IcePaq

How many devices were there within that cockpit that give a reading of speed whether ground or air?

Dream Land

Wow, I'd like to be a part of this real world, the only problem being that in the morning I wake up to reality.

Gretchenfrage

The eternal FO argument. It should be the question in what world you live!
Maybe all FOs fly better than the skippers, at least in their opinion, but it takes way more to operate an airliner. And these add-ons are not god given, even to the best FO.
It takes a thorough training, a decent amount of experience and a serene assessment to occupy the left hand seat. Although most bean counting greedy manager would disagree, reading recent accident reports, where aviation was supposed to become safer and safer, show that this has become the achilles heel of civil aviation: Shortcuts in training (due bean counting greed), shortfalls in assessment (too lenient on favored groups/persons due to national agendas) abbreviated careers (due to both above) lead to people sitting up front without the personal tools needed. They might be raw diamonds, but they are to roughly cut for the job.

AF447 shows perfectly well that there was a pilot flying in the RHS who had not the basic flying skills, a pilot acting in command on the LHS who had not the skills to command and analyze a critical situation and finally the captain showing up on deck who had not the leadership skills to either direct or take over a terminally critical situation.
All things that might and should have been trained, repeated and assessed more thoroughly.

BOAC

- NB I had the same mis-understanding which has been resolved.

acbus1

Give me strength.

Two pilots with exactly the same licenses can, in my forty-ish years of experience (30 in airlines, 28 as Captain), range from the superb in all respects to the downright incompetent.

Airlines want bums in seats. The right-hand seat ('co-pilot' to many SLF), in my experience, is occupied by anyone with the required license. Competence ranges from excellent to minimum permissable (and below, occasionally).

Ditto the left-hand seat ('the Captain' or 'the pilot'(?) to many SLF), with the added condition that they've demonstrated sufficient ability, experience and judgement to fly from A to B without frightening or killing everyone. The standard rises from that very low base all the way up to the best aviators in the world.

...and every one of the above could hold precisely the same set of licenses.


Put three incompetents or minimum-standard morons in the same cockpit, throw in a few problems that should easily be managed, add a couple of stupid sidesticks and what do you get? You get AF447 (and there'll be more like it, you can bet on that; the 'authorities' are clueless and the airlines and manufacturers are ruled by the bean-counters).

BBK

I agree with YorkshireTyke about the pressing need to understand WHY the crew did what they did. A lot of the opinions here appear to be from people who, I suspect, have never experienced the conditions they found themselves in.

It's all too easy to write them off as incompetent crew and label the whole tragic accident as "pilot error" and carry on regardless. That's what happened before we became more enlightened about accident investigations. I am not defending what they did as it appears inexplicable.

My take, based on the conversation in the last few minutes, is that they failed to recognise they were stalled. A fundamental error but when you have, perhaps, flown into the top of a Cb with all the turbulence, noise, St Elmo's fire etc and are, quite possibly, fatigued then one could fail to spot what would be otherwise be glaringly obvious. Here's a non controversial example: a sim instructor many years ago told me how he gave a crew an RTO. They completed the checks, so they thought, but stopped with full reverse thrust selected and made no attempt to reduce the thrust to idle. The sim, it appears, was vibrating like a good 'un. The moral was/is that what was obvious to the trainer wasn't so to the crew who were clearly hyped for their check. No it wasn't me but I'm sure I have done similar things! Another trainer said after a while you get to see it all - every error you can conceive and a few that you cannot imagine.

Going back to this accident it is imperative to try and understand the mental model they conceived about the aircraft's situation. Why did they get it so wrong? How did they miss what cues were available? Presumably the standby attitude and asi were unaffected so were they ignored.

Lastly, on the subject of FOs acting as commander when the captain is on rest my company sop is that the Acting Pilot In Command (APIC) FO MUST occupy the right seat and they are also Pilot Flying (PF). I don't know what AF sop is but I would be surprised if they would designate the command to stay with the left seat with a FO in it. Also, it does not follow that the most senior FO will always be so designated but they must be APIC qualified. I believe my company does this after one year and it is a standalone sim session. Bear in mind that these FOs will be experienced guys from other companies or ex military - some of whom will be ex captains.

Clandestino

In the most parts of the world it is covered in high-school level physics and physiology. Human beings are not equipped with velocity sensing devices, they can only feel acceleration, be it linear or angular, with the senses being adjusted to ground based, visually assisted, bipedal mode of locomotion, therefore they are easily fooled while flying. The AF447 crew was faced with incredibly docile behaviour of the aeroplane as it stopped flying: no extreme banks, no extreme pitches, no high-rate turns and acceleration was unremarkable in all three axes. Once again: there is no such a thing as the feeling of speed, only acceleration.

There is nothing remarkable about single 1.6 G peak followed by gently mushing around 1G with occasional trips to 0.8 and 1.2. Nothing spectacular in lateral or longitudinal acceleration graphs either.

Of what interest, bar as means to recognize and prevent the unsavoury effects of illusions on flightpath, are feelings of attitude to a pilot flying solely by reference to his instruments?

There are no such thing as pure lift and pure drag. Lift is the component of total aerodynamic force perpendicular to the path of the object moving through the gaseous medium, drag is parallel to it. Therefore, aerodynamic drag can not be considered to be form of aerodynamic lift, at least not in euclidean geometry.

First case is not entirely without precedent; capt of Birgenair 301 put his faith in the only non-working instrument on the flightdeck so stalled 757 on climb-out with predictable and fatal result. Second case has, so far, no proper leg to stand on. All recorded faults are consistent with three pitots being blocked and nothing more. By the time the aeroplane reached her apogee and started her final descent, left and stby ASI were showing consistent and correct speed readouts.

It's up to BEA to determine what is more plausible.

You may but don't expect to be taken seriously. What has been deciphered from DFDR shows that only changes affecting the PFD were loss of airspeed information. and replacing the bank and pitch protection marks ( green "=" sign) with yellow crosses indicating the loss of protection. There are no scrolling or flashing messages on Airbus, per design and multicolored is reserved for ECAM only. Granted, ECAM would be hard to decipher with apparent multitude of procedures but ECAM actions are supposed to come into play only when the flightpath is safe, which actually never happened once climb was initiated.

Wildly optimistic. I'd put it north of 67%. That's why ground instructors of old insisted of knowing as much as is possible about aeroplanes and flying: it was in hope that if we remembered the number of nuts& bolts holding our aeroplane together on ground, we could remember at least the part of it that would someday make the difference between safe return and smoking hole while we are airborne.


No. It is very safe bet that it began as soon as the BEA was noted of the missing aeroplane so it is probable underway, if not nearing its goal.

When one considers how the other crews managed the extremely similar problems in plain & simple way, one has to agree with you.

The crew of the AF447 avoided the weather and never penetrated the storm cell. Notion that they did is at odds with officially published third interim report. It would be useful for further discussion to find out what are the sources for it.

If you are referring to Turkish vs Canada 3000 rapid climb and TCAS RA over the North Atlantic, the official word from AAIB is very clear: it wasn't overspeed protection that caused the climb, it was crew's massive overreaction to overspeed protection, followed by massive underreaction to twitchy high AoA protection - which was desensitized since. Somehow, some of the posters on the thread were stunningly incapable of comprehending the AAIB report.

If you are referring to something else, please accept my apologies for making an assumption too many and please provide the reference to the occurence mentioned.

It was. Everything was working bar speed and that returned to normal pretty soon. As for black, overwater, night flights, I'll have to borrow the phrase from Mick Jagger: "It just happens every day".

All it takes is rapid expansion and all the decency & serenity gets thrown out the window. If there's empty seat on the left and pilot with ATPL and at least 21 year of age on the right, that's enough, no matter what country so no mounting the first world high horses, please.

GerardC

Do you REALLY understand what BEA's reports are meant for ?
The role of BEA's reports is purely a "technical" one : understanding the reasons of incidents/accidents to improve aviation safety.
It in NOT BEA's job to determine who is responsible for these incidents/accidents and to which exent.

In Court, judiciary experts having conducted their own inquiry will come with their own reports to establish (to cut it short) who, in the end, will pay.

The "urban legend" will not "pop up again" for the simple reason that BEA's "interim" report #2 is alien to the judiciary procedure.

BOAC

- I have only seen the AAIB report 6/2001, and would be grateful if you could elaborate on the 'massive overreaction' which according to that report was to close the throttles and disconnect the autothrust, which is pretty much what I would have expected? Perhaps a quote from your report copy would help?

Gretchenfrage

My quote was not attached to any race or region.

The one bringing this in was you alone!
Sort of self-qualification, isn't it?

jcjeant

GerardC
Seem's you don't have a foggiest idea of what was the meaning of my message.
Anyways .. be sure that BEA representatives will be called by judges and lawyers (of all parties) for testimony and be interviewed in the judicial process .. and their findings and answers (added to the experts findings) will help the court to point fingers to the culprits

captplaystation

Clandestino, I was thinking principally of the similar AF A340 "whoopsy" last Summer, where they ended up within (if I remember) about 5 -7(?) kts of the KIAS stalling speed, but yes, the Turkish one too.

HazelNuts39

The incident is described in an AF internal message (in French): Level bust en turbulences An English translation can be found here: Air France A343 near Guadeloupe on Jul 22nd 2011 The latter adds a computed stall speed that is not in the original.

captplaystation

Thanks for the link, like I said, my initial reaction is to ask of the AF447 crew "what were they doing", but, when I read things like this I maintain an open mind,& still harbour suspicion as to whether the reported final cause will be 100% transparent.

bubbers44

Yes, we have competent and incomptent pilots in both seats. The left seat guys get a little more pressure to measure up but the right hand seat can skate along being sub par until they upgrade. I flew with a lot of pilots in both seats that were worthless but a lot that also showed me better ways of getting the job done from both seats. We hired very qualified pilots at our airline so we learned from each other. I felt very fortunate to get hired from a 4 engine jet to my first airline job with 5500 hrs, mostly PIC. AF doesn't require much experience to get hired so their FO's obviously are in the learning stage of their career. Most of their flying is on autopilot so I can see the difficulty AF had flying their aircraft at night with no autopilot and faulty AS.

Things aren't going to change so the next generation will be interesting.

Mac the Knife

Would not the attitude indicator(s) have been showing an unusually NU attitude?

They must have looked at them?

???

smith

A bit of thread creap but what do you think was happening in the passenger cabin? From the transcripts there was no PA made to the PAX. Do you think they were aware they were going down, was there panic in the cabin etc etc.?

jcjeant

Lawyers and experts of those who have to pay for this accident (in excess of the damages provided by international conventions) will try to show that the passengers did not suffer (did not know they were going to die)
Lawyers and experts of families will try to prove otherwise because if passengers knew they were going to die ... this will increase the amount to be paid to families
So .. for have an answer to your question .. you must wait the end of the judicial process

DouglasFlyer

This crew-rest for the flight crew is just behind the cockpit on the starboard side:

B/E-Aerospace

We had this kind of flight-crew-rest on our A-340s but it's an option on the A-330 as well. I don't know if Air France A-330s are fitted with the same bunk but I assume...

GerardC

They are. No "walking half way along the cabin".