[Gideon7]

In the AF447 crash, the pitot tubes for the air-speed incidator iced over and read 0. That’s why the computer kicked offline. It was a storm and they couldn’t the horizon either.

That crash was due to the co-pilot’s inexperience with flying the Airbus A300 without the computer. He was confused by the ‘Pull up’ audible warning going silent whenever the computer faulted at an extreme AOT (the computer shut up because it decided the sensor inputs were crazy). So he kept pulling up the joystick up and up thinking the stall ended whenever the audible warning stopped. Whenever he eased the stick forward the computer reawakened and starting bitching again about a stall. Rinse and repeat. And so he belly-flopped right into the ocean.

Meanwhile the captain (who was sleeping) jumped into the right (co-pilot) seat and yelled WTF to the co-pilot as he pushed the joystick forward to stop the stall, but the captain’s joystick on the left overrode him, and he didn’t realize it. (Boeing uses wheels that are mechanically linked, so pushing one steering wheel forward always pushes the other.) The official determination in the AF crash was pilot error due to failure to understand how the fly-by-wire A300 behaved whenever the computer kicked offline and went into alternate (mostly manual) flight mode.

The 2008 crash was similarly due to lack of experience in flying without the computer (and likely the Air Indonesia crash too). In each event, the pilot wildly wrenched the joystick to try to keep the plane aloft. The flight recorder showed the plane going up and down with extreme maneuvers like a roller coaster.

However, that is not what we see in the radar altitude chart for this crash. The plane gradually descended over 18 minutes in a straight-line path right into the side of a mountain.

A mid-air explosion would show significant deceleration and rapid descent. We don’t see that here. That, plus the lack of communication with the flight crew, makes it more likely that the flight crew was somehow physically incapacitated. The autopilot tripped off, and then the plane slowly descended into the mountain.

A 9/11 style hijacking would show changes in direction and there’s no evidence of that either.

[cuspofcommonsense]

Supposedly pilot was a German . . .

Time to ‘vet’ the pilot???

Wasn’t there an Egyptian suicide pilot who flew plane in to
the Atlantic?

Did he have a ‘flight simulator at home’?

[dragnet2]

Good points. Based on the scene video, this was no midair incident, and it went right into the side of the mountain as if the pilots simply fell asleep and it kept descending until drove it right in.

[brothers4thID]

An excellent synopsis.

[Eva]

I read that there was an alert from an air traffic controller who saw the plane veer off course in his screen. Others said that the normal route should have been over the Pyrhanees, not the Alps.

[RayChuang88]

A mid-air explosion would show significant deceleration and rapid descent. We don’t see that here. That, plus the lack of communication with the flight crew, makes it more likely that the flight crew was somehow physically incapacitated. The autopilot tripped off, and then the plane slowly descended into the mountain.

It makes you wonder this: was there a possible cabin depressurization that incapacitated the flight crew, similar to what happened the private jet that carried Payne Stewart in 1999 and a 737-300 belonging to Helios Airways in 2005? And the depressurization happened so fast the crew had no time to react?

[expat2]

The air-data system was so screwed up in 447 that the computer system supposed to fly the plane had a nervous breakdown and started calling for its Mommy. How do you expect a pilot to do any better with the same useless air-data critical to flight control.

The pilot took the blame because Airbus had too many $$ riding on the call.