Yes, I understand this. But in that situation the PNF or the Captain should still be observing what the PF is doing. There should have been open dialogue between the 3 and the Captain should have taken a leadership role. From what we read this was not the case. Furthermore they are all AB pilots and understand this and should be able to work around it with that knowledge....

Razoray,

given your opinion as the "probable cause", the "why" is part of the contributing factors. So far, we had a lot of keywords for those factors, e.g.:

- CRM
- Man-machine-interface (stick vs. yoke, aural warnings, ...)
- (poor / mediocre / too much sim) Training
- Psycho factors
- Weather
- Darkness
- Software issues
- ...

Assessing and prioritizing them is the challenge. Some forum members tackled a lot of those keywords. Adding them to their opinion in a structured way would very much add to the value of this thread.

What a sick concept really when pilots need to work things around ...

Sidestick is a sure way to waste valuable information in a multi crew operation.

There are some interesting comments on the CVR that address what the PF might have been doing. Can they be related to this design flaw?

"What's HE doing now?" LOI leads to LOC. And sustains it?

mmmm. I knew there would eventually be a "gem" if I carried on reading the AF447 threads.
Pilots recognize they are causing the stall if the control column/ stick is in their gut and they are pulling it, perhaps the Nintendo side stick does not give the same info?

Would any real pilot sit with the stick in their gut for 3 min and not think they are stalled?

Should Airbus fit a "stick shaker" which activates at a given angle of attack?

Anyone so pig$hit thick as not to be able to recognise and recover from a stall shouldn't be flying. Whether hi-tech Airbus, lo-tech Bubba Boeing or whatever.

I can't believe this thread is still crawling along. A mix of ignorant speculation and hillbilly rhetoric, it is surely time to close it.

Please!

BEagle. Maybe you are correct. Maybe the AF crew was "pig$hit thicke". Maybe they should't have been there.............

But they were there; and now they and 225 other people are dead.

If this accident were as easy to understand as you want to believe, then anyone with like selection, training and background needs to be grounded immediately.


All of these AF447 threads have " jumped the shark", but that isn't grounds to close them. If you don't like it, stop reading.

Sounds like a plan, it's about time we move forward with something other than rhetoric on how to redesign an aircraft

I have an even better plan: Put everyone in a sim and expose them to the same scenario. If they survive, they can continue to fly, if they don't, they don't. We call it check.

:D
I suspect some airlines will suffer pilots shortage

I have a feeling the airlines with that big yoke in their gut would end up with a lot more pilots left than the airlines with that little sidestick. Since I have been called a caveman for suggesting this in the past I will let you guys decide.

Automated stall recovery?
 

Frequent SLF here, flying most of the time aboard A330/340's, better informed than average but that's it. I very seldom post. Feel free to ignore or delete if inappropriate.
I have two questions. It's not humanely possible to read each and every post on AF447 here (although I've already read a large part of them over the past years) so I've tried searching but failed to find answers.

1) when reliable airspeed information was recovered, did the flight control system switch back to normal mode with all the protections available or not? (I presume not). Is this by design?

2) would some kind of automated high altitude stall recovery be conceivable on such a plane? at least forcing a stick push action?
I find it so disturbing that the AB has so many protections to prevent incursions outside of the flight envelope and that none of this automation could no anything while the PF was holding the stick full aft for long minutes and the plane was stalled.

Sorry for the naive questions. This is *not* a attempt at restarting a new FBW pro-con war and I would be very frustrated if it did.

Another Issue
 

'The Captain returned from a break'. Quite possibly he may have been sleeping in a legal in flight rest period. if woken from sleep, sleep inertia may well have made his decision making skills somewhat erratic for anything up to twenty minutes after he awoke. On the assumption that he was alerted of the situation immediately by the cruise crew, he had only three and one half minutes to regain his composure. Posiibly not long enough to provide a valid input to the situation. Just a random thought.

I don't think the sidestick was invisible to the LHS PNF or PM.
OK you have to look across the flight deck, unlike having a yoke in your gut, but even with the lights down you can see RHS sidestick from the LHS in a 319/320. I am prepared to be corrected by a 330 capt but I don't believe that the two cockpits are that different.
Chances are that the cockpit lighting would have been up somewhat if lightning was around.

No and yes.

If you trust a computer (and the data it's fed with) enough to do an automatic recovery you could just as well let it take action before the actual stall occurs. Then you have what an Airbus gives you in normal law.
There are devices like stick shakers (literally rattling the yoke to alert the pilot by other means than just the aural stall warning) and stick pushers (required on some a/c with unfavourable stall characteristics, automatically pushing the controls ND to initiate recovery). Both systems help but are no sure fire solution. There have been incidents where the action of the stick shaker has been mistaken for mach buffet (a sign of the aircraft being too fast) thus provoking exactly the wrong actions. Even stick pushers have been overridden right into the ground. As they say, invent something foolproof and nature will come up with a better fool.

I agree; 'humanely' is the correct spelling.


Let's face it, this looks to have been one massive screw up by not just one, but all three 'pilots'. I've observed co-pilot manual flying skills and the application of straightforward common sense/airmanship deteriorate over the last thirty years. I've no idea what the 'old school' AF447 Captain's excuse would be, but I doubt it could be even slightly convincing.


Sidesticks in the present configuration(s) are clearly an extremely bad idea, most especially given the potential for the inputs of unbelievable incompetents to be concealed or too subtly annunciated.

The 'sidestick v. Yoke' issue is surely a factor in this accident.

Maybe not the only factor, but a factor nonetheless that shouldn't be discounted.

The captain would surely have instinctively summed up the problem instantly, had he seen both yokes full aft.

I think most pilots would. Especially if he saw that yoke kept full aft for minute after minute.

I'm not an Airbus pilot, but who actually benefits from the use of sidesticks?

I don't see any benefit for the pilots, except when using that table.

Explain to me why a pilot should have a table in front of him instead of the controls.

- it's SO much easier to eat your meal?

Humour aside, a s/s offers a much more attractive way to get digital info from the controls than that large thing thrashing around between your legs.

For combat a/c, having a s/s with an armrest to support the limb means that high g manoeuvring becomes far easier too.

BOAC. Yep. I know that it makes it easy to input digital stuff. That's a benefit for a manufacturer, but not to a pilot.

What are the benefits of a SS for a pilot?

The other obvious drawback is that yokes move together. With SS, opposing unputs are possible (I know they have a way of summing them or for one SS to take priority, but how can either of these features benefit the pilot???)

I know the F-16 has a SS, but most F-16 are single seaters and in the two seaters (mostly) one pilot is an IP.

The yoke (OK, why not take digital input from a yoke?) has the benefit of being in clear view and both are linked mechanically.

These features might have helped or even saved 447.

Come again?
Did it also mess up the FDR traces of elevator position to compensate?

How many lightning strikes did you experience?

- excuse me, Mr Oozlum - which lightning strike are you referring to for AF447?:ugh:

svhar, please supply details/reference for this.

Monarch, I think, and a brilliant bit of flying to get it back on the ground.

The wires were not crossed. I believe the sidestick transducer was put in the wrong way around reversing the roll inputs, even though it was designed to fit only the correct way. The flight control check may have also have been done without looking at the flight control page (as is the norm now) and only the sidestick position Cross, on the PFD, which gave the correct indications.

This has no bearing on AF447!

Lufthansa I think and the FO's sidestick worked correctly as he took control.

Lufthansa in 2001. A faulty repair to an ELAC plug.

http://www.bfu-web.de/cln_030/nn_226...kfurt_A320.pdf

Quote from tech log:
The PF was pulling back regardless if he had a side stick or a yoke...and that's what caused the stall in the first place. The fact that he kept pulling back puzzles people, but the real problem is that the crew never knew they were in a stall.....if the PF, or for that matter any of the 3 pilots on the flight deck knew they were in a stall, I am sure he would have stopped pulling back...

That pretty much sums it up...

The Captain wasn't as "old school" as his age might indicate. I think he changed from steward to pilot around 1980.

There was the crash that killed Aristotle Onassis' pilot son, where either cables or hydraulics were transposed and right bank and left bank were switched.
Of course, on AF447, the PF said he had the stick back, and the data reflects that.

More room to work and less chance of bumping the thing inadvertently for starters.

By clearly delineating who is in control. Because the controls are digital and decoupled from the controls (as are modern yoke designs), there's no need for two yokes to provide extra leverage, so that's half the reason for having them linked gone. With a procedure that is based around only one pilot having control at any given time you've got a significant dent in the other half of the reason.

And in the FBW Airbus, only one pilot is supposed to be in control at any one time, so it's much the same.

Well, I'd be interested to have it confirmed or denied that the 777/787 yoke "connections" are not mechanical, but in fact controlled by the software-based force-feedback system. Bearing in mind that one of the rationales for FBW is weight saving, it would be counter-productive to retain a mechanical link.

There have been LOC accidents in yoke-equipped aircraft - so it's just as likely they might not have. Right now we're all basically arguing from our own positions, and I'm trying to stay as neutral as I can, because as with all engineering solutions there are benefits and drawbacks to both. :)

Re: The Lufthansa cross-wiring of the controls. I've said this before, but imagine how difficult the thing would have been to control if the sticks were linked via force-feedback as opposed to the priority-button design!

'more room to work and less chance of bumping the controls'.

Is that it?

Because, I've never felt short of room (the seat moving helps if I need a wee bit more for some reason) and as for 'bumping' the yoke-must have bumped it a few times in 10,000 hours worth? No major issues so far.

So, what's in it for the pilots?

B**ger all as far as I can see.;)

That's your opinion and you're as welcome to it as anyone. Someone asked me why I brought up EAL401 a while back, and it was precisely for that reason - the initiating event that caused the deviation from assigned altitude was an inadvertant bump on the column (with a background loss of situational awareness due to the faulty nose gear bulb).

All my position has ever been is that the sidestick approach solves some of the shortcomings of the yoke design, but has shortcomings itself. No system is perfect.

I think I suggested...
 

...that if the fact that two pilots couldn't see what inputs the third was making WAS a factor in this crash, then it shouldn't require two dirty great control yokes to fix it - just a little tell-tale on the instrument panel with a crosshair on it and showing the current 'virtual stick position', as familiar to anybody who has ever played a computer flight sim game using a keyboard instead of a joystick. If the little glowing dot was at the bottom of the circle, everybody would know that 'the stick is being held all the way back', without needing to re-engineer the entire cockpit to stick a big old yoke into their crotch...

I think it's far more worrying that despite verbally handing control to the PNF twice, the PF continued to make inputs. The concept of a single pilot in control at any given time is a fundamental aspect of the Airbus operating procedure and it should be drilled into cadets and pilots as soon as they start their type rating.

Yes, the fact that the PNF could not see or feel that the PF had not relinquished the controls can be considered a shortcoming of the design, but ultimately the PF should have known that "you have control" means immediate hands-off-the-stick unless or until control is explicitly handed back. Even in the old Chippy I used to fly, if I was physically stronger than my instructor I could have overpowered his inputs - and had I done so and lost control as a result, few would argue that the brute-force aspect of the old cable controls was at fault.

The SS is very old technology (already a caveman tool)
The way to go for modern management of FBW computer flying (actual technology) is touch (tactil) screen (even it can be wireless .. so portable)
Very safe and more space to "work" :8

Which conjours a mental image of the pilot sitting in the aft economy lavatory, enjoying a 'constitutional', all while flying the plane on his iPhone...

Nah, I suspect that stage will be skipped and they'll go straight to brain-mapped control, which if it keeps advancing at it's current rate will probably be plausible in about 30-50 years.

Although this is off-topic silliness, in all seriousness the idea that the sidesticks offer as little resistance as a common-or-garden home analogue controller is completely incorrect - these are industrial-grade, certified components (I've never flown an Airbus, but we visited a Level D A320 sim with Uni - not that I was on that course mind, but a friend sneaked me along for the day).

If LHS PNF/PM wanted to take control he grabs his SS, presses and holds down the takeover button and says the usual, "I have control". The aircraft is under the control of the LHS SS all the time he has that button down.
Done it in the sim, practising baulked landings by RHS in case, as has happened, they freeze on the RHS SS.

I repeat my 535 post as no 330 capt has disputed my 320 view that the RHS SS is visible from the LHS even if the lighting is down. You just have to look across the flight deck. OK when the capt appeared from the bunk he would struggle to see either SS from the jumpseat.

Beagle’s view at #527 is a dated and unhelpful view of safety. Even during training and within limits, it might be possible to weed out the less capable pilots, but the process should be based on a deeper understanding of an individual’s capabilities and reasons for poor performance, and not just on a the outcome of a single event.
Humans learn (or should learn) from their variable behaviour; the source of our success is the same as for the ‘failures’. Throwing out the ‘failures’ does little to help others avoid similar situations.

A key issue throughout this event is human performance - situation assessment; similarly the technical aspects of the flight system and human interaction, but another contributing area, the regulatory process is generally overlooked.
With hindsight, why was the aircraft allowed to fly with ‘suspect’ pitots, or if, with reasoned argument, flight was allowed, why into conditions which might result in problems.
These judgements are typical of airworthiness processes, similar to MEL approval, arguing that flight with ‘suspect’ pitots would be safe – the reasonable containment of risk, and based on previous events, knowledge of the environment, technical system behaviour, and human performance. All of these involve assumptions and thus ‘expert judgement’.
However we should not conclude that the regulators ‘failed’, as this too would be the same as blaming the pilots; each group experienced variable performance, which with hindsight was insufficient for the conditions encountered.

Thus the industry might learn from this and manage to turn some of this hindsight into foresight. In this event, a primary assumption was that the human would manage an ice crystal encounter, recognise the ‘system failure’, and fly the aircraft until conditions improved.
We can reflect that a better strategy would have been to avoid the weather situation and only use the human resource in the event of misjudgement of this first step; there would be greater depth in the safety defences. Obviously fixing the pitots would be better, but this alleviation is similar to the balance of risks taken every day and necessary for operation, and which regulators and crews managed very successfully.

In the view above there are also similarities with other recent accidents. In the 737 AMS approach accident and the Madrid MD-80 take-off, the human was relied on as the first line of defence where existing technical solutions were available. The 737 with grandfather rights used a lower (unmonitored) standard of rad alt, and similarly the MD-80 had an unmonitored TOCWS, where other aircraft have improved systems.
Therefore we might review the process of design and certification, and of continued airworthiness (MEL), and enquire if in modern, complex operations, the industry relies too much on the human as the first line of defence.
Also, we might consider that human performance may not be as assumed due to different training standards, fewer opportunities for experience, and different social attitudes to flying modern aircraft – automation dependency, instant gratification (information) Wiki-Google-geeks, and reliance on SOPs.

Has the industry drifted too close to a safe boundary, or have we identified a new boundary involving a complex interaction of the many factors in modern operations?
Alternatively, in our ‘very’ safe industry, the rare and unusual accidents stand out and our natural human bias focusses on the most salient aspects or easier ‘blame’ option; this might be the public perception, but it should not be that of the industry if we are to learn from this event.

As long as you don't further overload the PFD ...
Then which sidetick displacement will you display ?

1. left
2. right
3. sum of both
4. all these answers

1066

Tray table OUT or IN ?