Air France 447

The comments on that thing!

surely it's not that hard to design a black box that floats.

Bosses blame the pilots for Air France 447 disaster

It is over three months since Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic off Brazil. They have not found the flight recorders but the elements are falling into place. It became clear this week that Air France, the Airbus corporation and the BEA, the French state accident investigators, would like to blame the crew for the crash of the A330 Airbus, which had 228 souls aboard.

Pilots are angry over what they say is an attempt to make them scapegoats for a failing in the Airbus design. Families of the victims are also accusing the authorities of obfuscation. A lot is at stake. I have been talking to Air France pilots. Gérard Arnoux, an Airbus A320 captain with the company, told me: "They are trying to blame the pilots. They do not want the truth." Arnoux is active in the Union of Air France Pilots (SPAF), a militant offshoot from the company's branch of the mainstream National Union of Airline Pilots (SNPL)

Thanks to data transmitted in the final minutes, we know the outline of what happened to AF447 as it cruised through a storm en route from Rio to Paris. The sequence began with the pitot tubes, the sensors on the outside of the plane which measure the pressure of the oncoming air, thus the plane's airspeed. The pitots failed on AF447, probably because of ice. The flawed speed data upset the electronic flight system, leaving the pilots to hand fly the plane with partially automated controls. They were unable to keep control and the plane dropped at high speed from cruising altitude, hitting the ocean in upright attitude and in one piece, according to evidence from the wreckage.

The argument centres on the question of whether the pilots should have been able to control the handicapped plane. A series of similar -- but apparently less severe -- pitot failures have hit Airbuses over the past decade, it has emerged (Since the crash, the European and US aviation authorities have ordered new pitot tubes on all long-haul Airbuses). In the previous incidents, which did not last long, the crew recovered their planes. A system failure of this type in a storm at cruising altitude would leave the crew with tiny margin to manoeuvre. In this so-called 'coffin corner', a few dozen knots too slow and the plane stalls. A few dozen knots too fast and it will overspeed and dive.

The accident investigators and Airbus say the crew should have been able to recover the plane. Paul-Louis Arslanian, chief investigator, said the pitot failure was a "factor but not the cause" of the crash. Last Monday, he suggested that Air France had not sufficiently trained its pilots in how to handle high-altitude malfunctions of this sort.

On Friday, Thomas Enders, the CEO of Airbus, told le Parisien newspaper: "The pitot probes may have been a factor in explaining the crash. They were not the principal reason." Air France is trying to finger its its pilots, according to Christophe Guillot-Noel, who heads an association of AF447 victims' families. Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline boss, has told them that faulty decision-making is suspected, said Guillot-Noel, whose brother was killed in the crash.

Interestingly, Air France has just started giving special simulator training to all its Airbus crew to teach them how to handle high altitude failures in speed data. Pilots told me that they had never previously been given hands-on instruction in this field. "No appropriate safety manoeuvre exists to cope with this very dangerous situation in the coffin corner and no training was given to Air France pilots in the simulator," Captain Arnoux has just told me by e-mail. All the evidence points to the big Airbus entering a flat spin -- a pilot's absolute nightmare. The crew would have been unable to recover because the computer, having switched to so-called "alternate law", would have prevented them from deflecting the rudder enough to halt the turns, said Arnoux.

"Airbus, as well as the BEA, have obvious interests in minimizing the pitot faults as they have not demonstrated a proactive attitude since the very serious incidents which occurred on the Airbus fleet since the late 1990s," he said.

There are other points of view. James Healy-Pratt of Stewarts Law, the London firm which is representing victims' families, tells me that they have just carried out trials on a simulator and found that the pilots recovered the Airbus each time they tried. The only failure was when the pilot at the simulator controls did not realise that there was a flaw in the speed readings. Simulators cannot recreate the full violence of heavy turbulence of the kind suffered by AF447, he noted. Healy-Pratt, who is a pilot as well as lawyer, also says that questions have to be asked about the crew's failure to divert around the storm and their skills at interpreting their weather radar. Air France will face a bill of some 450 million dollars for the disaster, his firm estimates.

Without the black box recorders, no firm conclusion may ever be reached. They are about to to start a third search of the mountainous ocean floor off northeast Brazil. Airbus is contributing several million euros to the effort. Arslanian likens the task to hunting for a shoe-box at night in Switzerland using a single flash light.

One result of the disaster has been a push to replace onboard flight recorders, invented over 40 years ago, with real-time data links. Enders said Airbus is working on a system to transmit key parameters, as well as video from the cockpit, via satellite, rather than storing the data in metal boxes that can be lost at the bottom of the ocean. My Air France friend said the pilots have no objection to this "provided this data cannot be used against crew handling of the aircraft in any way and be used for disciplinary reasons."

Another Air France jet hits trouble near AF447 crash site

December 11, 2009 -- Updated 1342 GMT (2142 HKT)
Paris, France (CNN) -- French investigators said they are looking into problems encountered by an Air France jet last month in nearly the same spot over the Atlantic where another Air France jet mysteriously crashed in June.

Air France flight 445 was flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, the night of Nov. 29 when it encountered the problems, the French accident investigation agency, BEA, said in a news release this week.

It is the same route taken by Air France flight 447 when it went down in the Atlantic Ocean in stormy weather June 1, killing all 228 people aboard. The investigation agency has not established the cause of the crash, and large parts of the plane -- including both flight recorders -- have never been found.

"The analysis of what happened could lead to complementary explanations about the accident of flight AF 447," the investigation agency said.
Flight 445 encountered "severe turbulence" about four hours after takeoff on Nov. 29, forcing the pilots to descend, Air France said in a statement after the flight.

The crew sent out an emergency radio message to indicate it had left its flight level, Air France said.

The flight, with 215 people aboard, "continued normally" after half an hour of moderate to severe turbulence, the airline said.

-----
The French BEA has issued an interim report on the loss of the Air France A330 over the South Atlantic that includes a summary of the conclusions to far:

- Parts were recovered from all over the aircraft, ranging from the nose radome cover to parts of the spoilers, ailerons, cabin, and elevators.
- Aircraft probably impacted water intact.
- Flaps were retracted.
- An analysis of damage to the cabin crew seats that were recovered (3/11 seats) indicated they were not occupied at impact.
- Life vests were still in their containers.
- O2 masks were not deployed, indicating no decompression above 14,000 ft.
- Injuries to passengers (spine compression and fractured pelvises) plus damage to aircraft parts indicates a high rate of descent at impact.
- Attitude of aircraft at impact slightly nose up, with a small bank angle and minimal side slip.

They intend making further attempts to recover the aircraft and FDRs starting in the new year.

An English version of the interim report is available here (PDF):

http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601e2.en/pdf/f-cp090601e2.en.pdf

The report includes a detailed description of the maintenance messages that were automatically sent by the aircraft, plus discussion of the pitot tube problems seen on other aircraft.
-----

can you put that in english for me ET?

it landed nose slightly up + small bank angle + no slip + no masks or vests deployed + crew was not braced for emergency landing = surprise turbulence rendering the aircraft inoperable and fell out of sky like a brick?

good advice for future oversea flights: don't fly into monstrous storms in the middle of oceans.

can you put that in english for me ET?

it landed nose slightly up + small bank angle + no slip + no masks or vests deployed + crew was not braced for emergency landing = surprise turbulence rendering the aircraft inoperable and fell out of sky like a brick?

Cribbing from the interim report PDF, it looks like the plane impacted the water as if you held a model airplane stationary in the air and then just dropped it. Compression fractures in the area of the tail topped off at 36g so it was definitely brick-like in it's descent. We just don't know how it got there.

don't fly into monstrous storms in the middle of oceans.

Corollary to that... you may have flown through big storms before but in the end Mother Nature always holds the trump card.

New wreckage found.

In fact it's more than that -- seems like they've found the fuselage and a number of bodies, though they're not sure about the black boxes yet.

for some reason it's really freaky to me, the idea of these bodies & this plane just having been floating around in the atlantic all this time

well, maybe not floating, but you get what i'm saying

Part of the black box found

Search teams have found a part of the crucial "data recorders" of the Air France flight which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, says France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA).

The orange-colored recorder 'chassis' was found on Wednesday during the second day of an operation which also hopes to retrieve bodies from the wreckage site.

All 228 people aboard the Airbus A330 Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were killed.

The find - which comes more than three weeks after search teams found the tail section of the aircraft -- does not include the "memory unit" which holds the recorded data that could eventually help investigators determine the cause of the crash.

Martine Del Bono, a spokeswoman for the Paris-based BEA says there is a good chance the memory unit, which records any instructions sent to the aircraft's electronic systems, will still hold retrievable data.

Here's hoping. Grim comfort at best even so.

Big new NYT Magazine piece up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Plane-t.html

Also, both the data and cockpit voice recording parts have been recovered.

Air France 447: How scientists found a needle in a haystack

This year's search was the fourth attempt to find the wreckage of Flight 447, and it probably would have been the last, even if the plane hadn't been found. Previous searches had been done by boat, mini-sub, and—back when there was still a chance of catching the audio signal from the plane's black boxes—underwater acoustic sensors. In 2010, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were brought in to search for the crash site using autonomous robot subs. Still nothing had been found.

On March 22, 2011, the Woods Hole team set out from Brazil to try again. They'd barely been at the search location for a week when they found what they were looking for. On April 3, researchers spotted the plane's debris field, 13,000 feet down, smack in the middle of a massive underwater mountain range.

The success was astounding, but I wanted to know ... what made this search different from the others? What could the team from Woods Hole do that other groups could not, and how did their system work? To find out, I spoke with Mike Purcell, senior engineer with Woods Hole, and the chief of sea search operations for the mission.

All flight data and cockpit conversations recovered. We should all know the basics of what happened in a couple of months.

Preliminary Findings Suggest Pilot Error in Air France Crash

The pilots of an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean two years ago apparently became distracted with faulty airspeed indicators and failed to properly deal with other vital systems, including adjusting engine thrust, according to people familiar with preliminary findings from the plane's recorders.

The final moments inside the cockpit of the twin-engine Airbus A330, these people said, indicates the pilots seemingly were confused by alarms they received from various automated flight-control systems as the plane bucked through some turbulence expected on the route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris but also faced unexpectedly heavy icing at 35,000 feet. Such icing is renowned for making airspeed-indicators and other external sensors unreliable.

Ultimately, the crew failed to follow standard procedures to maintain or increase thrust and keep the aircraft's nose level, while trouble-shooting and waiting for the airspeed sensors and related functions to return to normal, according to these people.

Slated to be disclosed by investigators on Friday, the sequence of events captured on the recorders is expected to highlight that the twin-engine jet slowed dangerously shortly after the autopilot disconnected. The pilots almost immediately faced the beginning of what became a series of automation failures or disconnects related to problems with the plane's airspeed sensors, these people said. The crew apparently had difficulty sorting out the warning messages, chimes and other cues, while monitoring essential displays showing engine power and aircraft trajectory.

The pilots were never trained to handle precisely such an emergency at high altitude, according to safety experts and a previous report by France's Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, which is heading up the investigation. All 228 people aboard died in the accident.

The senior captain, Marc Dubois, appears to have been out of the cockpit for a routine rest break when the fatal chain of events started, according to safety experts familiar with the details. But according to one person close to the probe, the cockpit-voice recorder suggests that once problems cropped up, he may have rushed back to the cockpit to join the other two pilots of Air France Flight 447.

Though Friday's announcement won't provide final conclusions or specific causes, investigators believe Air France never trained its pilots to cope with such automation problems in conjunction with a high-altitude aerodynamic stall, an emergency when the wings lose lift and the plane quickly becomes uncontrollable.

must be horrendous listening to the last few seconds of that cockpit recorder but then i guess i am morbidly fascinated enough to be thinking about it at all wargh

Its always frightening to think that what keeps jet planes in the air is really just their forward momentum. And if that stops...

It's their job. If people like this or people who work at morgues etc wouldn't be able to disconnect they would be working somewhere else. xpost

Yeesh...

3.5 minutes of terror: Air France crash dropped at 10,000 feet a minute

Passengers on an Air France flight plunged for three and a half minutes before crashing into the Atlantic, killing all 228 on board, after it lost speed and stalled while the main pilot was resting, the first evidence from black boxes has found.

AF447's junior pilot battled to save the Rio de Janeiro to Paris flight, as the second pilot tried to rouse the captain shortly after the plane had begun its fateful descent in a tropical storm.
According to flight recorder data, the younger of the two men, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, angled the jet's nose higher, a position the aircraft maintained until its final impact, after inconsistent speed readings confused the plane.

Aviation experts asked why the pilot kept giving nose-up inputs when the plane was in a stall, given that one normally puts the nose down to recover speed and regain control.

All 228 people on board – including crew – died after the Airbus hurtled into the Atlantic at a speed of 180 feet a second in the worst disaster in Air France's history.
David Robert, 37, the second pilot, had begun anxiously calling for their more experienced captain after autopilot suddenly cut out four hours after take-off. Captain Marc Dubois, returned a minute and a half later, but never retook control of the plane – instead leaving the flying to his assistants.

...

Releasing preliminary findings yesterday, France's accident investigation office, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA), said they showed the co-pilots decided to turn slightly to the left to avoid a zone of turbulence, warning cabin crew to expect the plane to "move around" in forthcoming turbulence.

Two minutes later the autopilot disengaged, the instruments began showing that the speed had slowed dramatically and the engine stall warning began to sound.

The BEA said the pilots received inconsistent speed readings for around a minute, with one pilot saying: "We have no valid indications." This suggests there was a problem with the plane's speed sensors, so-called Pitot tubes that an earlier preliminary investigation had indicated might have contributed to the crash.

The pilots responded by pulling up the nose of the aircraft, triggering a stall warning in the cockpit.

According to the BEA, the co-pilots continued to increase the angle of climb, rising rapidly from 35,000 feet to 37,500 feet. When a third stall warning sounded, they continued to pull back on the controls with the engines set to full thrust and rose to about 38,000 feet, where the plane entered a stall.

With the plane's nose still pointed up about 15 degrees, the jet began falling at about 10,000 feet a minute, rolling left and right. Almost one minute into the stall, the pilots had reduced engine thrust and tried pushing down on the controls to lower the nose.

Airspeed indications returned and the alarm sounded again as the stalled aircraft picked up some speed, but the plane never recovered.

I'm not easily scared, but a 10,000 feet a minute drop squicks the hell out of me.

well, i guess it's no fun, but if it's any consolation they may not even have realized

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/27/air-france-crash-inquiry

Despite what the pilots must have been going through in the cockpit, the pitch attitude remained fairly constant throughout so the passengers would not have sensed something was seriously wrong. They would have felt mild buffeting of the stalled airflow over the wings and the initial sinking feeling. That's all.

3.5 minutes is a long time, in that situation, i bet i felt a lot longer.

I know it's a minor thing, but your ears can hurt on descent, i wonder if it was in issue for those aboard 447?
I can picture furious boiled sweet sucking to prevent ear popping.

Sorry :/

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.