Posted on 07/06/2012 9:19:28 AM PDT by Olog-hai
The Air France Flight 447 crash, considered one of the worst aviation disasters in history, could have been avoided, a top-ranking aviation safety expert said.
"Absolutely, this accident didn't have to happen," said William Voss, the president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation.
BEA, the French government's official accident investigators, conducted a three-year investigation into the crash, which killed all 228 people on board, including one married couple from Louisiana, when the Airbus A330 slammed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil in 2009.
In the agency's final report, which was released today, investigators determined that a combination of technical failures and mistakes made by inadequately trained pilots was responsible for the crash. They recommended that pilots be better trained to manually fly commercial aircraft at high altitudes and called for stricter plane certification rules. …
According to the report, a speed sensor on board the plane, called a pitot tube, stopped functioning after becoming clogged with ice at high-altitude while the plane was flying through a thunderstorm. This caused the auto-pilot to disengage and shift the controls back to the pilots. While flying in heavy turbulence, the pilots failed to properly diagnose the severity of the problem because the pitot tube, a critical piece of equipment to the aircraft, was sending inaccurate data to the cockpit, the report said. The pilots put the plane into a devastating stall and it fell rapidly from the sky, before pancake-ing into the ocean.
"Despite these persistent symptoms, the crew never understood that they were stalling and consequently never applied a recovery maneuver," the report said. …
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Pitot heat is your friend.
This news does not make me feel good about future flying.
If it ain’t Boeing, I’m not going.
I was going to say, if a C172 has it, surely an Airbus would. And that instrument was invented by a frenchie, which makes this all the more puzzling.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Air travel is becoming increasingly safer, in large part due to automation. This is an issue that needs to be addressed, but it does not mean air travel is unsafe.
Shouldn’t there be an automatic cross-check between the pitot and GPS to see if there’s a major disagreement?
If it ain’t Boeing, I’m not going.
<><><><
When it’s pilot error that ultimately brings the plane down, it doesn’t matter who built the aircraft.
I know, too many damn computers and not enough actual ability to fly the plane. Kind of like driving and auto mechanics, can’t rely on the computer all the time.
You would think. When I took instrument training the point was to scan key instruments, airspeed, altimeter, vertical speed indicator, heading indicator, artificial horizon etc, and not rely on just one. They were in extreme turbulence though, all hell must have been breaking loose.
The captain put the plane on course for bad weather that other aircraft were avoiding, and then he left the cockpit for his break. The two pilots left on deck didn't know how to manually fly the plane based on the transcripts.
From what I've read, pilots in Europe don't need any experience flying before becoming an airline pilot. Being able to punch numbers into a computer is good enough.
So basically, the pilots didn’t know how to fly by instrumentation?
Fundamental flight control settings and piloting would not have produced stall conditions.
If the pitot tube was producing an abnormally low airspeed why would the pilots decrease throttle to a stall?
Color me skeptical.
Nope - disagreements between pitot and GPS are to be expected.
One method of dealing with a significant crosswind is to yaw in such a way that the aircraft would be pointing quite a bit away from straight down the runway; rectify the crab in the flare to the ground; and typically land first on the upwind wheel.
It's not just Airbus.It's happened at least once with Boeing. Blocked Pitot Tube
At altitude the flight envelop is very narrow. It doesn't take much up attitude to create a stall, even at high speed because the thin air has much less lift.
My son told me the drill if your instruments fail. IIRC 4⁰up attitude, 75% power.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.