Dozy.

Re your point 1. yep, having a yoke didn't save them. Perhaps these two F/Os might have been saved by the intervention of their Captain though, if he could have quickly grasped what was occurring?

He would have grasped it more clearly if he could have SEEN what inputs PF was making.

Agree?

Dozy.

Re my point about the autos making us lazy.

I guess you agree.

The less you fly, the less you CAN fly.

If you rarely fly, your skills diminish.

If you NEVER fly (and where I work the AP goes in at 1000 agl and stays in til final) you'll soon not be a pilot at all.

Surely 'piloting skills' ought to be valued in an aircraft pilot?

No.

Sometimes, as I'm driving to work, I think...'why am I flying this thing? what makes me the pilot instead of, say, an engineer- or that guy who taught me 'flat-panel'?


Or indeed, any guy who can wrestle the airacraft up to AP min engagement height!

What right do I have to call myself the 'grand fromage' pilot?

GY, great illustration.

Ladies and gents, if I may repost something CRITICAL to aviation safety ... from aquadalte ...

To serve man ... that is the purpose of the machine.

Period.

No, a stick is pivoted at the floor - correct? And the hand grips the stick in the palm with your fingers wrapped around - right? This has a totally different movement and total throw, compared to a joystick type controller. The total throw is what... 3 inches max forward/back for the joystick. Very different and uses a completely different set of muscles.

I guess there are just folks that refuse to see to control for what it is - there is also a wrist rest - the arm doesn't move, only the wrist and fingers.

Differing perceptions
 

GarageYears:

I guess all those joyful hours I spent flying Decathalons, Citabrias and Super Cubs gave me an entirely different perspective than yours. I find the "center stick" arrangement quite natural and easy to make precise control inputs with. It took me just a matter of minutes to adapt. It's not just me either.

Sidestick controllers came into vogue in the past couple of decades and I've yet to fly a plane so equipped. I'm sure they're fine too when properly designed with sensible force/motion/feedback (feel) built in. Long-EZ and Airbus pilots seem to like it. Pilots have adapted to a number of differing man/machine interface system designs over the course of aviation history. Some worked better and were more accepted than others. Some arrangements are better suited to certain missions. But you won't find many pilots with "stick" time who think it's a bad or even uncomfortable system to use. I'll agree that "center sticks" probably won't be anyone's first choice for installation on large transports!

The lack of motion interconnect on the Airbus sidesticks is something worthy of consideration though...

JenCluse

Love your post and agree completely. Nice to see that more and more FBW experienced pilots (read this Safety?) admonish the absence of a vitally fundamental in Airbus cockpits.

As to the sidestick discussion:

There is no problem with a sidestick.
After 25 years of J3 stick, MD yokes, even the Bonanza Z-yoke, it took me 15 minutes to get used to the Airbus sidestick, be it with the left or with the right hand. It flies very well, is nicely precise, confirmed by all Airbus pilots.
I'd take a sidestick over a fossil yoke anytime, had it a tactile feedback though ....

What we focus on, is not what kind of a stick it is, or where it's located, but what it does.
Or what it does not and what the consequences are in terms of safety, stubborn denial from the lobby or not.

Not all sticks are pivoted at the floor. I've flown several (most) that had the pitch pivot at the floor, but the roll pivot higher on the stick. Also, floor height may be significantly different among types.

And, NO, I do not grip a stick in the palm! Depending on the airplane, different parts of the FINGERS are used to grip the stick (and occasionally braced with the edge of the palm), but SELDOM with the fingers wrapped around!

Regardless of the total throw, the grip on either a conventional center stick or a sidestick is VERY dependent on the individual installation. You apparently have little or no experience flying real airplanes with stick controls...

While there may be a wrist rest in SOME airplanes, and SOME sidesticks use no arm movement, that is definitely NOT a universal truth! A brace for the forearm or elbow may well replace a wrist rest. I doubt you could fly a Cobra without arm movement, though it may be possible in an F-16 or A3xx (I've flown neither of the last 2).

Someone has finally grasped the direction design is moving in (bold text).
The technology is in tune with humans but the ultimate or primary goal may not be to serve pilots interests. We are in a transition phase to pilotless aircraft. The significant influence which will determine how quick or how slow this is implemented will be public perception

Many of you will remember the introduction of computers and hand held calculators. Apparently they were rubbish because they kept making mistakes in their calculations. The mistake however was more often than not the user. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

Early FBW pilots used to complain the aircraft did this or that without their input only to find out on examining the flight data that they did in fact move the stick and they did in fact cause the input.

In both the above cases very occasionally the system was at fault. Despite all the complaints at the time, I doubt there are many that support going back to human filing systems or the abacus.

I am sure many of you have used the driversless trains at some modern airports.

This harping on about the good ol days will not achieve much. There is no safety case. Even older generation aircraft had their own character including the spitfire which suffered from handling difficulties if the c of g was too far aft. Pilots however tuned in to the aircraft.

Number of aircraft in service, number of flights, number of fatalities all indicate proven technology. Humans remain the weakest link. Until the safety case is proven I still believe the argument should be about training and not technology.

Safety

1. No one wants to go back to the good old days. Repeating that eternally doesn't make it true.

2. If you pretend that there is no safety case basically takes you out of the discussion equation.

3. Arguing that even on the other planes some guys crashed is only an infantile argument, not a valid one (look Mama, he did it too ...).
Look at the one in question, with its technology, try to fix that and then go on to the other.

You need to understand one thing:
To really and objectively judge if there is a safety issue, you need to have operated both systems (with and without feedback/driveback). Many pilots who actually have, joined us who ask to have all the new technology kept in the systems, but add tactile feedback to Airbusses. For the sake of enabling the pilot to better do what he is kept for in a modern airliner.
No engineer, no FS pilot, not even PPL pilots would have the real time experience of both designs.
This should not be taken as arrogance, but as sheer fact.

In science and technology there is no such thing as "that's the way it is, adapt or leave" (didn't I hear such cr@p before? Right, it was something like "love it or leave it").
Science has to try different approaches, otherwise its results mean zilch.

I miss the differentiated approach to this particular issue. Instead of stubbornly denying anything could be missing, why not try and install such devices on a trial aircraft. Boeing had a sidestick with driveback developped, only to have the United pilots request back the yoke (now here is a classic case of what you described Safety, I admit and condemn).

Get it and install it.
This aircraft could then be evaluated by all sides in such replicated upsets.

I would certainly volunteer and go for such test for free.

Been following the thread for a while and some good valid points are being put across from both sides but some folks are arguing for the sake of it, @Dozzy i think you are missing the point or deliberately trying to push peoples buttons, it had been earlier explained very clearly that the NWA 727 crew didnt push nose down though they had a yoke, simply because they both believed that their actions were correct trying to recover from a percieved overspeed as opposed to the AF PF who had no clue what he was doing and his PM had no way of seeing his control column inputs.

Now i crawl slowly back to my woodwork...

"Pretending" there isn't a safety case.

In the 60's and 70's we had more accidents. We also had analogue aircraft with cable runs, AOA indicators and stick feedback crashing. We also had pilots who were human and unfortunately the biggest single cause of accidents.

In the 21st century we have removed the cable runs, removed the feedback (on some a/c), significantly increased automation but we still have pilots and we still have accidents.

Although the accidents have significantly reduced the number one cause is still pilot error yet the safety statistics and results of accident investigation show no significant difference between Boeing philosophy and Airbus philosophy.

Designers will be continuously monitoring operation and performance for improvements including of course accident causes. The aircraft are different, the way flying is conducted today is different yet there really is a valid argument about training and time "hands on". Is it sufficient?

There isn't however, yet at least, a valid argument about the technology. The industry remains driven by cost and safety. Until you can present a case that meets one of those criteria nothing will change.

On that basis it would appear that change isn't coming so industry has accepted that pilot error remains the issue and not technology. That is not meant to be derogatory just a statement of how it is today for those outside your bubble.

talking about a bubble ....



Well, I think I have to rest my case, as the tecno bubble seems to have a greater surface tension, mainly financially driven, than the genuine safety concern bubble of pilots.

You know, the ones with their bums inside the thing.

Brave new world

AOA gauge is there as an option already (I believe) - airlines just don't order it. An extra gauge will make no difference without training to use it - it might as well display phase of the moon. AF apparently couldn't be bothered to train pilots to manually fly in cruise at all (A/P goes off - learn to fly a new a/c, fast) - what makes you think they would have trained AOA ?

Feedback - well, it might improve things or it might not. Intuitively, yes - more feedback through more channels = better. In pratice, aviation history is littered with the smoking holes left by those who have ignored and overridden stick shakers and pushers, all the way to the ground.

The 'bus designers didn't just decide to do something different from shaker / pusher, they went for "better" with active protections ["limits" for Gums - but that's just semantics and audience because I sure wouldn't want to be the designer that tells a fighter pilot I'm going to "protect" him by limiting his control authority!].

Unfortunately, in this case (and perpignan) the protections were lost due to technical faults, leaving the warning system that is maybe less good than the old stick shaker. So question should be, is the overall system - active protections degrading to aural warning at 1 in 10k flight hours - better or worse than "stick shaker only" ?

I'd say they made it better. Could it be improved ? - certainly.
Should they go back ? - not IMO.

That's agreed. The tricky bit is how to know what makes things safer. There are so many changing variables and so little accident signal buried in the statistical noise that you could find support for almost any change.

Human factors, and particularly human-machine interface is a complex area, and the little involvment I've had with it has given a clear impression of how counterintuitive it is.

Users of a system (pilots in this case) will happily tell you how they use it and how it needs to work - but record their usage with eye-trackers etc. and you'll get completely different answers. I would expect that to apply even to highly trained pilots and insturment scan - I bet that they weren't looking at what/where they thought they were when it all hit the fan in that cockpit.

The most interesting link posted on these threads (more than once)
was the Nasa study of A vs B control systems for CFIT escape. Covering sidestick, laws protections the lot. Result:

• the pilots overwhelmingly thought B was the better system
• the actual outcome was that the A system saved your ass more often

So which set of designers got it right ? Not easy.

Hi,

If we base the analysis of a statistical point of view .. (those known) it is clear that removing the pilots of the aircraft is definitely the solution.
This would avoid 80% of accidents to occur.
What a huge step for flight safety :D
But it would be to forget the number of accidents prevented by the presence of pilots
Who can give me a statistic about the accidents avoided by the intervention of the pilots ? :)

jcjeant,
This one you probably can't find, as most who achieved it are probably keeping quiet, as in many instances the "save" will have been a response to a prior cock-up on their part :hmm:

I think the bottom line in all this is that the original designers of the control architecture & responses in Airbii FBW were not really taking pilots wishes too seriously in their list of priorities.
Any of you who know the chequered history of Monsieur B Zeigler (& cringed at his Paris /Farnborough air show boasts about the maid being able to fly his new wunder-plane) will underatand better how the "aircraft knows best" control concept was evolved. How we laughed (not) after Habsheim/Bangalore/Mt St Odile at the inane previous "uncrashable" horlocks he had spouted.
If a situation, no matter how it was provoked (AF447/ Perpignan ? doesn't matter) could have been better assimilated & resolved by enhanced pilot perception of what was happening & what the other guy has done/is doing/ will do in the causal chain , it is difficult to argue against more feedback being a good thing (unless you are a Beanie /pilot basher , or both)
If an aircraft is being genuinely operated two crew, and you expect the "pilot monitoring " to actually monitor, I think you would be well advised to give him the tools to actually monitor what his cohort is up to, and possibly for both of them to rapidly understand what their Bus is doing, in a manner more obvious than currently only available by closely monitoring ( & rapidly assimilating whilst all goes pear shaped around you) ECAM messages & instruments.
Anyone who has flown through severe weather will realise the limitations of relying solely on this.
And don't get me started on how it will all be when these things get older & the wiggly-amps go on the blink even more often :eek:

If you lose control of your car on a slippery bend do you find it easier /more intuitive to manipulate the pedals/steering wheel to avoid the ditch, or would you find it easier to jump into the sat-nav & arm "skid correction" whilst hurtling ditchwards ? If your car was two-crew & you as DM (driver monitoring) had to decide whether to activate this or another system , would you not find it just a little helpful to see what the other guy was doing with the wheel ?
Humans are far better at intervention than analysis, we need to have the information /mechanism to do this. Nanny is right 99% of the time, but we cannot rely on her ,otherwise how do we grow up.
Our current generation of pilots are in regression in terms of basic piloting ability, we need to reverse this trend, it is time Airbus listened to what we ask for to achieve this.

That is a very good point. However if we quote infrequentflyer we may get a brief insight into current thinking.

So we already have an operational system that has been scientifically proven to save butts more often. Therefore the answer may well lie in a different approach to training including more hands on time.

Have to seriously disagree with that but it is a trade off influenced by other factors.

What's all this obsession with the sidestick (mainly from other manufacturers lovers...)? Why would one want a yoke if there are no cables, springs, whatever, to pull? It's illogical to use a yoke on a fly-by-wire aircraft. Should we all be typing with a typewriter (mechanical) instead of our keyboards? :ugh:

Think the main obsession is with its position (out of sight of the other guy) & the fact that there is no feedback to the other guy what you are doing & vice-versa, particularly as it is all about pressure rather than movement (AFAIK ?having not have the pleasure of "Bussing" it . . . except TO work, not after I arrive ! )

The History is full of CFIT's with yokes equipped aircrafts, you know, even with that feedback and position sight thing.

You are right, it looks natural and the basic idea is not bad at all, and it has proved to be safe and workable as the thrust levers do as well.
But it lacks two important features, a yoke or a stick or conventional throttle linkage in former A/C provided:

- tactile feedback from flightcontrols / throttle position
- tactile feedback from the second set of control input, being it SS or yoke.

Those feedbacks are negligable when things work out straight forward, they are missing when things start to get wrong in more ways:

- it is easy to get out of the loop and be caught by surprise (flightcontrol imputs / throttle position prior something going wrong not known)
- it is hard to catch up and make the correct input (if the inputs / position prior something going wrong is not known, the input might be wrong as well)
- it takes more time for the feedback loop, as the action first needs to be transferred to the flight controls / engines and the resulting change later on gets displayed to the panel and has to be picked up by the eyes.
- this feedback over the panel needs an input channel (the eyes) which might be at it´s limit already, saturated by things gone wrong.
- as this process is not a single one, but has to take place several times in a short period of time with changing parameters, references and environmental and human factors, it influences and hinders other necessary processes of the senses, other channels of human sensing as well.

Let me use your exemple of the keyboard here. If you plug everything on one hub to your PC system and saturate that channel, you might not only slow your system down, you may loose some letters, and there might other input/ output demands been affected to.

The keyboards still have the initial feedback of a typewriter, you press the key, the initial force is higher, and when you reach the point where the key sends the letter on its way to the system, the force resistance brakes down. That way i dont have to look at my screen to see the letter written down, i can feel it. On my iphone there is no tactile feedback from the keys, i have to check the screen or i switch on the aural feedback.
Typewriter is out for 30 years, but we still use the keyboard the same way as an typewriter. Why did the hardware manufacturers do that? Because it´s easier to write that way.

I think nobody really needs the yoke back,or cables and pulleys, but why not build in the features, which would keep the nice design and functions of the SS / autothrottles and provide the desired tactile feedback? It would make things still more safer and not unsafe at all. Most is built in anyway. Feedback loops to the flightcontrol computers are already present, so imho its the SS and throttle mechanics that need to change and some programming to get the feedback info present in the Flightcontrol computer to output the respective signal and create the artificial feedback signal to the changed mechanics. It costs money, so what? Flying is too cheap anyway, in two weeks i go on leave to Sardegna, the two way trip for three persons is under 150.- €. I would not care to pay 50.-€ more.

You still miss the point. Nobody wants to change the system back and make it more unsafe, call it further development under new aspects.

With training you are so right, but you do not overlook the consequences. The things we talk about here can only be trained in a limited way, as the saturation of the channels (eyes, ears) are natural and can be influenced only in a limited way by training, and i mean by a lot of training.

Training would have to be done in relation to real dogsh**t situations, and part of it in the real aircraft.

The approach of new technology however was and is and has to be in the future to get things like flying and training for flying easier, simpler and also cheaper.

For this task the system-human interface has to change in some points, the training has to change as well undoubtedly, and management has to allow their pilots more hands on stick in the real aircraft.


Edit: Most gear handles are still shaped in the form of an wheel, and flap handles like an airfoil. Because of tactile feedback. One of those can be found and handled in the dark without looking at them. Did somebody had the idea already to change those into an pushbutton on the top panel? I hope not.

big red button
 

A question from a SLF who most lurks and learns a lot here.
At any point after the initial upset and once the initial period of pitot-iced UAS ended, did the systems on board AF447 have sufficient information about the aircraft's attitude/altitude/speed(s) to ascertain and deliver the appropriate recovery inputs? (i.e. would the kind of Hail Mary recovery systems on Cirrus and some other aircraft have worked if the big red button was pushed?)
If so, then could it be that the fundamental issue is not how much "Nanny" control is best but training pilots to know when they are out of their depth or have lost awareness. It certainly seems that all three pilots in AF447 understood that they didn't understand what was going on and what to do.

Statistically proven is perhaps a more accurate, or precise description (yes, statistics is a science).

One can train the pilots 24 hours a day. Training will not change the fact that from the stick position/status perspective, the PNF cannot see directly what the PF is doing (with the stick) - the PF might as well be separated by a wall, or covered by a blanket, it would not matter.

As I've already mentioned, practically in any system, several levels of indirection and several levels of translation/conversion of information instead of direct, single step transfer of information is not the way to do it, if the goal is instant and efficient information transfer for synchronization between two pilots.

The failure of the indirection and translation/conversion of information, as it is shown by the AF 447 - night time, and instrument information malfunction - is a clear instance for anyone who is objective enough to see the system in which the chain of indirection and translation/conversion of information was/got broken due to its weakness. And as usual, the breaking happened at the worst time, when the information was needed the most.

I am confident though that the Airbus architects and system designers are astute and quick in seeing this shortcoming, along with the others, and developing the necessary system improvements.

An excellent comment from Flight Safety Foundation.

we are going in circles.

your opinion but I would quote mountainsnake as my reply as I consider you still miss the point

Once again if we compare amount of fatalities and accidents from the 60's and 70's with now, what are we discussing here?

I do not want to undo anything but it would seem the flight safety foundation align with my arguments. This is not and should not be about technology.

It is about training.

Was the SS position for the PNF really the problem?
 

Well, the F-16 side-stick moves just about 1/8" total throw.... It is a force demand input, not a deflection demand. A regular poster here, Gums, can very eloquently explain, after spending a good many hours in the Viper. FWIW - all F-16 SS's are right-handed and I never heard of a left-handed pilot finding this a problem

I still think you are missing the point regarding center "sticks" and the different muscle sets used to move them - if a center stick provides roll control, then it pivots at the stick head (I presume you mean yoke type control, a pic or reference to aircraft type would help), your entire arm moves to effect the movement, pivoting at the ball socket of your shoulder. With a joystick this is never so.

Again, I think that AB spent many, many hours looking into the human factors aspect of the cockpit design (along with Porsche I recall) and I'm confident that this is not the root of all evil related to the AF447 accident.

I will give you the lack of positional feedback for the PNF, does, on the surface, seem to be an issue worth inspection - when the original Airbus sidestick driven aircraft were introduced, the technology to *reliably* drive the non-active stick was likely considered a significant risk. Since basically all AB cockpits are a simple derivative of the previous, the SS arrangement has been retained A320 through A380, probably not without good thought.

But, really, were not all the required indications available to both PNF and Captain - surely the ADI and altitude readout alone should have been the only two instruments necessary to figure out the situation, along with the fact the engines were working:

1) I'm pitched up (What was it? 15 degrees or thereabouts?)
2) I'm falling at 10K/min
3) I have engine power

Hmmm, what could be wrong....

Did the PNF or Captain ever state - "The aircraft is stalled, pitch-down! Lower the nose!"

Was it because the PF had the SS nailed to the rear stop? Would that have been the vital clue to all in that cockpit? Or was the problem well past that?

....................

During the roughly 1/2 a century of electronic computers, generation, after generation, problems/bugs in the software and/or hardware were cause of operational problems, smaller, or bigger, and got fixed from one version to the next of the OS/applications, or of the hardware, regardless of the particulars of the software, or hardware technology used. In the same time, new versions brought new sets of problems/bugs. And the cycles are continuing, it's not different today, than it was 10, or 20, or more years ago, and it's not different than it is in other industries.

Post Voss, the circle closes. From ACARS alone, the initial impression in public view was of an a/c in deepess, One can probably conclude that for at least one of the flightcrew present it appeared that way.

So it is. Not a training issue, for the training was on the money; it's in the book. Not A Stall (training) issue, the correct technique was not applied.

Not a "Mysterious quirk of hitherto unknown Physics" (BA038).

A system has shown quirks in the aftermath of the initial blunder. The SS actually can be improved! The STALL warning system might need a tweak. The THS system can benefit from some critiique.

For two years, a few posters have been trying to point out the meat of the matter was in and around 2:10:05.

The 'pinch' in the pipe. As above, accidents lately seem organized around some very elementary concepts.

For the Wrights, they had an excuse. After all the Press, all the pats on the back, and all the airshows and corporate intrigue, A perfectly good Airplane went in with all her people.

As a Pilot, I find that embarrassing.

The stick status and its handling was important, as it was a main cause, in two phases, (a) from the beginning of the climb to stall, (b)from stall all the way to the minimum altitude from where the recovery would have been possible.

Seeing, or perceiving directly the handling of the active stick would have been the very easy, unambiguous way, and the very fundamental direct information needed.

The instruments are ONLY AN INDIRECT indicator of the actions on the stick, and are in the same time indicators of other causal elements, and therefore can be ambiguous, and even hide the very cause of a certain behavior.

From a system architecture perspective, the instruments are at one end in "a chain of elements" that among other things do a transfer of information. The "chain" includes further, the "state of the a/c" in space, then the status of the "control surfaces", etc..... The "position/handling of the stick" is at the other end in the chain, the very opposite one.

This "chain" in its function of transferring information, represents from an abstract system architecture perspective several levels of indirection, and translation/conversion of information, which can ambiguate or hide from one end to the other, the information that is really needed, as the AF 447 clearly has shown.

Yes, embarrassing. Forest/Trees (pun intended). The problem is a bit basic, and should have been entertained and mitigated perhaps back in the thirties (It was).

Step back, let's. Going back to the drafting table is what got us here. The solution was in the elementaries, and long ago.

Making a simple endeavour complicated is arse about?

As per JDEE, the hardware is archaic, simplistic, and dependable.

Archaic, simplistic, and dependable = PILOT.

Ziegler was a lunatic. False idols and all that. Making the ship complex, for the sake of its complexity, was a fools errand.

See, ECAM. What a load of "Les bolloisie". The warnings can be cleared by the system presenting them to the PILOT.

Right, in the midst of what was a challenging flight theme, let's make everything dependent on the one resource ill-equipped to handle the system. And then, when he fails, light him up, and get everyone started on why the system is Excellent/Bulless.

Time release homicide. I blame Bernard.

"The silly Pilot couldn't cope". That's the expletive of those complicit in this cruel joke.

Pilots need to stop pretending they are GOD's gift, and Techies need to
stop acting like the Gift's GOD.

juct a tuppence, eh?

I'm sure that after 150-odd pages of opinions, there will be more than enough available to decry this excellent article, but the author, Peter Garrison--an occasional poster here--has, I think, done a splendid job of explaining AF447 within the limits of a newspaper op-ed article's space and the fact that it was written for a general audience.

Air France 447: Super-smart planes still vulnerable to human error - latimes.com

Thanks for posting Bill Voss's remarks.

I have been making this point for a very long time now. But I see in the Tech thread there are still those who believe, like Alain Bouillard of the BEA that pitching the aircraft to 5° at cruise altitude is the correct response. It isn't.

The UAS drill is badly written and can mis-direct the crew into an incorrect response if the Memory Items, intended for when the safety of the aircraft is immediately impacted such as the takeoff phase, are executed at cruise altitudes. The training they had would have been at low altitude, right after takeoff, where the UAS Drill's Memory Items are appropriate until the aircraft is above the MSA or circuit altitude. The "If above FL100....5° of pitch" qualification is misleading and wrong.

In cruise flight the initia UAS Memory Items should not be followed step-by-step - the aircraft is to be leveled-off for troubleshooting yet there is no evidence that any new thinking on the UAS Memory drill has been introduced.

Bill Voss is right - this should have been a log-entry. He is also right about how benign the initial failure was. It is almost a non-event...take over and hand fly, "do nothing", which means maintain level flight, while the system sorts itself out. The even certainly didn't threaten the safety of the aircraft.

So the Computers turned over the flying to the human, and he got it wrong?

So pat, so concise, so off target. If anyone could temporarily turn off the knee jerk "judgment", we may make some actual progress.

Implicit in Mr. Garrison's conclusion is the source of the very problem that caused this accident. It is here on this and other threads, and is not being addressed.

It is mouse trap thinking at its worst, and dare I say, most deadly.

Until we can improve the technology, these events are acceptable?

Until we can improve the training, these events are acceptable?

No, and NO. Ziegler set the tone with his supercilious and smarmy conceit.

The AB fbw system is OLD. The pilot's were experienced. Yet, in an event that is (should have been) mundane, 228 souls DIED.

So long as simplistic judgment is perpetuated, people will continue to die.

Groundhog day is unacceptable. Look a little deeper, seek the AHA moment.

Stop pushing our Peas to the side. Eat your Peas. Stop with the shoulder shrugging, the winks and the nods.

Someone put "Dumb" in the cockpit, and I don't mean pilots. Get the dumb out. Then I'll book a flight on an airbus. I can fly for free anywhere. I choose to pay, and fly other than AIRBUS.

Dear oh dear oh dear. Lymon I get the feeling you want some startling statement to take to the AF447 court case.

Well here it is PILOT ERROR.

For all those claiming unsafe, come back with proof, an accident statistic, something other than emotive pleas for the good ol days of yoke's and feedback.

Till then EASA has just published a document highlighting no fatal accidents in 2010 involving a European airline. Accidents globally are at their lowest level ever.

Bill Voss The FSF president stated

Sadly one need go no further because as mountainsnake stated

Hi safety

None so blind.... Look, PILOT ERROR implies HUMAN PILOT, is that fair?

You do mean Human, yes? Because the AUTO is also a PILOT. Any integral discrete computing system can fly an aircraft. ANY.

Why did the AUTO PILOT DISCONNECT? THAT IS 'FAIL', and before the PF could clear his throat. It also qualifies as an UPSET, in the REGULATIONS.

THE PF was, and must be considered, a back up system. You gloss over this, and for some bias, I assume.

You have, implicit in your tone and delivery, a childish bias for facts that are not present.

For once, can someone make a statement, and not end it as if he were channeling MOSES? That, for reason of implicit wisdom, the finding is the end of discussion?

See, I disagree with you, strongly. Do not take that personally, consider it an invitation to continue. If you wish not to discuss, stop addressing your commentary to me. If you comment, I may respond, that you will have to accept, I think.

Safety Concerns:

the science of ergonomics and human factors was just beginning in the 60's and 70's. I find your appeal (a refrain often made by numbers people) to that era of air mishasp disingenuous.

The numbers actually show me that air travel is quite safe right now, with all of those manned aircraft flying all over the globe daily in their thousands.

We are in the digits to the right of the decimal in terms if incidents, and beyond that in accidents, per flight hour.

Each crash can almost be treated as a special cause, if you are running the numbers as you would in a production environment, even if one bows down at the altar of six sigma.

Enough on the numbers.

Your pilotless personnel transport aircraft is a poor idea for anyone other than a lab rat.

Given the number of Predators that have crashed (an example I am famililar with from personal experiences and knowledge, I am pretty sure there were others), I find your proponency for unmanned personnel transport aircraft baffling.

If you take those Predator crashes and put 228 people in each of them, you'd find a groundswell of opinion against your industry bias proposing unpiloted passenger aircraft.

That human error is a common element of a human undertaking (powered flight) should not come as a surprise.

What surprises me is anyone who will profess by their argument a belief in the culmination of aircraft development into a zero defects, automated personnel transport system*. Those pilotless aircraft will crash too, if you build them, and what is unknown is how often. We'll only know after we count those body bags, won't we?

* = That is the between the lines read I am getting from you.(And some of our other non-pilot participants). It is a proposal that only appears attractive from an idealized bottom line discussion on a spreadsheet.

I have concerns for safety as well, being mostly a passenger these days, and only when I have to be.

I know, having worked with mechanical and electromechanical things since I first repaired a bicycle at age eight, that things manufactured by humans often break, sometimes predictably and sometimes unexpectedly.

You can take your pilotless airliner and park it on the ramp in Hell. I won't pay the fare to travel in one -- ever. (Hell, I barely fly now). Nor will I travel in a bus without a driver.

I don't trust robots.

Why?

I don't trust the people who make them to be free from human error.

See how that works? The machine does what someone tells it to do ... remember our old friend General Protection Fault from Windows 3.11?

Too many dead friends, for reasons both mechanical and human, as well as the ultimate cause in aviation: gravity.

I am not interested in trusting someone with no skin in the game.

Wonder how an unmanned A320 would have fared landing in a x-wind in Hamburg ?

The fact that the aileron authority is reduced if a main wheel touches down during the whoopsy/ go-around would no doubt have been fed into it's electronic brain. Shame no-one had previously thought to tell the human robots about it.
What other little foibles/glitches are still hidden in there , just waiting for the required circumstances to rear their ugly heads.
My 20 yr old 737 Classics occasionaly throw electronic wobblies that I have never seen in 20 odd years of flying them.
How will Airbii perform when they get a little older ?

Some interesting accident investigation in store in Africa etc in a few years when they end up with their 3rd/4th , no doubt loving/caring /technically superb, owners. :rolleyes:

Lyman:

Through hook or by crook you continue (and have done under previous user names) to incite, infer and apportion blame, either explicitly or otherwise, in all directions, other than in the lap of the fella with his hand on the controls. Or do I misunderstand you?

At one point you were campaigning vigorously that the V/S had snapped off in mid-air... despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. You got quite animated.... but were quite wrong. In fact that has been your operating mode since pretty much day 1.

This was not the first UAS instance affecting an Airbus - but unless I am mistaken, it is the first that ended up in the Ocean. So, were the prior successful UAS occurrences luck? The aircraft systems were the same. The same cockpit displays, controls, warning tones, etc. What was different? The fella charged with flying the aircraft... yep, that is one identifiable difference.

Yes, the human got it wrong. Why can't you accept that? It seems as if that simple concept is somehow entirely implausible. It MUST be the planes fault.

Can the plane be improved? Yes, I suspect so - better support information for the human, perhaps MORE automation/protections.... better pitots in the first place, etc. But ultimately the PF is sitting up front because there ARE failures, things drop off, or break, and since autonomous flight is not (yet) desired, "we" (collectively, as a flight community) believe that the best outcome will come with a trained crew in the front seats. In this case, the crew lined up the holes in many slices of cheese in a particularly unfortunate order.

As has been more eloquently put by others, what should have been a log-book entry, became a disaster. Deal with it.

UAS
 

A lot of good reading here lately ... Thanks guys !



2.5 deg + N1 at one o'clock ... I'm all for it too.

My question to you, PJ2 :
Why the BEA still 'believe' in the 5 degrees ?

Moses hath spake.

Yes the other UAS incidents were luck. You put 32 successful against the One fatal, and can't notice that makes 33, instead of 32:1?

What emanated from the VS discussion was a lot of interesting discussion, and an understanding, an informal one, of how the VS and the Rudder operate.

You appear to believe that focusing blame in one (accepted) direction closes the subject. Yet you criticise me for being narrow? Pot/Black.


Making this personal is useless, immature, and a waste of energy.

You think I am up to some form of harm? Evidently you do, or you value your passion so little you take time to get upset into the wind?

relax

lonewolf you should read my posts.

I made it quite clear early on I do not agree with removing pilots from the cockpit. I am merely highlighting the industry wish and the fact that some pilots do not help themselves on this issue by continuously referring to perceived safety issues that aren't there.

I accept it must be difficult and I respect the loyalty shown to colleagues no longer with us.

Safety is driven by statistics. You have no chance of getting stick feedback on a bus until accidents occur where without any shadow of any doubt lack of feedback was an issue.

You have seen the NASA results of A v B and the A320 over 20 years into service is doing just fine and is safer (statistically) than a 737.

Therefore my point was merely that if as a group of professionals you are hell bent on the return of stick feedback, you need to find a different argument because going on about perceived automatics issues with AF447 or Habsheim or anywhere else won't help your cause.

Let me stand in agreement with you, then, safety concerns. Feedback is not an issue. It is vestigial.

Feedback is a form of SA, and a tactile one. Cockpits have been non tactile for a generation. (commercial).

I made note before, that allowing one's body to sense and decide a course of recovery of control is a very bad thing. One is stuck with, works from, instruments, and indications.

Is it possible PF was trying to utilize his 'feel'. Could be, he certainly chased NOSE UP until 1.65 'g'. If he was flying 'g', he was in the weeds.

I don't reject Pilot blunders, and yes, it is difficult. But there are a thousand pilots like the one caught out here. Is that comforting?

My bottom line. The Big Picture. Salivating and ranting about the "ONE" UAS incident that was fatal, and how safe fbw truly is, is dangerous.

In jumping on this pilot, one is entering a dangerous State.

The State of DENIAL. Reliance on automatic flight is routine. How is all of a sudden a shift to Human flight uncomfortable? Pilotage should be a given, a default to be yearned for, not feared.

This time it was "his" fault? That is shortsighted, and dangerous.