I believe you are speaking of their UAS checklist which is in every Airline aircraft.

If you are at FL350 over the ocean you have no obstacle clearance so why climb at at a 5 degree deck angle because you lost airspeed. They climbed at 15 degrees for some strange reason. Why not just stay at 2.5 degrees nose up and get out the UAS check list like normal pilots do? I like to support pilots but these two don't get my support.

And I still hold that the totality of the BEA's final report contributed to many A PPRuNEr inability to understand fully what was written. I don't hold BEA responsible for it, though.

Completely true if "multi-place" is naval equivalent of civilian "minimum crew 2 pilots" It's different kind of CRM if there are two qualified pilots flying multi-crew aeroplane (e.g Greyhound or Hawkeye) or if there are instructor and student in training vesrsion of single seater (e.g. F/A-18D).

I wrote something different? Sorry for misunderstanding, I thought you were promoting idea that in regular airline operations (once line training is completed) one pilot constantly monitors other pilots control input instead of aeroplane. My bad.

True, but it helps in such a training if it is assured that a pilot understands very well that aeroplanes have absolutely no respect for cultural norms & differences and kill everyone who insists on mishandling them with total impartiality regarding the race, hair colour, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, type of licence or hours flown.

That in AF447 threads there is abundance of argument from authority and if we want to have meaningful discussion it would be better to concentrate on whether what is written is true than who is the poster that wrote it.

So they might be, but what has it to do with AF447? For Finnegan's sake, we have analysis of DFDR and CVR and they show nothing like the alleged "scan breakdown". Both pilots promptly recognized they have lost speed display. CM2 has quickly brought the roll oscillation under control, so he must have been looking at the EADI. CM1 realized that they climbed and advised CM2 to go back down, which he started to comply by somewhat reducing pitch but changed his mind when the stall warning went off second time. There is no trace of control reversals and aeroplane oscillation characteristic of scan breakdown. Right stick was used to fight the roll till the end and it remained nose-up almost all the time indicating at least some purpose, even if, contrary to any modern airline pilot training, it was never verbalized.

It is not they didn't see and read their instruments. Whether they did not understand what they were telling them is debatable but it is certain they had no idea what to do and eventually CM2 panicked into performing the maneuver that proved to be quickly lethal. There were other crews that were clueless but were saved by doing virtually nothing. There were those who made similar unwaranted pull-up but respected stall warning and reversed control inputs. There was many a way out of the predicament even without ever applying the UAS procedure and it is tragic that CM2 has chosen the disastrous one, while CM1 was unable to understand it would turn out to be fatal.

@Bubbers44:
OK, since no-one has postulated any believable reason for this, I propose a brand new theory, and no, I have not run this by Bearfoil/Lyman yet: :p

Bonin (and possibly the whole crew) was experimenting with LSD or Mescaline for the first time. (I'll be sure to write to the BEA to apprise them of this theory.) :)

No it wasn't LSD, it was lack of hands on experience. They could not handfly an airplane. They both started with minimum skills and were taught automation. With the lack of pilots qualified the airlines will hire the lowest qualified pilots because of cost and that is the future.

You may be correct, but your point has nothing to do with mine.

All you have to offer is crew incompetence. You could save yourself many keystrokes by just joining Bubbers44 in his quest to damn the dead.

I have no quest to damn the dead but how would you feel if a loved one was in the back of that aircraft and because they couldn't fly without automation, killed them?

Quite.

It's interesting to observe the changing attitudes towards pilot performance over the last three or four decades. Originally, superhuman skills were attributed to most aviators, so incidents/accidents were obviously primarily the fault of the crew, rather than systemic in the aircraft or operation. Then followed the CRM era with the realisation that pilots did have limits and that aircraft and procedures surrounding them were not always helpful in terms of a safe operation.

Now we're at the stage where there is an excuse for everything if you go back far enough. Very touchy-feely and nice for us (pilots) but there must be a professional bottom-line of competence, below which you have to start taking personal responsibility. Not knowing basic performance attitudes and recall/memory items from checklists falls below that line, IMHO, purely from a point of self-preservation...

FFS, Clandestino

1. Comments like that make me wonder the level of understanding you have of an instrument scan is. If you use one, or have used one then I find your choice of response confusing.

Are you playing games here?

2. If sound habits are not imbedded in training, and in type training, and then practiced, then those habits cannot be applied in flight. Scan breakdown is a common enough occurrence to warrant understanding it, it's sources, and it remedies.

While the pitch and power chorus have yet to sing off key, a concern to me as a prospective passenger on a given day is that the tenors, baritone, and basso profundos may erroneously assume that a pilot flying in the year 2012 operates a passenger aircraft while using a functional scan pattern.

Pitch and power and performance monitoring to desired parameters is a result of an effective scanm. (Or, perhaps it is a result of the passengers nearest the side sticks trusting the robot -- who the hell knows?)

I am not convinced that my assumptions of what tools pilots use is true anymore. Perhaps what you are getting at is that being concerned about a scan breakdown is a dead end if there isn't an actual scan pattern habitually used nor practiced. Is that your gambit?

There is no recording of what is going on inside the brain housing group, so your mind reading exercise regarding the two forward most seated passengers in AF 447 (is that why you use CM1 and CM2), has limited usefulness, even though I find it amusing in some cases.

Cheers.

It's not a point, it is a parable.

The point of the accident investigation is to prevent those still living from turning into the premature dead. The assessments of crews' performance made in reports are just a means to that end, not meant to be taken of that contest and absolutely can not be used to establish the legal liability. We live in a free world and one can freely misuse accident reports for entertainment but it would be disingenuous of him to feel offended when warned that he played the blame game using the material explicitly marked as the one that doesn't apportion blame.

Could be. Could be also that we have again reached the same conclusion from the different directions so we are unable to understand and appreciate we are talking about essentially the same thing. Could you please provide your definition so we can further this discussion?
Excuuuuuuse me!

What previous training and experience had capt Walter Hughen when he hit the severe icing for the first time in DC-2? How come he came with a solution to icing of the air intakes?

What previous training and experience had Maj Samuel Tyson when his no1 prop oversped between Travis and Honolulu? How come he anticipated the havoc shattered prop would eventually bring to engine no2 so he shut it down before no1 prop fell to pieces? How many times did he practice ground effect flight with two engines gone on the same side?

What previous training and experience had capt Harvey Gibson in recovering from supersonic dive in B727 (we'll disregard the manner in which the aeroplane arrived in it a bit)? How come he did not complain about severe control forces and deflections after the bird was recovered, slightly bent but flying, but rather did whatever he needed to do to land her without much ado?

What previous training and experience had capt Robert Schornstheimer in flying the 732 with much of a fuselage missing?

What previous training and experience had capts Fitch and Haynes in flying the DC-10 without hydraulics and no2 engine?

What previous training and experience had capt Chesley Sullenberger in ditching the A320?

What previous training and experience had Genotte, Michielsen and Rofail in flying no hyd A300, damaged by MANPAD?

What previous training and experience had capt Moody in penetrating the volcanic ash cloud?

What previous training and experience had capt Burkill in double engine failure at short final?

No, you just can't train for every eventuality or cover it with checklist. Those who are fooled into belief everything about flying can be covered with a thick rulebook (which can even less cushion the impact nowadays when they are virtual instead made of paper), soon get bitten in the bum by what ole Karl Marx well described in his aphorism about base and superstructure; pilots without very good grip on basics are bound to misunderstand the advanced, type related stuff and that may turn out to be lethal.

Effective scan is necessary but it alone is not sufficient condition of flying safely. It is not merely enough for the pilot to see what the instruments are displaying (that's certainly scan), it is also important to create the correct mental big picture from what the instruments are telling (that may be included in the definition of scan) and to know what needs to be done to ensure continuing safe flight (that definitively is not scan).

No. IMHO, AF447 pilots have seen the instruments, as proven by the reactions to roll, they just couldn't make out what to do with the readouts. They just couldn't put themselves into "We have lost the speeds, so what? We're still flying." mental state.

Feel free to be amused. While the radical Behaviourism of BF Skinner did not turn out to be be-all and end-all of Psychology, it nevertheless left us with many useful theories and methods, it has shown us that we just can not hide completely behind our foreheads and that our actions do tell about what is going inside our cranium.

CVR recorded what the pilots said. DFDR recorded what the pilots did.

CM1 and CM2 are official Airbus designations for pilots occupying left and right pilot seat, regardless of their rank, function or PF/PNF. It doesn't imply anything beyond that.

I only fly Pan-Am
 

I used to fly quite often, long distance, in 747SP, with Pan-Am.

But I wouldn't fly now. Dunno what sort of plane I might be put into and dunno whether I'll have pilots who know what to do, think they know what to do, aren't sure what to do, or plain can't hand-fly.

You guys don't inspire a whole lot of confidence, you're all experts of course but some of your younger co-professionals don't have your approval, and the aircraft systems seem to have a nightmarish convolution of hitherto unsuspected behaviours, so how can the paying public trust whichever pilots they happen to pick out of the check-in bran-tub?

If it ain't Pan-Am, I ain't flyin'.
"But mike-wsm, Pan-Am don't fly any more"
"Exactly!"

PS - I've just been banned from the British Mensa forums so you have a rather angry mike-wsm here.

There is absolutely no need to be angry about that, whether they had a valid reason to ban you or not. If there was a reason, then you probably didn't really want to be there, else you wouldn't have given them reason to ban. If they ban people without reason, why stay in such place at all?

Besides, high IQ is not so important. There are studies showing that high IQ is not even strongly correlated with income.

IQ and Income Inequality

Though I have a functional IQ of at least 6, I refused to join Mensa. They seem to be a rather humorless, or, if in GB, humourless, and a stuck-up lot at that.

Gladwell's book is fascinating. Success depends on a whole lotta factors besides smarts; in my case, I didn't "play well with others." I can't fly airplanes because my vision is wonky. :8

Anyway, veering back to sort-of on-topic:
I'm with Mike; after finding out about the woeful state of transport pilot training these days, I have real reluctance or a strong sense of gambling every time I strap in. Still have managed to avoid the planes from France. They may be very fine airplanes, but if nobody knows how to drive 'em when HAL goes tits-up, I'll be having a very bad day. :\ I would fly with TTex though. ;) He knows eggzackley WTH he's talking about!

(CUE: scoffing from all around)

Well, their attitude might be "If you can't keep up". A certain arrogance and
lack of ability to suffer fools seems quite common from professionals in some
quarters.

Anyway, I would agree in that anyone that feels such a pressing need to tell
the world how clever they are might be suspect http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/sr...s/badteeth.gif...

Heh - when they sent a guy to my school, he left exasperated because I kept reversing the direction of the tape recording he was making - being 6 years old I found the noises it made hilarious!

Hey now - credit where credit's due. The French may be the effective hub and project lead of Airbus, but the aircraft themselves are a joint product of France, Germany, Spain and old Blighty. Even though BAE relinquished their stake, our engineers still have a significant presence!

Lest we forget, more than 30 crews encountered this exact problem and brought their aircraft and passengers in safely. The computers in this case did not fail, and there has never to my knowledge been an accident involving a FBW Airbus (or a B777) caused by computer failure. All this accident shows us is that anyone can have a bad day at the office, and in some circumstances that leads to the worst-case scenario.

That wasn't my point.
I wonder who you are talking to with your listing of some pilots, who knew how to fly and knew their machines. They did did well when things went sideways. Not all pilots do, if we take it back to Wilbur and Orville, or even Otto Lilienthal. A non trivial amount of what we learn, or learned, as pilots was first written in blood.
Who are you talking about?
If you are attempting to make an allusion to me, you are simply wrong. If not, then whomever it is you are referring to may wish to address that.
Which takes us back to flying and using a scan pattern, be it a VFR scan, an integrated scan, an instrument scan, or a tailored scan.

Scan is part of Flying 101. Well, it used to be, and I hope it is now. I suspect that CFIs still teach such things.

If you require a definition of scan (I doubt you do, and sense that you are playing a game with that) I will suggest that you don't belong in a discussion regarding flying on a forum where Professional Pilots hang out.

That is sort of like ... if one were to hang out on a La Leche League forum, one would need to know what a tit is, and why a baby tends to suckle at it.

Instead of repeating my prior posts about how they mishandled this simple failure, why do we think we can put 300 hr pilots in any airplane, tell them to only fly on autopilot, let them get thousands of hours watching the autopilot and expect them to be competent if the autopilot fails?

While there's a definite question that needs answering about manual handling experience and proficiency, it's always worth remembering one of the lessons of Tenerife 1977 - namely that no matter how proficient or experienced a pilot may be, if their temperament is unsuited to a pressure or crisis situation it can lead them to make catastrophically poor decisions.

You know Tenerife? There was NO crisis, NO pressure. What makes you think that carnage was aviation related? Captain SkyGod wants to launch, and the Gods will clear the runway for him. Mere mortals best retreat.....

For two hours, Ops was trying to reach the KLM chief pilot....

He was dead on the runway, no more impatient, no more invulnerable....

No more SkyGod.... The second worst sin is Pride... The worst is betrayal....

He knew it all..... Then he was gone.

Impatience is the sign of a rookie. Likewise the false fear that makes him act against his training and experience. Also he who sees reality and makes up his own, challenging the Universe to a game of chicken......

Oh, but for the KLM Captain there certainly was. It might not have mattered much in the grand scheme of things (certainly not worth risking 500 lives over), but from the point of view of a management captain, he was facing a dilemma.

Firstly there was the new working time regulations - if exceeded, the whole flight crew would have faced a disciplinary and - if the letter of the law held - likely have been stripped of their licences and faced the consequent end of their careers.

Secondly, the other option would have been to stop in Las Palmas (or Tenerife) overnight. This would have avoided the regulatory risk, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands - if not a million - dollars in passenger and crew accomodation costs, plus parking fees for their 747 and potential legal action from the inconvenienced passengers with the wherewithal to do so.

The first was a career risk in terms of his standing as a pilot, and the second was a career risk from a management standpoint. Either way, the odds were that he'd lose some standing at best, or his entire career at worst.

So he devises a third option - one that cannot be allowed to fail. He takes on enough fuel to make a whistlestop at Las Palmas and then push straight back to Schiphol as fast as they can go. The rest is history.

To most people, his actions make no sense at all - but for whatever reason he believed it was the right thing to do, and the knowledge underpinning that belief died with him.

DW sayeth (about Tenerife):

Oh, BS. What absolute, poppycockical drivel!

Back to reality (facts) about AF447
Always interesting to read and read and read the CVR transcript
So ....

Well ... so the rest station is just located near the flight deck (no need of a drawing for know that)
Weird that it took so long after for the captain to be back in the cockpit
My conclusion is simple .. the captain was not in the rest station at the outbreak of the autopilot

So ...

Who is in charge in that plane?
Dubois is he really the captain?
He asks a copilot who will make the landing ! (This is not planned ? .. is decided by coin toss ? )
He asked the copilot if he has a valid license!
All very curious .. and not a word about these oddities in the final report ... despite the work of the famous group of "human factors" :rolleyes:

Final report, 2.1.1.3.2 Choice of relief pilot:

Uh...

Link here - Remembering Tenerife

AF 1896 report out...

Incident: Air France A319 at Casablanca on Aug 8th 2011, landed on wrong runway

hetfield, thank you for that link, very interesting report. Wonder if a thread on that will begin ... :E

All the flying birds fly without rudder nor fin.

No certification NOWHERE is done with these rapid reversing pedal inputs in dense air. With a DC-9s / MD-80s type rating, I have never learned such a dangerous manoeuver.

But Learjet who had a big problem with dutch roll since years, tried and teached it to their pilots :\ , probably they only decreased their fears before final.

Well no - it'd break the vertical stab off!

Video exists of the training session which advocated the maneouvre.

As I recall the rudder inputs were sensed at the rudder, not the pedals. The plane was put out of the factory new with a metal plate on the vertical stabilizer because of delamination. If the rudder sensing was sensed at the actual rudder and not the pedals and the vertical stabilizer was coming loose maybe the inputs shown were not pilot inputs but oscillations of the vertical stabilizer. It did break off where the metal brace was. Just a thought.

@bubbers44:

If that was the case, then the calculated loads against the vertical stab would have caused it to fail either below or at the ultimate design load. Instead, it exceeded the ultimate design load by quite some way before failing.

I saw photos that indicated it broke away at the attachment lugs, which - to try and stay on topic - was significantly different from the AF447 stab, which was still attached to a section of the fuselage.

I am saying the metal clamp because of delamination may have weakened the vertical stab and as we know bending most materials with a rigid base don't always give it the same strength it was designed for. Say the forward part of the vertical stab started fluttering. Who knows what the rudder indications would be if the FDR info is transmitted from a sensor on the actual rudder, not the pedal. The yaw damper input would also be shown. I know I wouldn't allow an FO to throw our rear FA's into the sides of the airplane if he did as the report said with wild alternating rudder applications. I don't think it happened that way. It was a cheap way out. Blame the dead guy.

Here is the NTSB Final Report regarding the loss of the vertical stab.

http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2004/AAR0404.pdf

Fortunately, birds do not have rigid tails. Being supremely skilled at "hand flying" they do not appear to be in need of many protections. ;)

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...Bs_IKel8ZwzMjrhttp://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...WBNaZYT5RlFNFA

And your theory is the old Burnelli Principle or the current air-displaced-downward theory?

Pictorial Chronology of Burnelli Aircraft that were built

Bernoulli's principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

.

Bingo. Because I was discussing Burnelli's airplanes with an aerodynamicist the other day, and he even laughed and wrote, "Don't confuse Burnelli with Bernoulli..."

Good job this crew was not appraised of that fact.

This Boeing has four engines per side to keep the nose stowed away. It also has sufficient Fin to fly.... Other Boeings with fewer engines, and crippled Dorsal finnage, have not fared so well.

A friend of mine told me the fin story.

???:confused:
The B-52 has 8 podded engines, 4 per wing, because that was how many were required to carry both fuel and bomb payload over the required mission distance. Remember, the B-52 was designed starting in the late 1940 time period. The B-52B (first model put into service by the USAF) had P&W J57 water injected engines, the first turbojet engine to develop over 10,000 pounds of thrust. The J57 engines were switched out starting with B-52Gs and all of the current still flying B-52H models have TF-33P-3 turbofan engines which gave improved fuel economy and aircraft performance capability.
Hmm, not always, separation of the vertical fin was a concern in early models. This particular aircraft in the video was a test aircraft examining structural integrity limits. Other in service aircraft suffered from this problem from time to time and some did not fly, but crashed. Turbulence and buffeting were the causes, two aircraft in 1963 lost fins, one in 1964 lost the entire tail, all crashed.

@TurbineD
Thank you for the AA587 NTSB report.Good to reread to see the Regulators ' immobility