Flug AF 447 - Kollaps der Team-Struktur im Cockpit könnte Airbus-Absturz ausgelöst haben
Flight AF 447
Collapse of the team structure in the cockpit could have triggered Airbus crash
In June 2009 an Airbus from Air France crashed across the Atlantic and killed 228 people. The reason for this was frozen sensors, but now crises investigate the disaster again: they see fundamental problems with the handling of people with highly automated board technology.
June 2009, flight AF447 on the way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The Air France aircraft has been in the air for over three and a half hours and is already far out across the Atlantic. The captain is resting. In the cockpit of the Airbus the two copilots. Outside stockfinstere night. Suddenly the autopilot turns off.
"I have control," says the copilot. But that will change drastically in the next seven minutes. Important exterior sensors of the Airbus are frozen. That's why the instruments spin! They indicate that the aircraft loses a lot, but this is not true. The copilot at the wheel believes the error message and rips the machine up. But now the airbus nose is too steep. It threatens the dreaded flow tear, a complete loss of the lift.
Giving gas and nose down! That would be appropriate now. But the alarm and the instrument display are contradictory. Is the machine now rising or falling? The pilots keep the climb, there is a flow break. Even the captain, back in the cockpit, can no longer avert disaster.
Lack of emotional distance to the onboard computer
"The last few seconds are characterized by the fact that people have only tried to take over the control by means of the joysticks, but this was not coordinated at all, which can be traced using the flight recorder evaluations," says Gordon Müller-Seitz. He is a professor of strategy and cooperation at the TU Kaiserslautern. One focus of his research is on crises arising when dealing with technologies at the interface between man and machine. Therefore the interest in flight AF447. Müller-Seitz shares with an expert colleague, French study scientist Olivier Berthod from the Freie Universität Berlin: "When the machine no longer reacts as usual, the emotional stress for the copilot is so great that everyone is just as bored to pay attention to what The onboard computer. At this point, organized action collapses."
"The breakdown of the team structure, the communication structure - that would be what was interesting in the case," says Gordon Müller-Seitz. He and Olivier Berthod are now presenting a new analysis of the misfortune and come to the conclusion that this is a fundamental problem in the way people deal with highly automated technology. The pilots lacked a critical distance to their onboard computer. In a confusing situation they were fixed on the instruments instead of pausing and thinking together what was going wrong at the time.
"It is all the more important," says Gordon Mueller-Seitz, "that the people - we would call it - have a certain vigilant, attentive neutrality with regard to technology Master of the situation, and that was not the case, because the interplay between the man and the machine broke. "
It was indeed dark and the pilots practically on the way. But would not they have had to feel what their machine was doing?
"This was also the reason for the fact that it was an Airbus aircraft, because the Airbus cockpit and the instruments did not convey a sense of how much the flight was actually flying. When one had flown a Boeing aircraft in comparison, You would have felt the movements from the outside, because they are electronically transmitted and simulated while you were simply in a closed cockpit in the Airbus. You did not know how to move, whether up or down Down, because it was night."
As a consequence of the crash, pilots are now training in their simulators the failure of the autopilot in cruising altitude. And Olivier Berthod emphasizes that the number of accidents with Airbus machines has not increased, but decreased. Nevertheless, the ability to work in the cockpit should be better trained, as he recommends:
"It's always easy to sit down at the desk, but we think that in critical situations, pilots should understand themselves as a team rather than a team, looking for a solution together, which should be a standard procedure and trained."
The new study has quickly moved around in aviation circles. And the researchers were already given first invitations to lectures before pilots.