an 11 degree pitch up attitude at FL350 which we all know will result in a full stall'. I can see you are not an Airbus pilot and therefore have limited grasp of the situation, but the whole point of an Airbus is that normally you cannot stall it. 'Lack of pilot skills', as you describe it, is not simply stick and rudder proficiency, all very good as that is. Operating a large passenger jet like an Airbus requires a whole host of other skills, including a thorough grasp of the failure modes and being able to separate the wood from the trees in a high stress environment - a rare skill in my experience. Unfortunately the aircraft in this case had degraded into a reduced flight law status, which was not recognised by the crew. Furthermore you say that 'at FL350 level flight AOA would be nose attitude'. That statement does not entirely make sense to me, but from what I understand you are saying that if the pitch attitude on the artificial horizon (PFD in Airbus parlance) says 2 deg then you would see that as an accurate readout of AoA. That is absolutely not the case and the crew's misunderstanding of that was ultimately what killed everyone. It is entirely possible to have the pitch attitude around 2-3 degrees and still have an AoA of 20-25 degrees, which was the case here. They got into a stall because they pulled back on the sidestick in a reduced flight mode (Alternate Law in Airbus-speak). That induced a stall (an aural warning went off 75 times in the descent sating, 'Stall, Stall' but they never acknowledged it once). The actual attitude on the horizon was only a few degrees but their AoA was massive - something they never recognised. There were two compouding factors - the RHS First Officer for some reason (overwhelming anxiety?) kept his sidestick deflected fully back throughout the whole experience which was not spotted by the LHS First Officer and it therefore made his inputs largely redundant. The second factor was that they had experienced an erroneous speed indication earlier on one side, due to icing of a pitot probe, that had completely blown their mental understanding of the situation. Combine that with a host of strange warnings they could not process, night time, bad weather, no Captain present to take absolute control clearly and positively - you have a cocktail for catastrophe present. There is absolutely no doubt their training was inadequate, but that is another issue. To simply see them as two idiots who lacked basic flying skills is a gross and unhelpful simplification of the situation. Were they ultimately to blame? Without a doubt. Were there a number of other factors which contributed to a totally recoverable situation? Absolutely.
As an Airbus trainer and examiner (check airman in US-speak), my observation would be that if a genuinely unexpected loss of airspeed takes place (not one everyone is expecting because that is what they are doing in that particular recurrent training cycle) it has about a 50% chance of being recovered by the crew. Many would disagree with that view, but that is my view nonetheless. Crashes are rarely one cause as we know - a whole series of events come together in a particular moment of time which together lead to disaster. Many lessons have already been learnt by Airbus operators about this accident - including the need to have stall training on an aircraft that is not theoretically able to stall! When I did my type rating many years ago we never did stall training. That has now changed dramatically and I believe that the vast majority of Airbus pilots facing the same situation as the AF447 crew would be able to recover the aircraft to safe flight. Sadly, it often takes an accident for the right training to be in place.
Total
! Bubbers is correct; 10 pitch-up is not what you want at FL350. It was a basic lack of SA.... No excuses at a large Euro airline.
No need for extra stall training (which as PILOTS we should all know from our C-152 days). Just need crew who can FLY an aeroplane
