PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AF 447 Thread No. 12
View Single Post
Old 17th Jul 2014, 20:31
  #204 (permalink)  
DozyWannabe
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: UK
Posts: 3,093
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
It'd be nice to have a bit of a summary in English, I must say.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can make out, the author of the slide set seems to be arguing that prior incidents warranted more action from the DGAC earlier, that the BEA should have made a public report on the issue and that AF and Airbus should have forced the pitot tube replacement earlier.

All these things are definitely worthy of consideration with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but it doesn't take into account the point I repeated earlier, namely:

...the aviation industry did not consider temporary loss of airspeed indication to be a significant threat - just set pitch and power ... and the aircraft will take care of itself until the blockage clears
The slide set itself quotes the FSF as saying there were 300 accidents and incidents involving flight instrumentation issues from 1989-1999. The Thales AA probes were only offered as an optional fit to the A330/340 from 1999 onwards I believe, so the author is misrepresenting a more general statement as something specific to this case - i.e. none of those 300-odd incidents involved the Thales AA probe.
DozyWannabe is offline