Posted on 07/06/2012 9:19:28 AM PDT by Olog-hai
I’m thinking you haven’t read the cockpit transcripts. AFTER the pitot tubes came back on line, they reached a situation where every electronic device was reporting correctly.
They didn’t understand they were stalled, and the pilot with his hand on the joystick couldn’t stop pulling it back. They possibly could have recovered if he’d pushed the nose down.
LOL. I wouldn’t know that either. I just guessed that it did.
(a) they were on their flight plan. It came into the storm. It’s not like someone aimed the aircraft at the storm.
(b) The captain was on his break/rest slot. This is normal procedure for long over water flights.
Here’s a good read discussing the cockpit transcripts and what went wrong. Also, if you scroll about half-way down the page there is a very good comment from an Airbus 330 captain.
(a) It is standard practice to divert around thunderstorms, and that would be especially important given known issues with the pitot systems in the Airbus. At altitude, TXs are easily visible from afar.
(b) Undoubtedly, but he should have cut short his break when they entered the storm cell.
Thanks for the URL —I’ll take a look.
Wow, what an incredible story!
Sounds like Bonin just freaked out and tensed up.
However, I still believe that the pilot-error conclusion was a whitewash of Airbus manufacturer problems. The digital primary FCS was triple-modular redundant, which means that it could handle one error, but an error in both of any 2 of the 3 channels would screw the primary flight-control system completely. But there was a known icing problem with the pitot heads, so a 2-sensor pair of errors had become much too likely.
Secondly, the Airbus pilots had clearly not been adequately trained in use of the backup alternate flight algorithm, an error shared by Airbus and the airline.
Well, the key to avoiding freak-out is training — when trouble threatens, the pilot goes back to a trained sequence of actions. It is clear that Bonin’s training on the back-up flight control system was totally inadequate. He had no trained action sequence to fall back on — that’s when freak-out occurs and thinking gets scrambled.
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