RetiredF4

A short comment from someone, who has done handflying for the most time in his flying life albeit a suitable autopilot was not available.

To compare handflying a glider in the heart of its envelope with handflying an airliner at the top of its flight regime as being similar or equal is far fetched. Aditionally the mental picture needed for flying a heavy against flying a glider is completely different as well. Therefore being able to handfly a glider does not qualify at all for flying an heavy airliner.
What does qualify is training with the specific aircraft in the required environment.

At the end of my military turn i started flying a PA28 prop, and nearly nothing of my previous flying hours helped me in doing so. By the way, my instructor had the same impression.

Wally Mk2

'RF4' whilst I can see yr beliefs as being true to some degree I cant subscribe totally to it all. As I am sure you know the basics of flight are no diff from an A380 to a model plane just the handling of that energy which is wildly different as well as the vast implications of Re (Reynolds No's).
Most likely the author of that statement 'same as flying a glider' or words to that effect had good intentions but it was probably not a good comparison in this case.

RetiredF4

The basics of flight knowledge can be obtained by different sources and using different devices, you named one yourself like flying a model plane. Does flying a model plane qualify to fly a glider, or a SE or Twin Prop, or a jet or a transport?
You agree that it does not? Therefore the fact, that one FO was a qualified glider pilot has nothing to do at all with the AF 447 desaster. Because the basics of flying you are talking about should be a knowledge base any pilot from model pilot to transport pilot should have, and that's the point i totally agree with you.

DozyWannabe

That's essentially what I'm saying too - however I do think that his sailplane qualifications and experience have some bearing on the *reporting* and *discussion* of AF447. You've got several posters waving around accusations of total automation dependency - saying the crew were incompetent and unable to handfly in any way, when that was clearly not the case.

I'm not, and never was arguing that flying a glider does or should "qualify" one to handle an airliner, I was simply saying that the PF could handfly to a reasonable level - certainly proficient enough to know that you neither maintain a straight and level flightpath nor escape a stall by consistently pulling up.

RetiredF4

They clearly demonstrated, that they were not able to handfly this aircraft in this particular situation. And they clearly demonstrated, that they could not cope with the loss of some part of automation.

If we look at other happenings in this new world of commercial airplane flying and in the way automation flying is trained and stressed, and in part manual flying is even most times prohibited by the respective training departments of some airlines (and not few of them as the saying is here), how can one not see a lack in handling skills caused by too much automation dependency?

Yes, this crew might have been able to handfly once and the FO might have been an excellent glider pilot (which nobody knows so far), but at that special moment in that aircraft and at that flightlevel with the loss of valid airspeeds they only proved the following:

After loss of Airpeed indication, which caused the loss of automation devices like Autopilot, autothrust and degraded the flight envelope protection they crashed an airwothy airliner within a few minutes due to their inability to fly this aircraft straight and level by their own hands.

Whatever you like to call that, it never should have happened and it never should happen again. I go with those, who call that incompetent and unable to handfly, period.

Our concern should be, who is to be made responsible for this kind of incompetence and for this kind of automation dependency and how can we promote further training to stop the degradation of those required skills. More glider flying is not on my list though.

Lonewolf_50

The rest of your post is well put. I'd like to add a slightly different emphasis to your clear identification of some root causes:
in a class of aircraft and on a mission where crew coordination and CRM are required fundamentals, a profound lack of same was in evidence from early in the event on this flight deck. Beyond hand flying difficulties, it seems from the evidence available that possession and use of an instrument scan (another fundamental requirement of flying in that class of aircraft on that mission) was beyond at least one of the pilots on the flight deck.

Scan problems and poor hand flying are related to one another. The concern this accident raises in my mind is linked to the standing complaint about "Children of the Magenta line:" how pervasive is the skill limitation exposed by this particular crew?

Not common, or very common?

I don't know if that is an answerable question given the size of the industry and how practices may vary from carrier to carrier. It's an answer worth pursuing, IMO.

DozyWannabe

That's just it though - I think that a lot of posters here are putting too much into this "Children Of The Magenta" scenario, which is not necessarily the case. After all, the ex-Air Force Captain of the Birgenair B757 did exactly the same thing as the AF447 crew, and he was a veteran.

And let's not forget, there are far fewer smoking holes with automation at this kind of level than there were when handflying was more prevalent in the early part of the jet age.

Frankly a lot of this "much better in my day" routine (the "magenta" talk often overlaps with disparaging remarks on new 200hr cadets) smacks to me of people who miss their youth, then see the ongoing changes in their industry - and it makes them feel old. No-one enjoys that feeling - but I swear there's a lot more to this case and others that have been conveniently swept into the "Magenta" pile without sufficiently examining the evidence at hand. Dismissing pilots and crews as generally 'incompetent' is a little dangerous, as it can lead to complacency - "After all", thinks Captain Hypothetical, "I'm not incompetent, so it could never happen to me!".

Ian W

These aspects can all link together,

In one life in the nice shiny transport you follow the magenta line and if you are lucky and it is your 'turn' you may get to hold the controls for a few minutes in an 8 hour flight but only with full system support.

In another life you fly a sailplane that is responsive to the controls even if you have to use full deflection at times, stalls are big nose drops that cannot be overcome by even full back stick. And you get that wind noise that gives you the impression of speed....

Then one dark and stormy night the nice shiny transport decides to have a problem - and you are in a sub-state of Alternate law which you have NEVER flown and you are at close to the ceiling of the aircraft. You have to fly manually - and you revert to flying manually the way that you do in sailplanes and perceive the performance as you do in sailplanes - it can't have stalled - the nose is still above the horizon and that noise means we are going fast....

If there is no sufficient training then people will revert back to what they knew from previous experience - it is all they can do. If your previous experience was sufficient that's fine. But it would appear that modern 'streamlined' training and limited experience is starting to show signs of insufficiency.

Lonewolf_50

Dozy, the problem of overdependence on automation is not a chimera. Ran into it two decades ago in the fleet. Here is another example:

On a CAVU to the moon day, at SFO a Boeing 777 crashed, thank God more didn't die.
Hand flying, not done.
Scan, broken.
CRM: out to lunch.

Core competency issues.

DozyWannabe

@LW_50:

See above - I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist, I'm saying we should be careful not to prematurely shove all mishandling/loss of control incidents and accidents into the "COTM" bucket.

Lonewolf_50

I asked a few pages ago, and got no answer.

Can you, Dozy, or anyone, explain to me why it takes 17 seconds for the pilot to make a control input during the A330/A340 altitude excursion that is of such interest in discussing the various features of the A330 flight control system?

I asked for anyone who flies that family of aircraft, as the flight control systems seem to be similar enough.

My impression from that statement was that no corrective stick command was made. If I misunderstand what that tells us, that would be nice to know.

DozyWannabe

That would be my reading too. As to your question, the obvious answer would be that for at least some of those 17 seconds, neither of the flight crew were paying attention to their attitude - but as to why that might have been, we can only speculate.

RetiredF4

Wouldn't be another possibility that they froze in a "what's it doing now" mode or / and were trying to resolve the problem by pushing buttons instead of using the obvious, the SS?

DozyWannabe

It'd be possible, certainly - however the possibility would rely on the idea that neither of them recognised that the AP had disconnected. As I said above - the "why" is something on which we can only speculate.

OK465

You could ask this guy:

DonH

Retired...re, "Wouldn't be another possibility that they froze in a "what's it doing now" mode or / and were trying to resolve the problem by pushing buttons instead of using the obvious, the SS? "

Yes, that is absolutely a possibility.

Here on the forum, we can quite reasonably assess "17 seconds" with no SS input as a very long time to respond but in such an environment the moment is fleeting indeed. Such turbulence also makes it nearly impossible to a) physically read the instruments and the various warnings, timed as they are, and b) to mentally "re-cognize" what's actually occurring, primarily with the pitch, vertical speed and altitude - the same phenomenon which would challenge the A330 crew to respond to the CLIMB-CLIMB TCAS RA in a timely way.

BTW, none of this applied/applies to AF447. The failure was benign - lots of messages and aural cautions/warnings but other than the potential distractions from momentary ECAM re-prioritizing the system failures as they occurred and the dozen or so single-chimes associated, the airplane itself was stable, and fine.

OK465, indeed, we could probably ask a few crews about this same phenomenon!...

Lonewolf_50

no, I can't, as I don't think he flies the family of aircraft I am curious about.

I'd like to ask him about his own excellent adventure, but I doubt I'll get an answer. Did the AAIB come up with a final report on that flight?

EDIT:
DonH, thank you.

OK465

LW50 original question:

bit of insight:

60 year old 340 Captain with 15131 hours, 5175 on type, who told the board he remembered seeing something he wouldn't have seen and.....

.....a board that said he probably saw something he couldn't have seen.

It appears not to matter that much.

Wally Mk2

In the a330/340 pitch up event the initial biggest non reaction here was purely due to the 'startle effect'. Remember in the Crz we would be at a low eb or state of mind especially after hrs of continuously the same noise levels & body movements. This is why people fall asleep at the wheel of a car & crash. These factors coupled with something that we are rarely exposed to (sudden pitch up)accounted for those 17 secs.

As I mentioned in an earlier post re the AF447 there's no way an Airliner operating close to it's highest performance Alt limit could suddenly have the ability to aggressively Clb & sustain it (other than using the energy avail initially ) due an over-speed in Lvl flight. To have the pilot/s react with full back stick to compensate (a natural reaction when first confronted with this rather odd & totally unexpected indication) is almost plausible when you think about it.
As we all know a blocked Pitot system effects just one primary system, Airspeed/Mach & it's associated connected elements (A/P FD etc) so any rapid increase in indicated AS/Mach isn't something that naturally occurs in Lvl flight to any major degree with thrust set.
It all boils back to basic airmanship....PITCH (or Att)/POWER & with 2day's extensive auto flight systems doing ALL the work for us our brains are becoming slowly de-tunned & desensitized to erroneous indications such as in this event.

Man will continue to fly perfectly serviceable flying machines into the side of a hill, such is the tenuous joining of man & machine despite all the technology.
It won't be long now when all the drivers in a typical Airliner will only ever have had exposure to highly sophisticated automation at transport level & raw flying skills will have been pretty much bred out as they are essentially no longer needed.

Chris Scott

Lonewolf_50 and respondents,

You discuss a period of 17 seconds before the first sidestick intervention. Re the AAIB Bulletin into this incident, I still find the description on Page 11 ("A340 Data") confusing, and the time scale on its DFDR trace virtually unreadable on the version I have. However, it states clearly enough (my underscoring):
"The first recorded sidestick input was made at 14:22:08 which was some 28 seconds after the commencement of the Master Warning."

The Master Warning and CRC (continuous repetitive chime) coincided with the AP disengagement (due to MMO exceedance, mainly caused by a sudden fall in temperature), but the aural warning (cavalry charge) was delayed because the CRC and a TCAS warning took priority. 10 seconds after the Master Warning, an up-gust briefly increased the AoA towards alpha-prot. That resulted in a phase-advanced engagement of AoA (protection) Law, after which the EFCS was tasked to reach and maintain alpha-prot, a much higher AoA than desired. That started the pitch-up, and after (roughly) a further 8 seconds the aircraft started climbing in earnest. After that, it was about 10 seconds until the first sidestick input.

So I presume your 17 seconds is the crucial period between engagement of AoA Law (+ Pitch-up) and the first (rather tentative) sidestick movement? This was less than half down, and it is unclear if it was sustained for the period of more than one second that was required to disengage AoA Law. The first application of more than half down-stick (which would disengage AoA Law instantly) started about 5 seconds later. It is only then that the a/c starts to pitch down rapidly, i.e., 22 seconds after the engagement of AoA Law.


RetiredF4 and DonH have identified the likely reason for the lack of sidestick action by either pilot. To be a bit more more specific, one or both pilots were probably trying to re-engage one of the two APs, possibly trying them both alternately. Many of us have seen this kind of behaviour: priority given to re-engaging the automatics, rather than flying the aeroplane.

This zoom climb involved an error of omission by the PF; AF447's an error of commission.

As I wrote a few days ago:
"The common factor this incident had with the much later AF447 accident is that of the unexpected transition from automatics to "manual": specifically from AP to FBW, in a pitch law other than Normal. In this AIRPROX case, the FBW system forced the a/c into an undesired zoom-climb which needed positive crew intervention to counter. In AF447, the FBW made no such input; the PF forcing the a/c into a zoom-climb by inappropriate sidestick inputs."

In both cases, there were extenuating circumstances - if only minor ones.

Most of us are in agreement that, had the AF447 PF sat on his hands for a while, the A330 would have maintained a good pitch attitude at least. In the A340 AIRPROX case, however, we are all (myself included) chiding him/her for failing to prevent the EFCS (FBW) from pitching the aircraft into a zoom-climb which - in the absence of any collision - would have become an embarrassing phugoid. So although the initial parts of the "zoom climbs" are rather similar, their causes are very different.

In this case, at least two unusual met phenomena and the logic of the EFCS conspired in such a way that PF inactivity was not an option - if flight separation was to be assured. The AAIB avoids censorship, as follows:
"Such was the vigour of the A340’s climb in AoA law, the aircraft could well have climbed through FL 363 (thus provoking a TCAS RA with revised software version 7.0) in a very short time, even if the crew had applied nose-down sidestick as soon as they heard the (delayed) autopilot disconnect warning."