And unfortunately .. also same pain feeling for the passengers and cabin crew ..
Sure the last minute was not a sweet ride for them

Their last two minutes should have ignored all bells and warnings and confusion and looked at their attitude and descent rate and figured out they were in a simple stall, easily recoverable by a student pilot.

Alternate Law is displayed on the PFD by 2 gold crosses. Ditto Direct Law.

Blubbers, I really believe that they knew how to recover from a stall however I don't think they recognized they were stalled due to training, . The required recover would have had to be very positive.

In response To Mr Optimistic's query, there is no indication whatsoever in Otelli's account that the captain at any time realised they were in some form of degraded law. He seemed totally nonplussed by the situation for the entire 2 min 46 sec that he was in the cockpit during the descent.
After the first 30 sec, during which 12 stall warnings sounded, Otelli writes: De son côté, le commandant semble étrangement absent [For his part, the captain seems strangely absent]. Less than 2 sec before impact, the last recorded words on the CVR are the captain's: Ten degrees pitch up.

Rockhound

They would also have ALT LAW PROT LOST displayed on the upper ECAM as well as the Amber crosses. I would be surprised if the captain was not aware they were in alt law considering the unreliable speed and concern with roll.

Regards

Forget about the freakin LAWS for a bit. Maybe normal law is not a cover for piss poor pilot skills intentionally but that's what is occurring. Why else is it needed anyway? It did not save anyone in this case did it? I am sure it is a good system but it is being abused. Flying is flying and aerodynamics and physics are finite. Power was at point X, pitch information was accurate, the decent rate and altitude were correctly displayed. How hard is it to determine just from this information that the airplane really is not flying anymore and someone should do something positive to unscrew the present situation? For months now (the length of these threads) some people are still flying the darn computer system. What happened to the pilots? The ones here in this forum? Did we forget the basics? We are arguing (discussing) minutia like it is a crystal ball that is supposed to save us. Forget for a moment about the weather. Yes they should have, maybe did, maybe did not divert. Who cares? Not me, that is not the real problem in my opinion. Who cares about the laws? I don't. That is not the root of the problem either. Get real guys. It is the cookie cutter approach the schools have now and the lack of experience that should be in the cockpit to polish the young are all retired and getting ready to retire. The situation is not going to improve unless the bean counters realize the situation and is willing to spend money for proper training across the board. Anything else is just BS.

It is indeed difficult to envisage what other situation they could imagine involving a 15º nose-up attitude / low indicated IAS / TOGA thrust / massive rate of descent that they could have believed to be the case, rather than coming to the conclusion that the aircraft was stalled.
Given how many times the aircraft announced "Stall" "Stall" (even if it had now fallen silent. . . useful that ; NOT) I am at a loss to fathom why nobody could at least figure out (and announce) that they had stalled.

There is no other upset that would display the same symptoms, at that moment they had lost Situational Awareness, completely & utterly.

Errr the flight control laws do have importance in the 330. ( and the others too).

The aircraft cannot stall in Normal Law, and pulling back on the side stick will therefore not cause a stall. Although there is nothing to stop you crashing the plane in Normal Law. The fact that Stall Warnings were being issued should have woken the crew up to the situation, although ECAM might have been confusing matters by issuing DISREGARD STALL WRNG at given moments.

This aircraft needs to be understood and flown correctly, and I agree that the bean counters share some blame in the whole sorry situation that is commercial aviation today, with too many under-trained Captains and FO's tooling around the skies. (to say nothing of SO's and Cruise Pilots)

Ultimately blame the passengers and market forces. Cheap flying still prevails.

Never having been a pilot of something heavy I was surprised how smoothly the stall entry was and how easily the pilot was able to hold to nose up to very high AOA.

I have commented at length on PPRuNe about the sorry state of affairs with the 300 hour total time copilot making Captain in 10 years or less after flying 1 or 2 long-haul legs a month on the autopilot. Companies choosing cadets on every hiring profile point except aviation aptitude, problem solving, and experience.

Captains who have had maybe 100 hours hand flying in their lives.

Captains whose idea of a single engine divert is flying 500 miles past several perfectly good alternates and then over 500 miles of open sea.

Captains whose chance of successfully diverting to KEF or any of the Siberian winter alternates during icy windy weather is nil.

Companies who promote incredibly inexperienced 2 year Captains to be Instructor and Examiner Pilots.

Sure, there are some good and even great pilots flying for these long-haul highly rated companies but the up and coming group is sadly lacking in everything except a well developed sense of entitlement.

I am out and glad of it. Had a great and well paid career. But, what I saw in the last few years of flying really turned my stomach. For some reason, the insurance companies don't care and the public, as usual, is clueless.

Go on guys - turn on the flame throwers.

Plectron - I agree entirely.

Plectron, how right you are!

An ex-UK mil colleague who flies the 757 as an F/O told me that, shortly after the AF447 event, they attempted a similar exercise in the simulator. Despite the brief, the captain was unable to recognise and recover from the stall....until my colleague gave him a less-than-fluffy wake-up call.

He reckons that at least 50% of the non ex-mil pilots on their fleet are equally as poor.

The AF447 event was probably just the tip of a frightening iceberg, involving selection, training and SOPs. AF have had some spectacularly bad accidents in recent years (Concorde, A330, A340) - is there a clue here?

When you read that QRH and FCOM changes such as 'check that any fuel imbalance is not caused by a fuel leak before opening the cross-feed valve' have been made necessary after idiotic crew performance, you have to wonder at the level of corporate knowledge on some flight decks these days.

Re beancounters and false economies.

I was a beancounter, mostly in the car industry but I started on that road in aerospace, when I saw stupid financial decisions being made and then learned enough about cost accounting to find out some of what was going wrong.

When taught how to do it properly in a company where it was well developed, three things became apparent that are relevant here:

1. The financial effects of a decision should be based on the smallest unit affected. That could be anything from an individual machine (or aeroplane, or even instrument) to the entire company.

2. Like computers, garbage in results in garbage out. We did the best we could to find all the effects and quantify them. But if somebody fails to tell the beancounters that an effect of economising on training is a risk of a very expensive accident, they may miss it. Shouldn’t, but may – there are less than perfect beancounters, just as there are less than perfect flight crews. (Looks to me like AF447 passengers were unlucky to be victims of both.)

3. The decisions were made not by beancounters but by management, who either believed what we told them, and acted upon it, or went their own way regardless. I saw both – but never (in the industry I was in) where safety was compromised. When considering fixing reliability or warranty issues, the safety of the user was given very high priority. For airlines, it is now apparent that training “economies” risk a hugely expensive crash. Ask AF if they now think economising on manual flying training etc. was a good decision. And who told the “beancounters” there what it could cost in terms of SAR as well as the future legal cases and compensation, if poor training etc. could result in such costs?

Just my 2p-th.

BEagle said,
There sure is, but just to keep the record straight, I doubt that any pilot, no matter how competent, could have recovered from the Concorde situation. Right?....

As to (Plectron):
Yes, quite. I realize there's a "pilot shortage," but I'd like to see, besides exponentially better training, an IQ test as a requirement. There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there aren't any old, stupid
pilots! :}

<BOOM, CRASH>

If I remember correctly, they might fly a bit longer etc, etc,.. if they did not STRICTLY follow the Engine Fire/Failure checkist.

Re the Concorde accident: didn't the FE shut down the wrong engine without any cross-check with the pilots?

Yes he did. 43 mins 4.28 secs on the CVR.

The only way to achieve this effectively, for long haul airlines at least, is to remove company seniority throughout the industry.

Require every company, as part of their AOC, to send the total time a pilot has accrued with that company to the CAA/FAA/country's authority for easy audit when a pilot ceases employment.

Only when a pilot is free to leave an airline, gain experience in a short haul operation, and return without penalty - perhaps as a direct entry Captain with their position based on their experience will this cease. Company seniority is what stops pilots being true professionals, able to sell themselves on their abilities.

Wouldn't work with the local pilots in the ever growing larger Middle Eastern airlines, Checkboard - those lads insist on being on the biggest piece of metal possible from Day 1. Years ago now, someone recognised the looming problem as discussed in the posts above in one very large Middle Eastern airline. At that airline's home port was (still is) a thriving local freight operation running a half dozen Beech 1900s - lots of sectors, lots of night work, no autopilot, so with very little effort, there was lots of stick time available for the large airline's cadets going begging before they moved onto the heavy metal, in a situation the big airline's training department could easily oversee.

It never got past the suggestion stage, for it was pointed by the people who know such things out that if they made the local cadets spend a year or two on the Beech 1900s after completing their initial training, they would have extreme difficulty in attracting anyone into their cadet scheme.