Air France 447

Long Aviation Week article on the results so far.. The takeaway is that pilot training hasn't really kept up with the systems management duty required by modern airplanes.

“We will learn a lot from this accident,” says William R. Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, who believes that AF447 should have fundamental consequences for the content of pilot training globally. “We are still training for the engine fire at V1, but the complexity of automated systems has grown. We have to develop crews that can deal with incidents such as QF32,” the Qantas Airbus A380 that suffered an uncontained engine failure after takeoff in Singapore on Nov. 4, 2010, and returned to the airport severely damaged.

Voss argues that AF447 would not have crashed if the aircraft had been of an older generation. “Highly automated aircraft have saved many lives, but they fail differently than aircraft of 20 years ago,” he says. He sees it as a “failure of the industry” that pilot training has not kept in step with the latest aircraft technologies. He also argues for improved upset recovery training, as “we are not explicitly training that” and the AF447 A330 “seems to have had pitch-and-roll authority all the way down to the water.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world/europe/air-france-flight-447-crash-report-july-2011.html?pagewanted=all

Was scanning that earlier. Sounds like a compounding of a lot of problems in the end, but if the core was that the pilots weren't trained properly...

in some ways much more disturbing than simple mechanical failure - how many pilots out there are qualified to deal with that kind of situation? air travel is a growing industry in many developing countries, most notably China where many pilots have been caught with fake licenses.

pilots should probably know how to fly the plane manually at high altitude, yeah

The part that scared me was that there is no indicator in the cockpit that shows the "angle of attack" - a key piece of information in that situation.

"Safety experts say those procedures are now essentially the same for both aircraft makes, regardless of altitude, and instruct pilots in the first instance to lower the nose of the aircraft and, if necessary, to reduce thrust to avoid excessive acceleration.

Previously, the standard procedure for an approaching stall at low altitude was to raise the nose by around 5 degrees and to maintain full thrust. "

Why was the previous method for overcoming stalls pointing the nose up? Unless by "low altitude" they mean in the very early stages of a flight, where I guess you can't nose down for long enough to build up speed.

Final report from the French crash investigators is out

LE BOURGET, France — French investigators’ final report on the 2009 crash of an Air France jet that killed 228 people portrays a cockpit rapidly consumed by confusion and unable to decode a welter of alarms to determine which flight readings could be trusted, with the pilots’ apparent reliance on a faulty display cementing the plane into its fatal stall.

The report, released Thursday by the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis, concluded that the errors were the outcome of a confluence of factors beyond the competence of any individual pilot. The investigators stood by earlier findings that the pilots had not been adequately trained to fly the aircraft manually in the event of equipment failure or a stall at high altitude.

There was a “profound loss of understanding” among all three pilots of Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, about what was happening after ice crystals threw off the plane’s airspeed sensors and the autopilot disconnected, the report said. The pilots then struggled to control the plane manually amid a barrage of alarms, a situation further confused by the faulty instructions displayed by an automated navigational aid called the flight director.

“The crew never understood they were in a stall situation,” the report said, “and therefore never undertook any recovery maneuvers.” It said further that “the combination of the ergonomics of the warning design, the conditions in which airline pilots are trained and exposed to stalls during their professional training and the process of recurrent training does not generate the expected behavior in any acceptable reliable way.”

The report offered an answer to a central puzzle: the consistent and aggressive “nose up” inputs by the pilot at the controls, which added to the loss of lift. Pilots are normally trained to point the nose of the aircraft down in a stall to regain speed.

The report said that the readings being gathered by the automated flight director — which uses cross hairs superimposed over an artificial horizon to indicate the required positioning of the plane — would have resulted in repeated calls for the plane’s nose to be lifted.

One aviation expert was troubled that the pilots did not appear to have the skills to start from the basic observation that airspeed indicators were giving conflicting readings and anticipate which of their flight readings — like that of the flight director — would therefore be untrustworthy.

William R. Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said: “We are seeing a situation where we have pilots that can’t understand what the airplane is doing unless a computer interprets it for them. This isn’t a problem that is unique to Airbus or unique to Air France. It’s a new training challenge that the whole industry has to face.”

Air Crash Investigations gets to the AF447 crash. In the last eight minutes I'm shouting at the co-pilot "GET YOUR SHIT STOWED AND PUSH FORWARD ON THE FUCKING STICK!"

"we're searching an area the size of Switzerland - including the Alps"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTuagG3aW_g

New deep story on the crash and questions of air safety in general

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

No crisis existed. The episode should have been a non-event, and one that would not last long. The airplane was in the control of the pilots, and if they had done nothing, they would have done all they needed to do.

William Langewiesche is the best.