There’s going to be a lot of Sunday armchair QB’ing on this one. My two cents? They were in a stall situation and didn’t realize it. They hit the water almost flat (tail a bit down).
I don’t think these guys had a clue what their airspeed was.
I don’t think these guys had a clue what their airspeed was.
No mention of throttling up (whether they did or not)? I’d like read a full transcript of what was said, the media accounts of this are too disjointed. Journalists write what they think is important, and it’s pretty clear that they don’t know much about anything. (Journalism is the special olympics of college majors.)
So true. As much as I respect them in some venues, their Special Forces, for instance, the French are just so damn French. Honestly, I don’t understand how they can stand it. It’s like this all the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aoqvq0Btn1c&feature=related
It didn’t sound that way to me.
It sounded like the plane was not responding and the instruments were having a serious malfunction...systemic
Two things of possible error stand out:
Captain coming in earlier rather than later
and why no response to the first stall warning...crickets
The rest they sounded reasonable to me but the bird just wouldn’t respond
What difference does it make if you're the captain of a passenger jet with hundreds of people aboard?
Your break time comes up, you take a break. That's it.
Flying without visual on instruments that are not working is virtually impossible. The only thing that could possibly have saved them is the experienced captain’s intuition. He should have been at the controls as soon as he entered the cockpit.
Oh, geez. I hate flying already, this didn’t help. I only fly about once every 2 years, home to visit my family. And I am anxiety-ridden and convinced I’m about to die from the minute that plane leaves the ground till we land again and come to a complete halt.
It is hard to understand why pilots would continue pulling back on the stick when the stall warning was going off; almost the first lesson in flying is to lower the nose when the stall warning sounds. However, it’s possible they didn’t trust the stall warning. They may have thought it was a false alarm.
When the pitot tube is blocked, the airspeed indicator starts acting like an altimeter; the higher the aircraft goes, the faster the airspeed reads; in reality the opposite is happening. The aircraft is slowing, and will stall if the nose isn’t lowered.
They were flying in bad weather at night, so probably had no visual reference outside the cockpit and had to rely solely on instruments. The way out of the problem is to fly pitch and power; use the artificial horizon to level the wings and keep the nose down, and a power setting known to give a safe airspeed.
I have to believe that the pilots were fooled by the avionics to think the situation was different than what it actually was.
I blame Airbus for putting the pilots in that position, I blame the airline for not having properly trained pilots (as mentioned in a previous article), as well as flying a two-engine plane transatlantic (I know that wasn’t the issue here, but it’s still not the best idea), and I blame the pilots for not keeping their cool.
Regarding Airbus, I just don’t trust them.
In fact, I don’t trusts socialist countries to manufacture anything more complicated than a cigar.
When I was in flight training many years ago in a piper cherokee, we used to practice power on (agrivated stalls) and power off stalls. I remember power off stalls you would get almost no break and a slight wing-over. With power on the break was much more pronounced and the wing over as well. If you didn’t lower the nose NOW and I mean NOW, the airplane would eventually spin. It was great training and we would see how little altitude we could lose by taking quick stall recovery action.
Don’t know how the Airbus would repond so it’s hard to put yourself in their shoes and be critical of their actions (or lack thereof).
This AVmail letter of the week is very enlightening. The pilot (with 4500 A330 hours) concludes with:
. . . Lest anyone think I am blaming the Air France pilots for this accident, let me be clear. Despite all of my experience in the aircraft, I am not the least bit certain that I would have been able to maintain control under the same circumstances. I do feel certain that were you to spring this scenario on pilots in a simulator without warning less than half of them would have a successful outcome. Safely flying the 320, 330 and 340-series Airbus requires something of a non-pilot mindset.
And here is a page of several articles on AF 447.
It sounds like they left the inexperienced pilot at the controls way too long. He’s gotta learn, but that was a fatal decision.
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.
Probably one of the poorest lines I've ever read in a news story.
Who in the hell are the journalists these days?
All I know is that there is a conflict of interest with France having a vested interest in Airbus coming out of this with reputation intact. And of course the pilots are no longer with us so can’t speak on their own behalf.
“Wrestled”? Maybe that was their problem, they fought the plane instead of flying it. I cannot imagine they did not know that their nose was high and their altitude was falling. Seems like the perfect time to pitch down, set throttles to an expected airspeed power setting and continue level flight.
IMO, AF447 is the logical consequence of the prevaling “gear up, autopilot on” operating procedures on the line. IOW pilots get very little time “hand flying” - that is in direct control of the aircraft - in the simulator or on the line. Primarily this is because the autopilot systems can fly the aircraft more efficiently than the pilots.
In today’s ultra-competitive passenger business that means a smoother ride and fuel money saved. But it also means, IMO, the pilot flying is “out of the loop”, watching “George do it” when his brain ought to actively making corrective inputs so if/when “George” decides to pack it in seconds/minutes aren’t wasted trying to “get back in”. Based upon the flight data, these pilots never did.
There are a host of other technical aspects to this accident dealing with systems failures and the hard/software operations of the Airbus I’ll leave to many others far more qualified than I to opine upon. >PS