Posted on 07/31/2011 9:31:55 AM PDT by lbryce
Dude, I'm not saying he is in the clear - he may have well fouled up when he returned to the cockpit. And yes, kudos to your astute observation that he is indeed dead. What I'm commenting on is your inference that he took his scheduled break in spite of the peril the aircraft was in - and that does not appear to be the case. Crashes like this are an aberration, and the normal routines and procedures, including breaks for pilots, are executed without incident many thousands of times every single day. It's easy to armchair quarterback in situations like this, but this could simply be attributed to poor training for aberrant situations, as some other posters have said.
Yes, I think you’ve got it. :-)
There is a very precise record of what happened that essentially puts us in the cockpit.
But I have a feeling they were going by the book and the plane was telling them something different.
Well trained and competent pilots would have made through the situation.
Union rules?
The computerized flight-control system certainly thought the plane was stalling, even if it wasn't, and it perhaps wasn't letting the pilots raise the nose to pull out of a dive, which they may have needed to do to maintain alitude.
No, I see more of a comparison to the Air Egypt flight that went down with the pilot yelling Allah Akbar! as he held the nose down.
Our Alinksyite in chief wants the biggest crash possible so he can rebuild America. So he wants to keep spending for a while until we are totally blown away by debt/inflation. Whether he gets his way on spending or not, his next primary wish is to blame it all on the Republicans.
Maybe. No talk of lightning strike, but that would explain heat not working. Or more likely, partially working, or intermittently working.
Even the less experienced guys would know not to sit there with the yoke all the way back, but they both did it and held it there. They weren’t stupid. There had to be a reason for that.
I’m gonna guess the airspeed indicator read something very high, they had no vertical speed indicator function, attitude indicator was also broken and the altimeter was partially working with delay, jumps, and intermittent.
I’d pull back too if the only thing that looked reliable was airspeed and it said I was nose down vertical. The stall warning would be astonishing in that situation.
The Captain, you can tell, was disbelieving it all and told the guy to push the stick forward, but the instruments may have that very second jumped around suggesting stick forward caused something they didn’t want.
There was no BS going on. All three of them were working to solve the problem every second of the event.
They may have been unsaveable with no instruments, at night, in clouds, in turbulence.
Ah, a person after my own heart.
When I was younger I flew with glee, but one trip across the Atlantic in a severe storm left me with an almost paralyzing fear of flying. I only do so as a necessity, and fortified by an alcoholic beverage or two---and usually one before a flight. The thing is, I have no doubt that if something went seriously awry during a flight, I would quickly revert to a sober state in a major panic.
My husband has developed the same fear after many years of flying on a regular basis. He told me about a terrifying flight home from Virginia Beach in which he was sure he would die; all he could think to do was scan the plane for the heaviest woman in case he needed to rip her dress off for use as a makeshift parachute. Illogical, but indicative of a panicked mind. We laugh about that now, but we fly infrequently and with trepidation.
Where is that? I must have missed it. I'd love to read it.
Well trained and competent pilots would have made through the situation.
Obviously not. Six thousand hours sounds pretty competent to me. Of course, I have no idea how much time in type he had.
Once again, We weren't there. Unless there is a second by second transcript that tells us exactly what they were seeing on the screen and hearing in their headphones, I'll blame the airplane.
I’ve never piloted anything beyond a RC aircraft, but if I heard the stall warning horn going off I’d push throttles to full power and the stick forward.
2. Well-trained and competent pilots cannot 'make it through' if the flight-control computer has taken over flying the plane and is getting erroneous data from the ADS. That's what happened with the famous crash at the Paris Air Show -- the FCS flew the aircraft into the ground despite attempts by their top test pilot to climb.
Yeah but they must have known they were in a stall. The alarm was going off. Nose down, increase power.
You might well kill yourself then, if the stall warning system were erroneous (as is most probably the case here). You put the nose down at cruise speed and you soon hit NTE speed and lose a wing. That is very hard t recover from....
Not true. If the stall warning provided by the pitots were in error, due to the pitot icing problem, death would be inevitable once the nose-down at cruise-speed sent the air-speed past NTE.
Probably one of the poorest lines I've ever read in a news story.
Who in the hell are the journalists these days?
The pilots were too poorly trained to recognize and deal promptly and correctly with a stall. In the event of any in-flight malfunction such as this, the first reference should have been to the attitude gyros rather than to airspeed. Airbus airplanes are designed to fly at cruise with the center of gravity located relatively close to the aerodynamic center in the interest fuel efficiency; the trade-off being reduced static stability, i.e., the tendency to easily recover from a stall. There was an incident years ago where another poorly trained crew flew a DC-10 from the US to Spain with the aircraft stalling repeatedly most of the way but they survived because the high static stability of the DC-10 allowed the aircraft to recover repeatedly on its own, albeit with substantial structural damage.
Good point, Kid. The tops of the wings were seeing too much air, not too little.
Irony, Dude. Irony. People use it all the time here. You even used it in your post.
I think the best thing is to wait for the release of the CVR transcripts and the black box data to see what really happened.
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