Posted on 05/28/2011 6:34:47 PM PDT by lbryce
Cruising at 35,000 feet and nearly four hours into what seemed a routine overnight flight to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, an Air France cockpit crew got a stall warning and responded by doing what even weekend pilots know to avoid: They yanked the nose of the plane up instead of pointing it down to gain essential speed.
Apparently confused by repeated stall warnings and reacting to wildly fluctuating airspeed indications, pilots of Flight 447 continued to pull back sharply on the controls—contrary to standard procedure—even as the Airbus A330 plummeted toward the Atlantic Ocean, according to information released Friday by French accident investigators. The June 2009 crash ton board,
The pilots' actions are likely to lead to a global shake-up in pilot training that reappraises the role of computer aids, as aviation-safety experts increasingly worry that many airlines scrimp on drilling manual flying techniques.
Still to be answered is how seasoned pilots for a top airline, flying one of the industry's most advanced jets, violated such a fundamental rule of airmanship.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Those pilots had no working instruments and zero external cues of the orientation of the aircraft.
They had many instruments. You can fly quite well without airspeed indications. Good training includes flying by attitude indicator and engine power settings when you lose airspeed and/or altimeter.
Unfortunately, in an airliner, the recommended solution in zero visibility with no instruments working, ejecting, is not an option.
It's not an option with Air Force pilots either. You have many different instruments to help maintain altitude, attitude, and heading when visibility is zero and you start losing instruments. Air France did not lose all its instruments. So far as is known, they lost airspeed. They still had engine instruments, throttle positions, normal and backup attitude, altitude, and heading instruments.
The sad reality is that too many of today's pilots, especially with many (not all) foreign and commuter domestic airlines is that the training of many of them does not cover what used to be basic maneuvers - unusal attitudes, spin recoveries, departure training, limited panel instruments, icing conditions, high angle of attack flight. Some airline pilots have actually never flown beyond 60 degrees of bank or 45 degrees of pitch. When their first encounter with these conditions is in an airliner with 200 people in the back, the outcome is not pretty.
AirFrance/Bus are all bureaucrate blue collard systems in which the pilot’s hands are tied by the engineers and lawyers design behind it. It’s a Titanic system, very arrogant French. Not the first Airbus do that. The first A320 crash was similar but the pilot got blamed because all the upper ups were butt hurt by his allegations about an aircraft you cannot pilot but program around/hackthrough like a video game.
Are you saying the pilot did not have a functioning altimeter, a VSI or an artificial horizon?
The pilots may have pulled up the nose because the airspeed sensor data output from the computers was showing too much speed, rather than too little. No pilot with more than 20 hours flying time would bring up the nose if he knew the airspeed was too low.
If the pilots had only a working attitude indicator (and even the most advanced glass cockpit airliner still has the old “steam” analog attitude indicator as backup), the pilot can maintain pitch and power setting and they’ll be within a few knots of expected A/S. This was confirmed in a pilot’s remarks earlier.
... and to make matters worse there three pilots - a captain and two co-pilots. Between the three of them you owuld think they could figure it out. I just don't think we have all the information.
About 20 years ago in my previous life, I was a commercial aircraft electrical and electronics technician. EVERY aircraft has pitot heaters. When the aircraft is on the ground and have power on for any length of time, they pull the pitot heater breakers. It is inconceivable that they would not have pitot heaters.
The problem I see is that after the pilots got the false stall warning they disregarded the air speed and as they fell, they pulled back on the yoke to try to gain altitude instead of pushing on it to gain airspeed.
Agreed, its a lot easier to figure things out safe and on the ground. I had to make an emergency landing due to carbuertor icing, because after the engine quit and I went through the emergency procedure, when I got to pull on carb heat for some reason my mind said “naw, that couldn’t be it” and didn’t pull the heat on. Fortunately I had lots of altitude and was able to find an abandoned ranch air strip to land on, and the ranchers 4 dobermans were locked up in their kennel.
“they pulled back on the yoke to try to gain altitude instead of pushing on it to gain airspeed.”
“EVERY aircraft has pitot heaters.”
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I fully agree with you on both points.
I wonder if everybody is barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. I’ve ben in a bad tstorm and had sudden icing before. Airspeed drops suddenly and falsly, pilots nose DOWN. I feel this is more likely a computer fault. For example, in the F-16, when it get into a deep stall the computer overrides the pilot input and commands max nose down elevator. There is a pitch overide switch to turn the flight control computer off and allow the pilot to pull the nose up and then push down to “rock” the plane out of the deep stall. Since the 330 is also fly by wire I wonder if the computer wa overiding the pilot inputs. Nothing more frusterating than when you are telling an airplane to do something and it’s doing something else. Trust me. But now a days the engineers know best. And most of them are not even pilots....
Well, yeah, that is correct as far as it goes. I am not sure it was zero visibility at their flight level, however. There were some storms around but at that flight level the clouds were below them and the stars above. Would not that give them a horizon? And if you have a horizon, they you can take off, fly, and land almost any plane, would you give me that?
I believe that if the pilot had kept it level, he could have had another jet meet him at an emergency field and give him his airspeed for a safe landing. So I would suggest that the pilot, as the writer said, made a mistake that any solo pilot would have avoided without having to think about it. Another thing I would mention is that AirBus makes planes that fly into trees... Boeing give pilots the overide capability. The difference between the American way of thinking and Europeans was never more stark.
My wife stated that an overspeed and a stall have very similar sounding warnings and a very similar feeling shudder in the yoke. She believes the pilots thought that they were in an overspeed situation instead of a stall which would explain why the nose was up and the engines at idle prior to impact.
Yep.
That's the only explanation for the random turns and climb before the stall and final plunge. Either inoperative of displaying bad information.
As I understand, all these comments are based on a preliminary report of raw data. What the flight recorder received is not necessarily what the glass cockpit displayed.
As with any other instance dealing with heaters/coolers, they are only designed to inject or remove so many BTU. Temperature is only half of the equation, time is the second factor. If ambient air removes the heat faster than the element can replace it, it loses the war and can't keep up... just like the A/C in your car. It can put out enough cold air to freeze you into hypothermia under the right conditions, but try staying cool with 90 degree outside temps and the windows rolled down. Same thing...
The ISIS was working. It's a backup display with its own internal sensors. From that they could have maintained altitude, airspeed, and heading (the aircraft was actually heading west when it crashed). It's easy to sit here and criticize, but the transcript gives the impression that everybody in the cockpit forgot how to fly the plane without a computer.
The transcript gave me the impression that the warnings stopped when the airspeed dropped below a very low value (even though they were valid, the computer considered them invalid). That would have given a weird type of feedback, which may explain the pilots letting a perfectly good aircraft drop in the water.
If you see your climb indicator showing that you are sinking at -10,000 feet/min would you pull the nose up thinking you might be in a dive?
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