Reading the report posted earlier posted by threemiles, I came to the shocking realisation that something very similar happened not too long ago with Asiana 214. The only difference between this flight and Asiana 214 is that Asiana 214 was on finals and landing where as this flight had just entered cruise.
What astonishes me is that in both cases, neither pilot was monitoring their instruments, most importantly airspeed, without which we should all know, the plane can not fly, and it brings me to ask these 2 questions:
1. What had both pilots so occupied that neither one of them were monitoring their airspeed attitude and altitude? The weather radar?? Come on!!!! There are the 3 instruments my eyes are always on when I fly. Theirs is on one screen. It takes 1 second for me to look at, read and understand what my airspeed, attitude and altitude is, and I read them in that order, from left to right.
2. How on earth did they not notice the nose pitching up as they started loosing airspeed?
Now it has also come out that not only is the CVR unreadable, it seems to be that it never recorded anything in the first place. That brings me to question the maintenance by Air Algerie of their aircraft, who supposedly have an impeccable maintenance record, until now.
The last time I looked, an inoperative/malfunctioning CVR was a no go item on any commercial plane. Could somebody please tell us how often the CVR is checked or should be checked to see that it is working properly and recording?
I disagree with porterhouse in saying, “So what?? Even if CVR is totally useless FDR is still much more important of the two for investigators.” Sure, the FDR will tell us what the plane was doing, but I think it is just as important, if not more important to know what was happening in the cockpit and what the pilots were talking about and doing about the situation, which also also gives us an idea to what they were thinking at the time. The FDR can never tell you that.
In the absence of the CVR, at this point in time, I am beginning to think that both pilots fell asleep thinking that the automation would take care of it all and only woke up after it was too late to prevent the accident.