[QUOTE][If your are seriously going to mandate/insist that the Captain must be in his seat for the "tricky part" of every flight, irrespective of the qualifications and/or experience of the other pilots, how are you going to do it/pay for it? BTW I've no problems with two captains on a three pilot augmented crew if that's your answer
/QUOTE]

Wiggy, I don't think you read my post with the attention it deserves ! :))

In my dreams, yes ! I would love to have a second captain. By the way, that's what Emirates does on long sectors to Australia.
If not, at least, I want a Senior guy who is command trained, like Lufthansa.
I am not at all satisfied, and let me tell you I am not alone, with the system we have.
So if the tricky part turns out to be most of the flight, chances are...............I'll be sticking around for a good chunk of the flight. Call me a woos, I don't care.
I was in the bunk only a couple of days ago as I will be tonight and couldn't help thinking about my colleague, lying there in the dark and having to rush to the cockpit and try to make sense of what he was handed. I too, would have been toast on that one.
At the end of the day, you don't know the fellows you're flying with and they may or may not give you a good impression at sign on, hard and cruel fact is this : 7000 ft/ min at FL350 blasting off to 380. If you can sleep with this, good on you ! I can't.

The common thread throughout is that 'even an ab-initio PPL should have been able to recognize and recover this stall'.

In my flight testing I have had the experience of recovering from a fully developed stall on partial panel when the b$tard sitting next to me has applied full aft trim. Easy, if you know what the aircraft is doing.

It is a different kettle of fish if the the manual tells you, that for no speed info, you apply nose-up and power. At altitude this is going to take you to a stall, then, with (hidden) full aft trim, no stall warning and a TOGA power pitch-up couple you are probably flying an unrecoverable aircraft.

These pilots weren't stupid, there but for the grace ....

the b$tard sitting next to you
 

According to you, in the AF447, was the "b$tard" a human factor, the plane or the weather ?

My last employer mandated a second Captain for an augmented crew, and we also had a Flt. Eng., someone with aviation experience on the flight deck who might just be thinking outside the box relative to a pilots' thoughts, and also wasn't physically involved in handling the hardware in the same manner as the pilot, so could look at a problem from a different angle.

But that costs money, and we must always genufluct to Progress.( and profit )

The last words recorded from another accident where the pilot was confused as to the information he was receiving was - look at the standby ( which was giving the correct info. ) shouted by the F/Eng. Too late unfortunately, which of course raises issues of P.C. culture and CRM as well.

In my case it was the examiner, in their case in the absence of a trim wheel ....?

In either case relaxation of nose down can, or will, lead to a second stall ...

I think most of us figured it out a long time ago.

Wiggy, a 744 on UN873, the same airway as AF447, and preceding it by about 20 minutes deviated around the heaviest weather. A 340 following AF447 by 12 minutes also deviated. The next flight following the 340 was AF459, which deviated to both the left and right to fly around the MCC. AF459 deviated by 70 NM to the right of the track.

Arhhhhhggg!

Look, if you haven't read much of the thread you shouldn't be posting and wasting more time & space having your repeat questions re-answered :=

It was explained barely a dozen pages back (for about the 5th time!!) :ugh:

Nose Up
 

What would cause PF to keep the A/C in what I would summarize as a flared landing stall from FL380 to impact.
There is surely a missing piece here. Clearly the BEA statement is an extreme simplification of the facts. It implies that the pilots did everything professionally i.e. handled the a/c correctly given their training. Logically the cause must lie somewhere other than the pilots?

Presumably they did not ignore/neglect the flight instruments?
Were the flight instruments degraded more than just losing the Airspeed that the BEA is yet to release.
Did significant ice build up degrade the handling character of the airframe.

One thing is clear. A continuous tone stall warning would have helped as the plane had effectively "flat lined". The stall warning should not disable as the speed decays, if anything it should get loader.

IMHO the missing piece of why they sticked back is the largest hole in the swiss cheese. I was hoping for some resolution from BEA or the forum. However the statement has raised more questions than it has answered.


The other holes in the swiss cheese are a grey area and open to argument.

1. AF chose to not update pitots aggresively as some other airlines.
2. Prior to departure the Captain chose a flight path directly through the storm whereas the subsequent flights (Iberia and Lufthansa) took on extra fuel and significantly deviated.
3. Captain chose to take bunk rest during the more challenging part of the flight.
4. Airbus training in excursions outside the normal flight envelope and outside normal law are under represented.

I presume all data from all sensors gets recorded on the Flight Data Recorder, so there will be information saying they were in a stall and AoA when in fact due to frozen probes they, at the start at least, were not in a stall and the AoA is incorrect. The only correct information being pitch and power the same as what the pilots would have?
Why this has been released to the media in the way it has seems very poor management.
I have sat here reading as many posts as possible, it is a shame the pilot concerned has been referred to as a Baby and its been jumped on by all and sundry. I wonder how you would cope given the situation of long haul and in the frame of being in a routine. Unreliable airspeed is hard enough to cope with, but in a storm cell, never mind later on when your tail rips off -which the latter I haven't seen anyone make reference to yet.

Re 2 previous post, I seem to recall something about this specific route being tight on fuel in order to be achieved, and this is the reason they did not deviate around the storm, they simply couldn't spare the gas??
Or much simpler, they missed it in the departure brief and missed the trick of turning up the brightness on the weather radar so saw nothing! (latter been done before)

The tail didn't rip off while in flight but upon impact. That was one of the first findings 2 years ago.
Short of fuel ? Pressure ?
All I can say is this : in all the years I have been flying for AF, not once have I been given the " frown " for taking whatever quantity of fuel I deemed necessary.
We have figures as to the cost, that's all. The rest is entirely left up to you, your experience and judgement.
If I ever felt pressure......it was the one I was puting myself under.

:confused::(

Once enroute you can always get deviations for weather so I am sure all the other airliners on the same route did that. It still looks like the final report will be the repeated Airbus pitot/static problems that were slow in being corrected. The copilots should have been able to handle unreliable airspeed with no problem. Everybody wonders why the PF pulled back and zoomed to FL380 and entered a deep stall.

No airliner I have flown says to pull back, it says to hold appropriate pitch and power for weight and altitude. I know the Airbus has no feedback of what the other pilot is doing so complicates things.
Also the interim report leaves out so much information they have for some reason so even though I am sure they know what happened, we don't with the lack of information. The CVR will tell a lot of the story and the FDR will tell the rest when they release it.

Undercarriage Microswitch
 

I think that you will find it is normal to use an undercarriage microswitch so that when the aircraft is 'sat on the runway' the weight compresses the oleo and the microswitch says 'ON' when the weight is off the undercarriage the microswitch says 'OFF'. This is used for OOOI by ACARS but apparently is too simple for the Airbus design team who instead put in a system that was based on their assumption that at less than 60 kts the aircraft will be on the ground.
That was an incorrect assumption which in this case may have been one of the series of errors that ended with a destroyed aircraft.

75 additional bodies recovered from Air France crash after 2 years
 

Unless I skipped a page somewhere, I've not seen this posted. Apologies if it has been.

75 additional bodies recovered from Air France crash after 2 years - CNN.com

This is contrary to decisions I thought were made weeks ago.

Stall Whining
 

I wish somebody intimate with AOA vanes would come on here and explain authoritatively why stall warning shuts off below 60. It's a physical limitation. Maybe one of you whiners could come up with a design that's better than the present one, which is nearly as universal as the pitot tube. How often has the present design even been criticized in an accident investigation, let alone blamed?

A question for all the experts....

There has been no discussion of the lack of a distress call from AF447. Does this indicate the lack of situational awareness on the flight deck as they where struggling with the jet? Is it SOP to put out a distress signal when the :mad: is hitting the fan, regardless of where you are? Where the pilots to busy to put out a call, or too confused?

Extra Fuel
 

Delta T,
if you have to deviate around a large storm system and by doing so you run short of fuel, then you make an en route stop for fuel. It's that simple. They could have stopped in the Canaries or Lisbon for fuel, but now they will never have the chance of taking fuel ever again. Please pay attention to the fact that other flights took extra fuel, deviated and arrived safely. Flying is serious business.

Yep, but it took me longer than 3.5 minutes ...

Aviate, navigate, communicate. They hadn't got past the first which is why you see no discussion of the third.

Hi,

Fuel ?

The BEA report:
Do you know the extra fuel quantity take on board by Iberia and Lufthansa ?

The AF447 flight had enough fuel for change his route.
Read also the two BEA preliminary reports.

Bodies recovered
Those decisions were nullified by another .. one week ago when the results of ADN research on the two firsts bodies recovered were positive

Distress call

You answered yourself ....