testpanel: no. I've read the entirety of the eight previous threads, and all of the reports issued to date less the one issued today. (As I am not finished with it, I may have a change of heart after posting this).

I can find no support for your statement. Yes, other crews adapted to the weather as they saw it differently, but it is well to remember:
a. weather is dynamic not static
b. each crew's weather avoidance scheme will be informed by what they see versus what was forecast
c. there is no evidence that moderate to sever turb was a factor in this mishap.

Fox3:

If the pilots are to blame, I'll suggest that they were in part set up by the system at Air France. Noted so far is the point that has been much discussed - evidence of their unfamiliarity with aircraft handling at 35K and above. That does not explain some basic CRM failures, which may be AF driven or personality driven, and also does not explain what looks to be a fundamental instrument scan breakdown.

The captain knew how to fly but by the time he got to the cockpit doing his required legal rest they had things so screwed up he took a while figuring out how they could have done what they did.

Pilots should not be left alone in a cockpit if they can't handle a simple loss of airspeed problem without crashing into the ocean. The scarey part is how many flights tonight will be flown by equally unqualified pilots while the captain takes his required legal break? You are not allowed to be on duty in the cockpit for more than 8 hrs. Monitoring an autopilot for a few thousand hours at altitude does not mean you could fly it if the autopilot disconnected with no airspeed. AF447 proved that.

It has to be appreciated what kind of stall they were in. As stated in one of the early threads, the aircraft does not enter a 'true deep stall.' However, their flight profile, the feel, and basic instrument readings could have certainly given that impression to the average line pilot. The major difference would be, for a limited time/thousands of feet, they weren't trapped, as in a deep stall.

The incredibly powerful instinct to pull away from the ground - as suggested above - is I'm sure, very real, and to get another warning, when for a moment you do the right thing, must have bolstered that faulty reasoning considerably.

It probably wasn't long before fear affected the pilots' normally methodical reasoning. It's almost certain to be the case not long after their inflow of data became confused. Their situation must have seemed almost surreal in the latter stages. That is pretty solid psychology. Not a good state to be in when you need to willfully force your hand to obey an absurdly counter-intuitive command.

There are a lot of people better prepared now, as a result of this tragedy.


Pitot heads:

They're expensive, vulnerable and need complex translation before their data is displayed. They wouldn't have been there all these years if there was an easy alternative. However, I'm surprised there isn't a backup system based on alternative technology.

Air particles, and especially water droplets can be detected electronically and this used to measure speed. The trouble is, all the same ice issues apply, with the electronic detection being far more sudden in the way it fails.

Northbeach
I agree, this is the mentality that did for the Titanic!


Sandy Swan
Again, I completely agree. I would make it form the basis of our 6 monthly tech questionairre.

- we must seek the 'good' from this disaster. LR has it. CaptainSandL's following post (#122) also.

We are stuck with the AB control philosophy - it will not change markedly. We have to make what we can of it. I hope new pilots will ponder well on this accident.

Mountain Bear said

"The 'startle effect' is an example of the over arching mental heuristic known as the recency effect. A different but related error is the primacy effect. The report makes clear that the pilot was primed to take the plane up because of the anxiety he had expressed about the plane's flight level prior to the incident. He went up because he wanted to go up; his training be damned. "

That's a great point. The same thing happened with the A300 that crashed on Long Island. The PF was overly concerned with wake turbulence and let his anxiety go to his feet, and he knocked the rudder off. To some extent it happened with the L-1011 at DFW, where the PF was spring-loaded to land in a storm when he should have gone around.

Well I think the proper bodies should mandate training flights in real aircraft with the AP is disconnected. Just normal hand-flying.

Why has no one asked what they were doing in that cloud in the first place? If they had not gone into cloud, the pitots would not have iced up.

Why did they not take vectors like other aircraft?

Was the radar display turned up so they could see it? - there are two parts to the ND display knob and I often see crews in the sim turn on the radar but leave it on min brightness so you cannot see it.

Something simple Airbus can do is to set the minimum brightness still visible.

Sorry SadPole, anyone who has ever had a VW or GMC MAF Sensor problem will tell you a MAF measure is not the answer. Compared to a pitot tube they are unreliable, need a computer to translate the indication to anything useable and when they do go wrong they screw up everything around them.

By comparison a pitot tube is an elegant, simple and direct measurement that relies directly in a principle of physics. The only complication in this event is that the modification (heating) to cope with low temps and high altitude and water were inadequate. Not the fault of the basic principle.

di sitter,

Agree with you totally, see my post on page 4. Absolutely no substitute for a knowledge of simple basics principles, combined with plenty of manual hands on flying, all this prior to bringing on the automatics.

The pitot tube for airspeed compared to static pressure is the only recognized way to display airspeed. Not having that, attitude and power setting using the charts on the aircraft is the alternate way to maintain stable flight for unusable airspeed. The two in the AF447 cockpit were not capable of doing this. Sometimes it pays to hire experienced pilots.

GPS
Yes some companies do have it fitted and used it for unreliable airspeed proceedures before the accident.

Flew the route with full enlarging crew - two captains. Copilots and engineers.
Always one captain in the flight deck and sometimes the resting captain would join us for the ITCZ transit.
Cheap option one captain - blame the companies and regulators.
As to the lack of airmanship from the captain!

Wouldn't the captain of anything make sure that matters were all boring and predictable before taking a snooze? I mean, was there any evaluation at all of the weather ahead?

I can't see the captain being the problem. When they put themselves into a full stall he wasn't even there. The two FO's managed to do it all by them selves and when he got in the cockpit they were descending at 7,000 fpm in a stall and he in a glance is going to figure out how they totally screwed up a perfectly good airplane exept for the pitot tube malfunction? Could you?

ds,yes if you had two captain you would have at least one experienced pilot in the cockpit but since RIO to Paris doesn't require two captains why would AF add the cost of an additional captain. Do like everybody else and get the FO's a type rating so they qualify to fly together. It is a lot cheaper having two FO's than two captains.

None of the guys driving that night were fools, some may not have had 10,000 hours experience but they were trained as well as the majority of pilots.

The real lesson here is that if it fooled them it could fool me...

@deggers316:

Once terminal velocity is achieved (can't fall any faster), vertical acceleration ceases, and thus no Gs are felt.

Buried somewhere in the myriad threads might be the information on how long it took them to accelerate to TV. I, too, wonder if they didn't feel that.

:eek:

Empiricism / a Modest Proposal
 

Thanks to those who liked my post (my first post here -- long time lurker, thanks for being kind!)

Again, i'm not a pilot, but am a cognitive psychologist, so I'm sure I come at this from a different viewpoint.

To me, the question is this:

Given an identical situation, what % of professional pilots (or perhaps '3 man groups of pilots') would flub it and crash the plane?

There seems to be a contingent of forum members saying "0% : the AF guys were idiots".
There are others saying "100% : the AB design is at fault".

In my opinion, this is actually a very nice scientific question, amenable to research. Let's calculate this %age empirically.

Imagine this:

Get 100 x 3-man crews, and put them in a multi-day full-experience simulator. In this simulator, they fly full flights, sleep odd hours in weird hotel rooms, etc. Each crew does this for 30 days. 99% of the flights are uneventful.

At some point, each crew will get on 1% of their flights an AF447-type scenario. No warning, it just happens.

From this study, we calculate the ultimate data point: what % of crews survive. And perhaps more interestingly: what % of crews survive for the right reasons.

Expensive as hell? Sure.

Would it cost more than one AF447 tragedy? (Not snark: that's a serious question - how long would it take to do this study? I have no idea.)

The outcome would be quite interesting.

Reading the BEA report, the most interesting findings to me was the comparison to events "similar" to the AF447 event, which the BEA summarizes as follows (p 106, english edition)

• 'Calling on the "unreliable airspeed" procedure was rare'
• 'The triggering of the STALL warning was noticed. It was suprisging and many crews tended to consider it as inconsistent"'

So I propose (a modest proposal, being on a forum where we do nothing but argue) that we don't need to argue theory : The BEA has collected the pilot (ahem) study data for us...

Let's take the next step, do the real experiment and see what the data shows.

If, for example, 99% of fully-trained expert pilots flub this, then the "bad pilots" chorus would probably have to rethink their position.

If, for example less than 1% of fully-trained pilots flub this, perhaps that's more of an example of bad apples needing to be better-trained or weeded out?s

Or maybe in either case, we need to consider the human-machine interface as the thing that must change?

We could of course include variations and get lots of data : set the simulator up with A vs. B style controls. 2 vs 3 vs 4 man crews. Time since last slept. Time since woken up. Aurual vs. visual warnings. Fullt-time AOA sensors.

We could even include some stooges (experimental confidants) to mess with the results: what if half the simulated AF447 scenarios, the PF was in fact a trained experimenter who just holds nose up, and we see if the other 2 PNFs figure it out and overrule him?

Sounds like a fun experiment to me!

(NB - I'm sure a lot of this research has been already done, right? I'm not a researcher in this field, so I'd be surprised if these ideas are novel).

two controls?
 

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere, but a search doesn't pull up a definitive answer... and I have NO wish to convert this to an A vs B thread.

What is the STATED logic from Airbus (they must have a reason) for input on one sidestick not to be felt on the other? As a previous poster points out this is low tech enough to be available (in a way) on every decent video game joystick?

Surely situational awareness would be greatly assisted by such a physical link between the controls? What is the manufacturers reasoning behind NOT linking "feel" between the sidesticks?

CafeClub:
I'd love to know what their official answer is, too.

In the likely event that they haven't commented on it, I'll posit the answer:

=Cheaper=. (A bunch.) :ok:

The override buttons and lighted cues were meant to replace the need for linked (yokes). This time they didn't.

No doubt, AB and its apologists will find a way to make it "a feature," not a cost-saving, neato, toy joystick. :hmm:
_________________________________

CafeClub;

Have a look at the following post from the Tech Log.

As OrganFreak said, there is a "price" to pay - for the life of the aircraft.

Soylentgreen

Please define a Fully Trained Pilot

I've never heard of such an example

some know somethings and others know something else and they all know the same little of something else

I was happening demo in sim A320 ,my learn about unreliable airspeed aka overspeed, which leads to Flight control normal law protections.
I cannot moved the sidestick even my partner beside, overspeed protection taken over controls to the nose pitch up and the sidestick stuck at aft position.
within seconds airspeed dropped and leads to stall...my condolences again to Af447.

mm43 you nut
 

No' kiddin'??? :O Doesn't make much sense now. Er...where'd I say it? :ouch: :oh:

OF - I kid you not!
 

May be, I'm an apologist.;)

The answer to that one was given during the BEA debrief/press briefing : There was a sudden Christmas tree with lots of warning , sounds including ice pellets hitting the windows and most probably the PF concentrated his action looking at one thing only and erasing all others, especially the sounds. This is a normal physiological reaction apparently. Brain prioritize visuals clues above sounds.

This reminds me of the 3 Miles islands nuclear accident where the operators collectively concentrated on the reading of a single faulty gauge to initiate a meltdown. Only when the relieving crew came on duty at 07:00 (3 or 4 hours after the incident) did someone immediately realized the error and stopped the plant from exploding. But during 3 or 4 hours a group of very trained engineers disregarded all other valid warnings believing they were false and concentrated on a single thing that happen to be the wrong one..

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Having read most of the posts, (not all, I will; admit, ) in the previous thread and in this one it does seem to me that many have advanced points that are valid but no one seems to tie them all together under sensible headings, say The aircraft and controls, training and flight management.

I realise, of course, that apparent shortcomings are not always so, and some are compromises that avoid others, however that doesn’t mean they are not worthy of discussion. I have also mentioned a distrust of fly by wire before and was upbraided because, as someone pointed out, direct controls, hydraulics and cables have been known to fail too. Again, given the complexities of the ‘laws’ that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of discussion.

Just from my own reading items that need further consideration in the aircraft might be,

1) Stability of modern aircraft in ‘coffin corner’ and the extent to which we allow designers to rely on computers to maintain control while aircraft are configured at the very edge of the envelope for better economics.

2) The sidesticks. No feedback. It may be something in French mechanical philosophy, we had a Citroen Safari once. The power steering and the brake, especially, had an entirely different feel to contemporary power augmented controls. Feedback to the steering was artificial, I think, and there was none to the brake button.

3) Automatic Trim. Given the lack of feedback in the sidesticks automatic trim is almost a necessity. The problem with that is, as has been pointed out, that after the stick has been held full back for some time trim is full up and it requires full forward stick to get the nose down and there are suggestions that even that would not be enough. (But surely after some time of full forward stick the trim would go ‘down?’)

4) The aircraft drops out of Normal Law into manual control immediately and without prior warning when more than one pitot appears to give an erroneous reading. It’s entirely logical but it is flawed. It means the pilots don’t really have time to get their head in the game before they have to act.

5) The stall alarm is disabled below 60 knots ( so it does not annoy while taxi-ing.) It seems reasonable, but if your head is not in the game . . . . . . . . . . I can easily imagine putting the nose down a little, hearing an alarm and thinking “Can’t do that, it triggers the alarm . . . . . . .” Surely the alarm cancel could be connected to the U/C load switches?

Training and Aircrew.
1) Most aircrew don’t do stall training once they get onto airline aircraft. Some say they have never done it, even simulated, at high altitude.

2) The primacy of instinct rather than training in stressful situations is well known and especially when the training is several years ago. For training to ‘kick in’ it must be frequent, current and automatic. I understand that training for extremely rare events is awfully expensive but so is the alternative.

3) There’s little comment on here about disorientation and illusion. I understand that pilots are trained to read the aircraft’s situation from the instruments however in the dark and with the aircraft being tossed around it might be easy to be disoriented. I have read often of pilots who commented after an event (eg, Gann.) that they had only survived because they had experienced the exact same thing before while in the care of an old timer. How many pilots have experienced a high altitude stall, in a storm, in the dark, with suspect airspeed, even in a sim?

4) There have been several comments that indirect indicators should have alerted the pilots to their situation, eg, “They should have realised if they were climbing on fixed power they would eventually stall,” ( and therefore no need for an AoA,) and some pilots may have that kind of presence of mind, however I don’t think we can rely on that when people are under pressure. I always used to think that I was good under stress, however I have discovered that actually I am useless, under stress I am pretty well unable to reason, I don’t suppose I am alone in that. It is, perhaps, important that we make sure that direct indicators are always available.

5) There is also the “I have decided that’s what is wrong . . . “ syndrome so we stop looking for other causes and adapt all the symptoms to our expectation. I don’t know how we train against this.

Flight management.
1) The decision to fly the most direct route, even though storms were known along it must be questionable. If airlines don’t make money we’ll not be travelling so freely, however how do we balance risk and economics?

2) Crew relief, given that one of the pilots had six thousand hours, hardly seems unreasonable. On the other hand one might reflect that makes it all the longer since he practiced stalls in the real world. It has to be a concern, though, that the captain wouldn’t be ‘au fait’ with the course of events when he returned to the flight deck and the other pilots didn’t seem able to tell him.

Response to Solyent
 

Solyent wrote...

"So, from a cognitive perspective, the accident makes sense. A big part of this was the human-machine interface, which did an extremely poor job of letting the pilots know what was actually going on.

Could they have done better? Of course. Are they entirely, or even primarily to blame? Far from it. "

__________________________

I'll take you task on this Solyent. From the cognitive perspective you have considered a limited set of factors....but assuming your argument holds for the cognitive circumstances prevailing in the cockpit, the accident still does not make sense. The cognitive environment informing the aircraft and avionics designers - even after all the accidents and incidents we have had over many years - leaves much to be desired. Bad HMI engineering, poor scenario modeling, poor checks on corner cases/bounday cases, poor design processes and inadequate checks (as well as poor pitot design) have led to a situation where, possibly, a set of cognitive elements have conspired to deliver this outcome. Bad, bad design and the usual chain of events at work.

Are they entirely, or even primarily to blame? They most certainly are. They are charged as professional pilots to mantain complete discipline and situational awareness in the cockpit at all times. No distractions, no excuses. They accepted the rank, pay and responsibility. They failed. Bad circumstances no doubt. Sensory confusion, loss of external references....never fun. But their responsibility through and through).

Interesting discussion here....

If one sees one's aircraft gaining 2 thousand feet, going from 350 to 370, never mind what the ASI is reading, if anything; you have to realize that you don't get a sustained gain of 2 thousand feet 'for free.' That is so very basic that it should over-ride all the binging and bonging and flashing and beeping in the world, except that here it obviously didn't.

I have noticed with interest the sort of stall recovery training given in two-crew aircraft. Where once we were taught, in little airplanes, to get the nose well down and accept a loss in altitude, the advanced way to do this was presented as a call-out of 'Stall!' at the first indication, going to full power, but putting the nose on the horizon reference and powering out with no or very little loss of altitude. A good recovery was judged on minimum altitude loss rather than getting to the right AoA, when that seems mistaken to me. Here it looks as if they kept the aircraft to a very tidy level-flight attitude while falling like a stone in a deep stall. That would have been somewhat correct for recovery from the sort of stall presented in the usual training scenario I just sketched.

A Summing Up of all that never hitherto "added up"
 

So to sum up the BEA final AF447 delivery, my much earlier analysis of the recorders' tale (here) was pretty much on the money, particularly with respect to the stall warning system. Because the AF447 hapless trio were embedded in a deep stall, the type of stall entry that can only be entered via a high AoA tumble from the very thin air of high altitude, the stall warning audio alert quickly cut out at a speed well below the 1g level stall speed. This is probably due to the practical limitations of the designed operating range for the AoA vane's deflection whilst riding out there in the relative airflow. No Airbus designer had ever entertained the proposition of being able to operate at a maintained >40 degrees AoA. *In addition to the nose-high low IAS stall entry, the aircraft had auto-trimmed its THS (trimmable horizontal stabilizer) into a fully back-trimmed/nose-high position during the inadvertent climb from cruise altitude. This happened soon after the autopilot disconnected due to iced-up pitots/ airspeed read-out loss and the pilot allowing/causing the nose to pitch-up by applying TOGA power. But the pilots would've been quite unaware that this auto-trimming was happening during that zoom-climb. Post stall-entry, in the ensuing high-rate descent, this back-trimmed configuration had the deadly effect of keeping the nose attitude nose-high and thus sustaining a stabilized stall (with the additionally assisting pitch-up moment of the wing-mounted/underslung engines at high power). High nose attitude (maintained via elevator authority) plus full THS backtrim and high power is a certain formula for deep-stall entry and stabilization - with a very high rate of descent.

Thus the aircraft began its steep descent embedded in its deep-stall regime and the only hope was that the pilot(s) would ultimately realize this and use stick-fwd elevator authority to lower the nose to unstall. However every time they tentatively initiated this, the stall warning system/AoA vane would traverse back into its operating range and give them a resounding stall alarm (this proving to be a sufficient deterrent to continue attempting what would have been an otherwise natural and instinctive recovery action). In an ideal situation, the stall alerting audio would continue to operate right down to zero actual airspeed – but it didn’t and thus it proved to be an insurmountable psychological obstacle to any affirmative corrective action (i.e. it just confused the hell out of the pilot whenever he tried a nose-down input. Why? Because its low side trigger alert threshold was so illogical and unfamiliar - and they had no meaningful speed display to resolve the conundrum). Adding TOGA power as a response to the surprise Autopilot disconnect and loss of airspeed was also undeniably causative, yet quite instinctive. It also certainly didn’t help that the sidesticks are pretty much out of view of the other pilot, so it was never clearly and visually annunciated to the other two pilots whether (or not) inappropriate manual inputs were being made by the PF. That sidelined Airbus pecadillo of "unseen control input" is yet another hitherto unencountered and unspoken hazard of automation. Automation surprise still has plenty up its ample sleeves.

Additionally, of course, the deep-stall is uncharacteristically without any of the buffeting caused by a normal aerodynamic stall’s flow breakdown, over and aft of the wings, turbulently impacting the tailplane....and thus defining the stalled condition. So the ride down to the ocean surface would’ve been eerily as smooth as silk and quite unlike any stall event that the pilots had ever experienced - i.e. another vital stall cue taken away. So from a design and training deficiency viewpoint, the enigmatic end result - without stick-shaker, airspeed read-out, stick-pusher, continuous stall warning or recognizable buffet cues - was a total sucker-bait scenario. It’s understandable therefore that a solution within the time and height available proved fatally elusive. It was all simply “beyond their experience”.

I'm not certain, but I think I recall an Airbus statement to the effect that the deep-stall characteristics of its aircraft were never tested. If that's true then the lawyers will soon be all over that - and the fact that the pilots were out of their depth due to never having been trained to cope or even exposed to the theory. In fact manual flight at cruise height in a degraded control law was an alien circumstance and never practised - nor entertained as a challenge. So why is an aircraft much more sensitive to minor pitch excursions at high altitude? Think high TAS. Two degrees of pitch change at 200 knots IAS at low altitude might generate a 1000fpm climb. However at around 40Kft that minor pitch excursion's effect will be at least doubled (as the TAS is twice as high). Pitch control at height is therefore deemed to be "skittish" - but near the aircraft's ceiling, it's also critical.

And of course, hearkening back to the origins of this accident, it’s apparent that the Thales pitot-tube heating was never capable of coping with the impact of actual ice particles (of which Cirrostratus/Cirro-Cu cloud is comprised). The Thales Pitot heater could stop water from freezing on contact but didn't have the heating capacity to stop ice particles impacting and agglutinating. The pitot heaters were being overpowered by the different characteristics of ice particle impact. No-one at BEA, DGAC or AirFrance (or Thales) ever awoke to that or factored it into the concerns that arose from an ever mounting score of prior such incidents. Risk appreciation, management and control would appear to be still in its infancy. We're still learning our 3 R's at the hard school of knocks.... that vital Risk Recognition and Rectification recipe for disaster avoidance.

Pitots certified outside normal operating conditions
 

Apart from poor piloting what strikes me most is that the pitots are certified in operating conditions that are not reprentative for high altitude cruising. A giant hole in the swiss cheese IMHO.

see page 204 in the Bea report.
No news since it was already in the interim report.

Contacted:
boba306:
Sort of sums it up.

a) It seems at some point a certain aircraft no longer allows rule number 1 ......
b) It seems as well that some pilots are not adequately trained ......
c) and it seems that better training of them will sort out a) ......

:ugh:

Gotta love RUSTY
 

And there you have it. Unfortunately, the situations and crashes will only worsen because the airlines won't hire " rusty" guys anymore. I have questioned for 2 years now why a certain airline that my husband had been applying at would not hire him because he was only 1 year past the age limit. Instead of hiring a pilot with over 15,000 hours at age 52, they would rather drop their minimum hour requirements and hire boys who operate computers at 28,000 ft.

Why ? Because the beancounters see it as more cost effective to run an airline with pilots who can offer more years of service, rather than pilots who KNOW how to fly the effin plane. What is the cost of safety these days? I'm sure AF will know that answer very soon :)

Every year, the airline industry is losing well trained and qualified pilots because bean counters in HR determine who gets hired. Not the Chief Pilot, not the TRI , TRE etc. The younger pilots of today don't have the opportunity to learn to fly. They are NOT trained how to manually fly and how to challenge the dynamics of airspeed vs altitude. They aren't taught how to keep a heavy piece of metal stable and horizontal when something goes wrong. Especially when the computer goes haywire.

Not all now! But Too many in the hiring pool are kids who bought their type rating, never had the opportunity to gain hours on a/c without computers, never had to work up to the majors. And some, well a few have blatantly lied on their log books or falsified docs.

I told my " Rusty" today that while I'm sure he would enjoy flying a newer, shinier, smaller ("Rusty" flies a 747 classic baby) I wouldn't want him anywhere else than what he was about to take off in and I could not be more proud of him. Because my man KNOWS how to fly. :D If I had the choice to non rev in 1st or biz class on a 777 or non rev sitting on top of a pallet inside his 747, I would ride with him every time. I know I'm safer. :ok:

Now if I could just teach him how to cook. :ugh:

since in fl350 margins between low and highspeedstall are narrowing , since the n1 speed of the engine does not say much about power output in a high altitude flight
, since the airbus gives limited visual backup of the power output vs thrust lever position , since pitch and power needed for a level unacclerated flight on such a widebody is much dependant on density altitude, weight and speed -you will not do much with basic pitch and power settings without speed reference in the middle of the night on a thunderstorm area and severe turbulence, especially when you are shocked that systems start to quit and you have not a real idea how to deal it.

its for sure something different than basic ppl training in a single piston and vmc .

airbus designed its aircraft not be touched manually in cruise flight- things like pitch and power are not of interest to the pilot since its all computer controlled. in my opinion - when airbus designs its aircraft to give ( in cruise) maximum control to the computer and minimum control to the pilot the systems should work in every case instead of quitting due to ice crystals and leaving the pilot with a manual recovery where his experience in manual flying and stall prevention on a a330 in FL350 is close to nothing due to the airbus design .

Automation= wonderful when used correctly
 

There are only two possibilities for why an altimeter would be relentlessly unwinding down (to sea level in this case). Your nose is pointed too far down or too far up (you are in a STALL!)

Unfortunately these guys were so massively confused by the automation that was "half working and half not", that they were reduced to the equivalent of a bowel of Jello. This theoretically could happen to ANYONE BTW, who is in disbelief/denial about what is going on around them.

As a low time pilot I lost my A/S indication because | neglected to turn my pitot heat on in what became IMC conditions. I was familiar enough with this particular light piston twin to sort out an approach in fairly solid IMC conditions with power and attitude alone. This was before GPS so I asked the radar controller to monitor my ground speed. I was/am a flight instructor so it was just applying what I taught.

Later in life for a while I was an instructor at Flight Safety on the Challenger jet but was still not too comfortable with it's FMS because I hadn't been properly trained to use it; so given a night circling approach scenario in the Sim. I chose NOT to use it and hand fly the approach instead. It certainly felt a lot more stressful than watching someone who DID know how to use the FMS properly for much of the approach (they screwed up the landing though), but at least I recognized my limitations and felt more "connected" during the approach doing it in a way I knew and understood (hand flying).

So I guess my point is you MUST know all the intricacies of the automation OR... somehow keep your cool and be prepared to manually do the flying if necessary.

aerobat77

Rubbish, do you or have you ever "flown: a real airbus?

I am another retired heavvies driver (B744) who is at a loss why an experienced crew (almost all had lots of GA/gliding experience, so a good understanding of basics like stall/stick&rudder flying) looses it almost right from the beginning.

The next moment (I mentioned it before) the PF gets more or less frozen in his actions, a well trained and rehearsed crew concept breaks down in a snap.
Basic instinct takes over, like pulling the stick to its aft limit, to get away from approaching death. How many of us had this horrible experience and lives to tell? Bet that almost all crashes, with aircrews in their last seconds, will have the stick or Yoke pulled to its aft limit. Stalled or not.

As a result of his actions the plane did not at all react to his input, worse, the thing just would not go up and kept descending, not even with full power and a high nose UP. That further made him loose the situation.

I have, like no one else, a single answer to this crash, it will take for years to study it. The industry as a whole will have to learn from this so that all those who died did not in vain.

For the choice of the routeing: I have flown the stretch many times. I remember only seeing once or twice some dim lights of Ferdinando de Noronha, a small island there. For the rest it is pitch black outside. No lighted fishery fleets(like the Indian Ocean), or even better lighted oil platforms like in the Gulf of Mexico. This would never had happened over lighted areas like Europe, although I did not read IF they got ever into (nightly) VMC conditions. But if so, with a sinkrate of 7000'/min, it was only seconds before impact. The agony suffered in the back by all who realised more or less that the situation was getting out of hand must have been terrible.

The ITF (ITCZ) itself is not so much a big deal, thousands of crews are passing it every day, be it east of Brasil, or right over Africa, or throughout Asia.
In the planning phase it is difficult to find the "best" route, as CB activity develops, changes and dies within hours. For crews a challenge to find routes through passes. That indeed needs experience up front, there are sooo many variables, there is no golden rule how to pass or cross a system like that.
Circumnavigating comparable systems when over US territory is much easier for pilots, as the ATC system is way more effective in rerouteing traffic, away from cells or reported turbulent areas. Once I got rerouted as early as with our landfall over NY, due to a quick developing system on our planned route to MEX, hours later.

On transatlantic routes the pilots are much more on their own in figuring out to avoid bad areas.
Maybe less experienced crews tend to remain too close to the "magnetic" magenta line, I went off track 150 miles if needed to.
But now I enter the balcony level of Statler and Waldorf. I for one have never had to deal with situations like this or Sully's and I am glad I never had to proof how I would have reacted.

As a current, qualified narrow body Airbii Captain, I can say this: One doesn't know what one doesn't know.

Before this accident, and this online forum, I had only the computer based training given by my airline and the Airbus AOMVol one from which to draw from for tech info. I passed a type rating course and checked out on the line with what I now know to be a very minimal understanding of how the Airbus is controlled.

Fortunately, in six years in the Airbus I've never experienced anything close to what happened to AF447. Had I have had the experience, I think I would have relied on twenty years of experience flying cable controlled, steam gauge turbo jets and discovered a way to overcome the problems. However, when you take two guys with nothing but Airbus cruise experience, who I must assume were trained the same as most of the rest of us, and you place them in a surprise situation in which their airplane presents them with conflicting/confusing information......I think you'll end up with AF447 more times than not.

If it makes you feel good blaming the pilots, go ahead, I won't change your mind. But if you consider ever flying as SLF, you might want to hope that this accident changes at least: training, procedures, and CRM procedures for Airbus control and "surprise" events.

Well there was a quite gibbous Moon that night, should have provided plenty of visual stimulus with the lights dimmed.

OrvilleW wrote:
OrvilleW - Thanks for your followup. It seems to me in the case where even a small % of adequately trained pilots can not handle the situation, then it rather pointless to blame them.

Silly example #1: both wings fall off. 100% of pilots crash? Would you blame the pilots in this situation?

Silly example #2 : a computer bug inverts the airspeed indicator and altimeter. Let's say 85% of pilots crash in this case. Do you blame the pilots for being "non professionals"?

I have no idea what the % has to be before we consider blaming the pilots vs. blaming the system. Does it matter?