Lyman

....So 5 or 10 seconds to figure out that initial actions weren't working does not sound unreasonable.

Given 447's rate and bank angle at handoff, she would be banked right at 56 degrees after ten seconds.... PITCH? I have no idea.

Did you fly the T38? 720 degrees per second. o lee she itt.

DozyWannabe

If they were getting that bank rate in clear air, then yes - prompt and expedited correction would be necessary. But they were *in turbulence*, and even in light chop, an aircraft can attain split-second accelerations that if continued would have them saying "Hi" to astronauts on one direction, submariners in another, and Australians in roll (if you're from the Northern Hemisphere).

But these accelerations are transitory, and even if they weren't we're talking 8.6 degrees of bank at handoff - most airliner turns can go between 10 to 25 degrees without unduly scaring us SLF.

In my opinion, there was time to wait and observe - but given the situation and the way it escalated I'm sympathetic to the instincts of the PF.

Please remember that I am sympathetic to the crew's position in general, and always have been. They were faced with a situation that for whatever reason their employers had not fully prepared them for either in terms of understanding or in terms of how to improvise if the published procedure didn't work. Based on the incomplete information we have now, my opinion is that we have a complex, systemic failure here - not a cut-and-dried case of pilot error (in fact I believe firmly that such cases are fairly few and far between at the ATPL level - just look at the stick I got on the Paul Holmes/Erebus thread for advancing that viewpoint!).

If I can abandon my usual desire to be dispassionate, looking at the traces to answer PJ2 showed me a period of 8-10 seconds where the roll had been ironed out and it looked like the PF was starting to get on top of things, only for the Stall Warning to kick in and startle him into fumbling the controls - pretty heartbreaking.

Lyman

That is an excellent point; it can be counterproductive to attempt to smooth out a turbulent ride...

I meant to suggest that with impatience, "catch up itis" and a squeeze of Adrenaline, overcontrol seems to have been the order of the day, In PITCH as well as ROLL. Did the pilot fear a loss of control, and that manual inputs were critical? I sense that he did, at least somewhat. Before Colgan, I would have simply rejected the thought that a pilot would persist in the exact wrong thing.

But Colgan had a PNF also, and she did not "get" it either...

Dozy, in all honesty, do you think the Bus might need a special dose of targeted training? Because the bottom line is that all three pilots were at a loss, without a hint of the right "Stuff". Can the platform be that inscrutable to three independent airmen?

DozyWannabe

It's not "the platform". Escalating situations from UAS have claimed a 727 and two 757s just to start with, and likewise several Airbus FBW widebodies have been recovered from UAS successfully while the pitot tube problems were being solved.

Trying to make it about Airbus is to miss the point. The issue is systemic to the industry as a whole, and that issue is airline management forgetting what it is that their businesses actually *do*, which is ferry hundreds of people at a time from one place to another in a metal and composite tube which spends most of it's time at 30,000ft and doing over 500mph. Consequently they forget that while safety has improved considerably over time, the fallout when something does go seriously wrong tends to be catastrophic, and that even if the chances of something going wrong tends to be in the 1 in 10,000 range or lower, the two people at the sharp end have to be fully prepared to do everything in their power to rescue the situation. And that while SOP and emergency checklists go a long way to mitigating the risks, only confident, competent basic airmanship - including stick-and-rudder and basic principles of flight - can save the day on the occasions they don't.

The junior crew on this flight didn't need an encyclopaedic knowledge of the A330's systems to recover, all they needed to remember was the stuff they learned back when they were doing their PPL - namely recognising the symptoms of, and recovery from, a stall (which are more-or-less the same whether you're flying a microlight, a space shuttle or everything inbetween). Unfortunately airline management don't see fit to mandate revision of the basics like this by and large, probably considering it too costly.

gums

Thank you, Doze.

You've nailed it. And still makes me cry.

The "mission" is to get the SLF home or to a vacation spot. There's more to the job than simply being a systems manager.

Gonna be an interesting final report, ya think?

DozyWannabe

A quick postscript re: ColganAir 4805 -

While the situations look superficially similar (pilots out of their depth fumbling the controls), the human factors aspects are considerably different in nature.

Firstly to address Lyman's point, it wasn't just the F/O in the Colgan case who made fatal mistakes, it was the Captain too. While it's true he was inexperienced and apparently below average in terms of ability, the crux of the matter was that in a sane world, both pilots should have called in sick that day - both for exhaustion, and the F/O for what appeared to have been either a bad cold or mild 'flu on top of that.

But Colgan, along with most if not all regional subcontractors at the time, operated a business model in which exhausted pilots were the norm, and that exhaustion was a direct result of those pilots being underpaid and undervalued, while the beancounters and management crowed about their profit margins despite rock-bottom fares. I'm tempted to go on a tear about deregulation, but I'll leave it for now. All I will say is that if I were king, the Colgan executives would have been up on as many corporate malfeasance charges as I could find, and a new statute of corporate murder created just for them.

Air France has had it's troubles over the last decade or two, there's no doubt about that - but for the most part it has treated it's pilots as well as your average flag carrier as far as I know. The misapplication of automation and atrophy of manual skills/aeronautical knowledge is not restricted to them. None of AF447's crew were sick or exhausted, they simply ended up in a situation that was beyond their abilities to understand in time - and what started as a benevolent gesture from the Captain (designating PF as relief pilot) had the unfortunate consequence of putting the least experienced crew member in charge when things started going wrong.

Lyman

Just as it is difficult to paint with a broad brush without missing a few things, it does an open mind some dishonor to get too narrow. So I applaud your broad view, but will be happy to point out where you miss some things after the report. There will be some knocks on the Bus, let's wait and judge the platform in the context of your well put post in its defense.

In a spare no expense world, 447 makes Paris, and there will be others. There is never a justification for scrimping when the outcome is brutal, but if cost is fatal to the enterprise, I favor some economies because I want to fly.

AF will be savaged for deferring the Probes out and in, and the sidestick will make some designers blush with embarrassment. There will be other things, Radar, CRM, and why don't we have AoA on the dash? AF was caught out through some theoretical ICE, Renfrow forgot his STALL bug was too high, and the Warning was not the problem he thought. The onset of 447 demise is not so different from Colgan's cause. A small deal became lethal, due a convergence of a hiccup in the "Force", with a cascade of shortcomings, each on its own not such a horrid thing.

In an unforgiving domain, get some rest, and replace the effing tubes, eh? Such a brutal outcome for being a little too human.

All the best to you Sir.....

DozyWannabe

No problems, but I just want to make a couple of things clear.

I am not "defending" the Airbus FBW and computer philosophy. All I have ever done is explain aspects of the design and implementation that I am aware of, and occasionally this has meant refuting statements that, while part of popular myth, are either incorrect or unproven.

(And, on several occasions when my memory has failed me or I've made a false assumption, accepting correction on the subject.)

The design may come in for criticism in some respects, but because engineering is and has always been the art of compromise this is as true for Airbus as it is for any manufacturer. The only way to design an "uncrashable" airliner would be to make it completely immobile, which would fulfil the "uncrashable" part of the spec, but leave it completely useless as a mode of transportation.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - there's nothing wrong with the sidesticks or the control system designed around them when used properly. Some pilots are uncomfortable with the notion (I suspect that number is decreasing with time), but the truth is that all the sidestick design does is confront the reality that has been the case with every new airliner design since the '70s - which is that the flight controls are not connected to the surfaces and that artificial feel is not only just that - artificial - but also in itself a complex system which can be prone to failure. Be sure of what I'm saying here - I'm not saying the sidestick design is better or preferable to the yoke, I'm saying that there are positives and negatives to both approaches and that any preference is therefore both personal and subjective.

Lyman

5X5. No problem whatever. I don't have the skill or experience to make a finding on the stick, yoke. Yoke is all I know. So I am merely curious, readily admitting the location of the SS outside the pilot does not in itself suggest anything untoward to me at all. My question rests on what the choice was, and how it was made, from an engineering, ergo, and safety standpoint(s).

I always fly with my left hand anyway, and it is not that far from where a SS would be....

It's been a slice, Doze.

PJ2

Dozy - quick note as I'm on the road - my observation that the PF had the roll under control quite quickly comes from an examination of the roll trace trend - it exhibits increasing stability - the peaks and valleys in a smoothed trace are reducing and do so, (iirc) over a period of about 30 seconds. They certainly get out of hand later on but we're not talking about anything after the apogee. The sim exhibits this behaviour as well...a bit of "chasing the bank angles" as you have put elsewhere, occurs until you get it right - it's PIO but not in a way that leads to a loss of control, and yes, I think turbulence contributed but again, not in a way that should lead to a loss of the airplane. I think inexperience and more than a few training issues, (chain-of-command, discipline, handling, SOPs, CRM) have contributed here - your comment about back-to-basics is, of course, spot on.

PJ2

Lyman;

Regarding the position of the sidestick, I will say this - when first checking out on the A320, (left seat, 1992), I was a bit taken aback and even mildly concerned that the "iron cross" symbol for the position of the opposite sidestick which was displayed on the PFD during takeoff, was removed at, (IIRC) 100ft RA. I thought it was a useful symbol so the other pilot would always know the position of the other sidestick. Over the years there were so few circumstances that made such knowledge necessary that I quickly got used to the symbol's absence. Also, sidestick movements are normally very small - 2, 3 degree-shifts when flying manually - the recent exhibition of sidestick-stirring in that video demonstrated precisely what NOT to do with the stick - the guy who posted it ought to be embarrassed - the airplane is subtle. The flight controls are already "busy" trying to maintain the last selected attitude - the airplane can be "flown" hands-off once the desired attitude is set...because FBW means, no input = no output and so no change in attitude, even in mild turbulence.

Here, I do not believe a yoke would have made a significant difference. The pitch attitudes displayed on the PM's PFD (and, we assume, the PF's PFD) would have/should have provided ample information regarding the attitude of the aircraft and what to do about it, (immediately!). The yoke may have made an initial difference given the visibility of its movement rearward, but almost within seconds, the results of the sidestick's half-way deflection were known to both pilots and I would have expected the PM to say "Stop! - I have control" or something to that effect. So there is possibly a cultural element at work here as well - in fact the third report comments on this but not wanting to take the airplane away even when things are coming badly off the rails is still a psychological "barrier" even though CRM has begun to tear it down.

This is about flying an airplane...C172, Viper, T38, DC8, A330, A380...here, no difference. After the stall had been deeply established, the potential for confusion increases exponentially and the possibility of recovery decreases by the same amount because there were in territory where no test pilot had ever been let alone any line pilots.

We may hope that one outcome may be increased awareness of and avoidance of stalling one's transport aircraft because those accidents on the increase over the past eight years or so.

philip2412

from the beginning,i was mostly interessted in the human factors of this flight.
i looked at bonin not as being a pilot but as a simple human beeing.it does`nt matter ,if you are a pilot,train-or bus driver,when there is immediate danger for you or your pax,there must be a reaction at once.
in any other case,what will one do? sort things out!
imagine you`re driving in your car,there`s an unusable noise,what wil you do?
you can stop,check your car,accelerate to see if the noise changes or slow down.just to sort things out.
but what you will not do is putting the steering wheel 90% left or right and accelerete until the road cannot manage the speed of the car.
yes there are defiencies in training and manuel flying at AF but there could`nt be a training as bad in any airline worlwide that bonin could forget simple standards :sort things out ,adhere to the QRH and use CRM.
NO WAY !
we must not forget that he was still a pilot with nearly 3000 hours on the book.this was a minor UAS event.it is a characterisk of humang beings ,if you don`t know what`s going on to sort things out.
what was the thougt-model he developed in his head within a few seconds?
and most surprisingley,the pnf even when it looks like he "knew a bit better" was similar clueless what was going on,both forgot at the sane time the simpliest meassures,CRM,QRH.
this failure of two pilots at the same time is unbelieveable.
did they develope the same thought-model? why,what did they see?
some say we did`nt have the whole CVR report.
BEA made so many informations public before the final report as in any acc.inv.before so why not the whole content?
could`nt it be that they heard someting what no investigation team
heard before and is this the reason we must wait so long for the final report?

by the way AB surely condemns the day they have introduced that s/w feature

DozyWannabe

I have a pretty strong hunch that there are (or were) similar gotchas in the stall warning systems of all modern airliners, because 99.9(rec)% of the time it's a logical assumption to make.

This is where revision of the basics comes in again, because pilots should be able to recognise the symptoms of a stall without having to rely on the warning instrument in the event that the warning instrument fails. No sales department of any manufacturer likes to talk about the possibility of their product going wrong, and with airline management coming increasingly straight out of an MBA without experience of the industry, pilots are the last line of defence and, for better or worse, have to think the unthinkable and prepare for it - because if they don't, there's a chance that no-one else bar the aircraft's designers and engineers have.

bubbers44

A quick question, my Airbus pilot neighbor last night said their airline says their UAS checklist says 5 degrees nose up and climb power as a memory item at higher altitudes. I disagreed and said if you are at FL350 and are too heavy to climb how can you do this because airspeed goes TU? Especially in RVSM airspace.

He called me a retard and left because I would have maintained altitude with cruise power and not followed his airlines checklist. Am I missing something??? I chose not to fly the Airbus but RVSM airspace doesn't care what airplane you fly they just want separation in my opinion. Now I have two airline pilots against me so need other points of view please.

PJ2

bubbers44;

Your neighbour's confusion over this checklist seems to be common among many Airbus and even non-Airbus pilots.

The Airbus Flight Crew Training Manual specifies that if the safety of the flight is not at immediate risk then the memorized items are NOT to be followed. Instead, the aircraft is to be leveled off for troubleshooting once above the MSA or circuit altitude, which FL350 certainly is.

"Immediate Risk" is not specified in the checklist but it is specified in the training associated with this checklist in an Airbus document which I posted the link to some time ago.

I have maintained for a very long time that it is this confusion and some recent low-level training (UAS event right after takeoff) that triggered AF447's PF to increase the pitch attitude of the aircraft because it was the only thing he could recall in this confusing and poorly-designed memorized drill and checklist.

The series of "if-then" statements in the memorized items do not apply to cruise altitude events where the safety of the flight is not at immediate risk. The loss of airspeed information is not an emergency and it is not a high-risk event which demands immediate action. Your response is precisely the one that should have occurred on AF447 - maintain level flight through pitch and retain the power settings which existed just before the event, while the PM gets out the QRH to fine-tune the pitch and power settings. In other words, do nothing with the pitch and power if they were suitable prior to the event. Things aren't going to change that much while the QRH is retrieved and read.

You argue correctly with your Airbus pilot neighbour but it is not his fault that he is confused, and, I submit, this and the low-level training the PM and PF had recently received are factors in this accident. How much is for the BEA to determine but I believe at least one pilot, the PF, was psychologically "primed" by the low-level UAS event which is the only UAS event training he had received.

In re RVSM, one does what one must do in an emergency of course but a thousand feet is nothing for the airplane to gain or lose so I think your point is a very good one to consider.

All that occurred after the apogee of the pitch-up and stall are far beyond transport pilot experience and territory and it is questionable whether anyone could sort out what this crew faced, after the AoA had exceeded 30deg in the "flat-plate" descent.

I have discussed this at length on all these threads, with graphics if you wish to examine this further.

Over the past year or two others here have disagreed with this assessment, and stated that above FL100, a 5-degree pitch-up is required by the UAS memorized drill regardless of altitude.

While I heartily disagree, (primarily because I think the FL100 case caters to high altitude airports and not 10,000ft above the local ground where the safety of the flight is not likely threatened by a UAS event, and a pitch of 15deg at, say, Bogota risks losing energy for obvious reasons whereas 5-deg is certainly safe enough in the initial climb until above the local MSA), the airplane will not suffer a swift and severe loss of airspeed in a 5-deg pitch-up, (I once said it would but was wrong), with an added 2.5deg pitch to the cruise pitch attitude of about 2.5deg, although it will slowly lose energy/airspeed.

But the FCTM specifically states that when/if the memorized items are accomplished by the crew, a very quick response using the QRH pitch and power settings is required to prevent an overspeed.

There is the admonition/warning to the crew in the FCTM and the schematic diagram therein which illustrates how to do this drill and checklist, to always respect the stall warning in a UAS condition.

Your Airbus pilot neighbour is wrong in his views on how to handle this event. One simply does not de-stabilize an airplane at cruise altitude without very good reason, (such as avoiding a greater danger). Pitch and power were suitable prior to a UAS event and should serve perfectly well for the few moments it takes to get out the QRH tables to fine-tune these settings. It is essentially a non-event. It may be disturbing but that is why we are thoroughly trained every six months or so...to reduce surprise and the degradation of cockpit discipline and the forgetting of SOPs.

bubbers44

Thank you PJ2, maintain altitude and do not fly through other flight altitudes. UAS can easily be controlled by staying level and using cruise power for where you are. Thanks for the response.

Clandestino

Both of you are missing the basic aerodynamic fact that either procedure will result in aeroplane that is flying, not stalling! Of course it's far better to maintain the known cruise pitch and power, caveat is "known". If it is not known, 5° ANU with climb power is safe attitude+power for almost any aeroplane (exception being high powered, low mach limited designs, not in production anymore). Collision risk does come into play with memory items, yet chances of having mid-air have to be weighted against chances of losing control. No extra points for guessing which is more likely to occur when ADCs go nutty.

I don't think so. He reduced pitch when warned by CM1, then pulled hard when stall warning went off. Nothing suggests trying to achieve any target pitch or any rational procedure at all. IMHO, it was sheer panic that doomed the flight, like the one Richard Bach wrote about:

Methinks FMS/autopilot/ADC failure can have the same effect on the airline pilot who doesn't know his aeroplane and doesn't feel confident he can control her when times get rough as the engine failure has on the pilot of piston single on night cross-country. However, as a lot of crews made it unscathed through similar ordeal to AF447's I am not so pessimistic to suspect the malaise is widespread. Also I still maintain that middle of the WoCL significantly affected the crew's performance for the worse. There's not enough data in preliminary reports to conclude whether the crewmembers were underperforming before the accident flight.

We don't have FCTMs (or A330s, for that matter) yet we recently had a hairy situation where relevant chapters of AFM and AOM differed. Our CAA's ruling was very quick: since AOM is recognized as OM-B, it should be followed when discrepancies with other manuals arise. Was AF FCTM part of OM-D?

TTex600

Agreed, here's my COM section. Sorry for the formatting I'm on an iPad.

Message: N/A
Condition: Unreliable airspeed indications caused by pitot/static probe obstruction or radome damage.

MEMORY ITEMS - if safe conduct of flight is affected: Note: Respect all stall warnings if in ALTERNATE LAW.
1. AUTOPILOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OFF
2. FLIGHT DIRECTOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .OFF
3. AUTOTHRUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OFF
4. Adjust Pitch/Thrust: - Below THR RED ALT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15°/TOGA - Above THR RED ALT and below 10,000' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10°/CLB - Above THR RED ALT and above 10,000'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5°/CLB 5. FLAPS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maintain current CONFIG
6. SPEEDBRAKES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Check retracted
7. GEAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .UP

When at or above MSA or circuit altitude, level off for troubleshooting.
Continued....


The way I read it, "level off for troubleshooting" means level off. It doesn't mean double your cruise pitch and apply climb power.

CONF iture

You are using here the right term : We get used to be deprived of a valuable source of data … How is it better ?
It is for those few circumstances that the information is useful and necessary … but missing.
Usually, that information is most useful for the rotation and the flare, but AF447 now demonstrates how it is also valuable at FL350.

Again, why wait for the final result when the initial action is immediate and first class information for a PNF to better appreciate why the result is undesirable. How is it better for a concept to suppress such source of meaningful information ?

I have not known that time, but in 98 the iron cross was already removed as soon as there was no weight on wheels anymore. Lately, as iceman50 made me realize, that indicator is now removed as soon there is no weight on the nose wheel anymore.
Everything indicates that it is not a tool they want the PNF to use to check the way the PF manipulates its sidestick. Actually Airbus thinks as absolutely useless for the PNF to know how the PF is doing its flight control commands ... In an attempt to justify the concept, the Airbus chief pilot himself has to refute the critics but his explanation simply does not make any sense. (Time 48:00 in the video)

bubbers44

So I will as always set cruise power and about 2.5 degrees nose up and get out a checklist. With no airspeed that altimiter will keep you just fine until AS pops back again. No worries on falling out of the sky.