Hi,

If you read the synthesis .. it show that the pilots were incompetents (no training for the AF447 case despite multiple same events in the past)
And also cause no recommendations in the past by the BEA about those events and no a sensed word by DGAC about same events
AF - DGAC - BEA are to put in the same bag and Airbus is not better (they always stated before 2010 that stall training was not needed)

Maybe you are dreaming ?

PILOT ERROR: Air France Jet Plunged Into Ocean Because Pilots Screwed Up

I just found this today. I have no idea if it will help or not.

I think you guys can brain storm all you want over the fine points why the computer and or indications did what they did. However the bottom line is either the pilots had mucked up data for whatever reasons and for that reason could not fly the aircraft out of the situation or the freaking system would not let fly the profile what was needed to escape the bad situation.

This is not a problem for non FBW aircraft. I say again we are so far ahead of the game we have lapped ourselves and are now behind again.

I will give the pilots the benefit of the doubt on their flying (not managing) skills. I have to ask again, do you want to be able to fly an aircraft or do you want to fly a system? Please do not give me a lame excuse about how fine the system is, just answer the question.

I think that was a misconception widely held by the industry as a whole, and not specific to Airbus in particular. It certainly looks like AF are going to have to pull their socks up though...

[EDIT : @before landing checl list - I think that's a terribly poorly-summarised article which doesn't even bother to translate what's being said into layman's terms - the whole thing has been reduced to an inaccurate soundbite. ]

Hi,

Found on a french site .. the synthesis of the press meeting (in french)

"Sebaska wrote at #2233 (I don't have the quote facility for some reason)

RWA

Quote: If we are encouraged to believe that the THS reacted to 'noseup inputs' by pitching up, why did it not in turn respond to 'nosedown inputs' by pitching down?

It was explained to you already, yet you choose to ignore that and champion your pet theory of "cover up". :ugh:

"

Where was this explained already, Sebaska? I have looked and I can't see any answer to RWA's point. I think it's a valid one.

Without any new evidence, the crash becomes more an exercise in politics, and authority.

Perhaps the bottom line is how much authority (control of evidence) should any entity possess which has a commercial interest in the outcome of their investigation?

DOZY: As a sw boffin, do you expect much of what is needed for an understanding has a particular timeframe?

I think the window around a/p loss, since this is the point at which the vulnerability was highest? If the PILOTS are as described, what is the point in a retrospect of STALL?

How did this START?

Hi,

Well ... the aircraft involved in the crash is an Airbus property of AF and piloted by AF pilots so far I know

Hi,

Some comments about extracts of the press meeting:

Those type of instruments are already available ... but were not installed on the AF447

The analyse of the pilot behaviour is not so difficult .. when you know that the BEA itself show in his synthesis the "lack of proper training" of the AF447 pilots


First at all ... in France the press is free and secondly .. the press articles were based on leaks from the BEA
Before take care of the press .. it's better for BEA to give a look at their personnel !

Hi,

Full report available: (so far in french only)
http://media.webcastor.fr/web/bea/f-cp090601e3.pdf

jcjeant, take care when translating:

14h56: Il y a besoin de réaliser une étude sur la présence d'une évaluation d'incidence accessible

2:56 p.m.: There is a need to conduct a study on the presence of an indication of angle of attack (not attitude)

:rolleyes:

About the group: question is why the stall alarm was ignored, IMO.

About the leaks: from the BEA ? Sure of that ? Of from interested parties (company, manufacturer, government...) who had access before the general public ?
Do you search for facts, reality, answers ?

Synthesis Note

Nothing new. A "qui" typo on the english version that should have been caught by the proof readers, a bit sloppy from an organization that is detail focussed, surely a simple spell check would catch it?

Safety Recommendations

Some odd grammer but readable. All looks good addressing the areas of serious concern that we have read in the forum threads. To that extent it is all consistent.
However it still does answer why the pilot inputs of generally nose up which appear to contradict the PFD. Why input stick back when pitch +16 and below Vs with TOGA thrust and N1 near 100%. Perhaps we will never know as we can't see exactly what the flight instruments showed. This appears to be addressed in the remarkable suggestion in the safety recommendations. Is this formally recommending cameras on the flight deck?

Well, from a software perspective, what you'd need to do is load up a test rig made up of the exact hardware installed on that aircraft with the exact software installed (down to point releases), apply the DFDR data to that test rig's inputs to see what the software and hardware does - then repeat this test anything up to hundreds or thousands of times to see if any anomalies appear. I suspect this would not be a small or inexpensive undertaking, but it would be do-able.

It's looking very much like an inappropriate response to the situation as it developed, starting with the nose-up inputs shortly after FMS disconnect, then progressing through selection of TOGA and the later aggressive and maintained nose-up inputs all the way down, and it wouldn't be the first time it has happened (as I've always said, I think this was another Birgenair-type situation).

Way back when I started commenting on these threads earlier in the year I said that unreliable instrument readings in the wee hours at night, in IMC with unsettled weather hundreds of miles from land was a nightmare situation for any pilot to confront, and that any findings of mishandling on the part of the pilots *must* take this factor into account, and this is why I got very agitated when people said that by saying software failure was unlikely to be a cause I was blaming the pilots.

Lack of training appears to be a significant issue here, along with poor CRM practice when it comes to rest periods. It would appear that the ITCZ is a known problem area when it comes to aviation, and many pilots on the thread have expressed the opinion that they would not have left the two F/Os in charge until safely out the other side.

Colganair 3407 was the wake up call that the airline industry had bred complacency in two distinct areas, one of which was the effect of fatigue and the other was poor recognition of stall conditions and application of the correct response to those conditions - but that investigation was still ongoing when AF447 crashed and the final NTSB report not released until February 2010, 8 months after AF447.

In short I think AF447 was a "perfect storm" of the problems within aviation. Birgenair and Aeroperu had shown what could happen if the pitot-static system was compromised, but both of those incidents happened in the climb phase. Not much thought was given to what would happen if something similar happened at cruise altitude, with the attendant limits on possible escape procedures. Airlines had been training pilots to respond to approach to stall and the warnings generated without getting into what would happen if you were to actually stall, how to recognise it and - crucially - how to get out of it, because it requires going against the human instinct to cram on power and pull up when the correct response is actually to get the nose down and hold it there until the speed comes back and the wings are flying again. AF also deserve to come in for criticism for failing to expedite the replacement of pitot tubes which were known to have problems.

@jcjeant - if you're honestly suggesting that airlines were training their Airbus pilots on approach to stall only and the rest of their crews were getting full stall recognition and escape training, I think you need to get some perspective.

BEA´s Safety Recommendations
 

Quote:

---

Training for manual airplane handling

---

As B4-LandingChkList , bubbers44 and others pointed several posts away: More stick time…
The question is who is going to pay for that? And… How is that redefinition of training going to look like?
Bubbers44 said gliding isn´t cheap; well prolly companies should pay that kind of training. Much more cheaper than a hull loss anyway.


Well Airbus… Begin asap with it methinks...

No conspiracy theory. The situation was mishandled by the crew leading to the aircraft departing its flight envelope.

Now the investigation will focus on the human factors involved and attempt to resolve why they did what they did.

On a very quick skim-read of the French text, two key questions are:

1. Why did it start to go wrong?

2. Why was it not corrected?

As to 1: notwithstanding the difficult conditions I am afraid it does rather look like pilot error in the sense of being a combination of ill-discipline in the cockpit and bad training. If I have understood correctly, the PF and PNF had received no training in how to deal with inconsistent IAS inputs at high altitude, or in manual flight at high altitude.

However, as to 2: IMHO the full CVR transcript shows that the systems were in large part to blame. The passage from 2:12'37 to 2:12'44 is tragic and shocking in equal measure. At the start of this timeframe (i) the PF was (for once) pushing forwards (ii) the aeroplane was in a stall but (iii) the stall warning was still silent. My poor translation is that the PNF tells the PF to "descend! descend! descend!" The PF says "That's what I am doing." The Captain intercedes "No, you're climbing". The PF says "I'm climbing [meaning - "you think I'm climbing?"], okay, I'll go down".

At precisely this point, his nose-down inputs stimulated enough speed to trigger the stall warning. The captain's next remark is "This isn't possible." His bewilderment is unsurprising.

Thus the PF's correct nose-down inputs were punished by a stall warning; his wrong nose-up inputs were rewarded by the stall warning ceasing.

The instruments thus played a cruel, Pavlovian trick on the pilots which IMHO goes a consdirable distance towards exonerating them.

I don't think this is sufficiently emphasised in the report.

Copilot´s training
 

Who can please shed some light on the copilot´s deficient training the BEA report states.

"The copilots had received no high altitude tr aining for the "Unreliable IAS" procedure and manual air craft handling".

I find it hard to believe this. Isn´t this training absolute standard in any simulator training of any serious airline?
Am I missing anything?

Thanks

The 3rd interim report says that none of the two copilots had received a proper instruction/training for
- manual A/C piloting at high altitude (see PF's large amplitude inputs in roll and pitch above 35 000 ft)(I am also very disturbed by this !)
- UAS procedure at high altitude (one of them had received a training for UAS at low altitude, where the pitch was higher, in the order of 10°)
The CVR also shows that there was no clear attribution of the roles by the CDB when he left the cockpit, and latter, that the cooperation between the two copilots was not very good

AF447 Interim Report In English -

http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol....let2011.en.pdf

Hmmm. Claiming the a/c behaved as directed after this accident was under way is misleading, if not a direct fraud. No one to this very day knows what to expect after LOC ending in Stall, yet that is the focus of the BEA recommendations? Confusion on the flight deck? Christ, does any pilot take that as a serious critique of these guys given the circumstances?

The induction of this LOC is virtually ignored. The Public is to accept the outrageous nonchalance of this outfit, and be satisfied with a conclusion and blame prior to the finish of the investigation?

I suppose we could say that the release is intended for public and lay consumption, hence the simplistic opinion and utter lack of evidence.

But that leaves the Public with but one source of critical knowledge, a source with a financial and commercial interest in the outcome. I cannot abide "International" accords, when they are merely political, but a proper and objective source of multidisciplinary critique might be an alternative.

Who Guards the Guardians?

Hyperveloce

yes. This fact screams complacency, and negligence. If accurate, then any criticism of the pilots stops well short of the actual responsibles.

bear

bear, one may make some criticisms of various members of, and actions of, the flight crew without precluding criticisms of the others whose contributions to this event, via their roles, actions, and inactions were prelude to that dark and stormy night.

Let's not raise a false dichotomy.

I estimate that the key to your objection is the way that cause factors are communicated.

The vague term of "pilot error" has so much currency, and so dubious a meaning, that it can be misleading or be no more than a fig leaf.

Halfnut, that's the link to the four page synthesis report.

Bear - look at the traces. This wasn't a LOC ending in stall, this was an aircraft *controlled into* the stall, because the guy with the stick in his hand had not been properly trained to deal with the set of circumstances with which he was faced.

After starting by insisting the vertical stabiliser must have separated, then moving on to various dark murmurings about the computer doing sometihng that the pilots didn't expect, or random actuation of flight surfaces taking them out of stable flight, your insistence that something must have been wrong with the aircraft (over and above the pitot tubes) in the face of all the evidence put forth has been puzzling. Why are you so sure they're hiding something?

If there was anything nefarious going on, then you'd expect AF (which is a also a commerical interest of the French government) to have been given the whitewash treatment too - as it is they've come in for some pretty heavy stick here.

Nefarious? The only thing I accuse the agency of is bias. As such, I believe it is equal to manslaughter, regardless the presence of fraud or no.

Look away from this current state of affairs. The Probes? Identified as problematic, and suspected of many episodes of intake to UAS. Rejection of AHI? BUSS? An apparent and outrageous ignorance of high altitude flight with untrained Pilots (That is the charge). This is outright negligence.

It cannot be seen another way. And yet the galling (gaulling) nonchalance: "perhaps a study of the need for AoA?"

I fear I have been crying wolf for two years; since he has not gobbled our young quite yet, "I see conspiracies." The wolf's jaw is full of blood, yet I have been overreacting?

My skin is 4 gauge dermis, and critics don't bother me. I have tried, and if I cannot convince you of shortcomings in the approach (unstable?), I have given up.

So three 'pilots' in the cockpit, a pull back on the stick and hold it there for....how long... until it hit the deck. OK, one may have panicked but all three?
'pilots'?

If the disconnect between a/c and 3 pilots is that pronounced, why is Air France still flying?

Wait - come back here- we're not finished.

And I say again, would a biased agency be hauling AF across the coals for failing to train their pilots correctly?

Let's start with the technical issues you present:

Airbus put out a service bulletin and AF implemented it, but did not expedite it. BUSS was a system developed to assist with the pitot problems, and was still very new at the time this accident occurred - I don't know how take-up has progressed since then.

And Air France will answer it. This is nothing to do with the aircraft at this point.

AoA indications were available in the form of FPV display. Whether that usage was trained as such or not I don't know.

Shortcomings in what approach? The Airbus control philosophy? I'm really having trouble understanding your point and I really want to.

Dozy

Absolutely. Which is why my favourite training philosophy has always been KISS (keep it simple, stupid), to cater for the worst case/lowest common denominator scenario.

Levelvibes.


Well, I thought this quote was rather surprising from the report---
"Really?! Wonder how much high altitude manual flying he's done, (and I'm not talking about simply keeping the aircraft straight and level, unlike what these guys had to deal with).

In the miliitary, we had lots of practice, and I can tell you it was not as easy as it might sound. A small pitch input that would normally be of no consequence at low altitudes would quickly put you in stickshaker zone high up, especially if you had made the mistake of climbing way above your optimum (buffet margin) level.

Not that these matters concerned us at the time; (no SLF to worry about) :ok:. Different matter these days...

just this once, then I'am off for vacation

Dozy, Say I develop an intricate and efficient new line in my production shop, it will streamline my production, cut cost, and widen my market. Something I can be proud of.

I pay the enormous development costs, exercise patience, have it installed, and debugged. It has problems, as do all sophisticated technologies, and it goes on line. Some of the problems have to do with training my personnel, so an expensive and sophisticated system takes care of that.

It works flawlessly. As it happens, there is a fantastically remote chance it may malfunction, which is acknowledged, and workarounds are installed. The workarounds are not modern, and involve a bypass of the new technology onto the old (left in Place) machine.

There are now two methods of avoiding this remote malfunction.

Step One. Do nothing. The machine has a good chance of self correcting.

ALTERNATE. Cycle THIS LEVER, and the line switches to the old machine which has a phenomenally good record with this remote but systemic problem.

In my business, it is called the CRITICAL PATH. Only in my business, if the Path is lost, no-one dies.

I agree it does fail a gut check.
I will not be satisfied unless they provide at least the same level of detail as the Colgan 3047 incident report i.e. full transcript from push back, simulated representation of flight and control inputs.
On the training issue why wait for bureaucracey. A pilot always has the option of paying themselves for extra training/sim time. Personally I would like to have basic flying experience in all the control laws including mechanical. But then I am a control freak. I detest the idea of driving an a/c and not knowing how it feels in different modes. Isn't the purpose of training to go through all the options, bells and whistles? Why hold back any training of flying characteristics from the pilots. Have we not learned from the titanic. Ships can sink and a/c can stall so we have to train for it.

If you had old style fixed wing military pilots the aircraft would never have been lost. All these aircraft need a magic switch that, when it is turned on, the aircraft turns into a basic stick handling machine.

xcitation : Don't get too xcited, Sir ;)
The transcript cannot be "full from push back", as only 30' or 2h (depends which track) are recorded.

4greens: Really cannot see how this magic switch would have improved in AF447 case... :confused:
- If the crew (ex-military in your hypotesis, but any crew would do) had recognised the stall, there is no evidence that a proper recovery action (ND until the plane flies again) would have been prevented by the "system"
- If the magic switch was there in AF447, but the crew didn't recognize the stall, no difference in the end.

4Greens, what if the pilot flying isn't "old style" military pilots, but guys who have flown mostly FBW and HUD, in planes that don't quite spin? (I suspect your point has merit, nonetheless). (gums has given us some great insights into an early gen FBW system, the F-18 is another that could compare, though I've heard it's tough to make it depart. No personal experience.) F-35? F-22? Typhoon?

What monkey skills are being imbedded in flying those birds?

The "old style" military pilots are running into some training changes. The elementary level Out of Control Flight and three dimensional upset trainers are gone. (I now speak only to US, not idea on the other side of the pond).

The Tweet (T-37) which the USAF could spin and inverted spin, is gone. T-6 has replaced it, though it still spins. Turbo prop.

The T-2 is gone, USn jet pilots used to spin, depart, cross control, and inverted spin train.

In its place is the T-45, which does not have quite the range of maneuvers one can train in that regard.

In time, the military experienced jet pilots will have had spin training, on our side of the pond, only in the T-6, which spins well enough. It isn't flown up where Eagles dare: spins tend to be somewhere in the 8-15,000 feet box. (Depends on the Op Area, they may have raised the floor in the past few years, not sure) .

What does the future hold?

I still don't fully understand what you're saying. If this accident had anything at all to do with the control philosophy, automation, FBW or whatever then I could make sense of what you're trying to say.

But in this case no amount of steam gauges, big red buttons to disable the automatics or probably even interconnected yokes would have made a difference. The PF responded to the UAS by pulling back on the stick and inducing a climb to the apogee and stalled, then after a brief moment where he corrected downwards he applied full TOGA power and hauled on the stick for most of the way down to ground contact, making control inputs far in excess of what would have been considered acceptable at cruise altitude. Just the same as with Birgenair the crew were overwhelmed by a situation that ran out of their control. The PNF did not take control, despite having a much better read of the situation and the Captain's advice seemed not to register.

Hi,

Well .. the miltary pilots (at least jets pilots) have a ejectable seat ... that can make the difference now and in the future

Lonewolf
Well perhaps this Wolf...

NASA - NASA Dryden Fact Sheet - Intelligent Flight Control System

I feel sure that this has already been posted but here it is again anyway.

http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp...90601e1.en.pdf

Cost benefit analysis
 

Back to the original concept:
With an airplane that is prone to iced up pitot tubes, which then causes loss of airspeed, which causes loss of autopilot and autothrust, and with no high altitude training in hand flying, and flying in an area of high buildups and potential turbulence, it seems to me the best course of action is to AVOID it all in the first place.
Simulator training costs money, deviations around weather costs money, hiring experienced pilots costs money --
If you can't afford it you shouldn't try to operate an airline.

You know, I have been watching this thread for quite a while as all of us have. There seems to be basically 2 types of us in here. The 1st type insists that if they were able to hand fly the aircraft with just basic instruments this never would have happened. These guys probably flew way before X-Bots came out, began in a Champ, maybe flew some ag, sweated it out flew light twins in crappy weather sleeping on an air mattress at the crash pad. They caught a lucky break to fly jets and loved every minute of it.
Then there is the other group whom I will divide into 2 subsets. Subset (1) knows they do not have 100% control of the aircraft 100% of the time since it is FBW. However they know this is a design of the manufacturer and since the manufacture has designed the aircraft to be pilot proof they know each flight is a roll of the dice but they are OK with this. They just pray nothing serious happens the system as a whole cannot handle.
Subset (2) has not only drank the KoolAid but has the KoolAid main-lined into the subclavian artery. These poor suckers pray to the god of automation almost daily, totally believing the manufacturer is all seeing and knowing. Since it knows and sees all the system has to be able to do a better job in the flying aspect and the judgment angle. I mean why would the manufacturer make something having the ability to vote out humans if this was not so?
The last group probably came from some academy and took the fast track to the airlines. Not that there is anything wrong with that.......
Anyway to make a long story short, we are screwing ourselves out of a job slowly but surely. You do not need to pay computers, they do not unionize and do not require life support.
Is this truly a step forward?

Examples of this type please? I don't see anyone around here that matches that description at all...