Hopefully airlines will start creating these types of situations in simulators for the newer pilots that have never experienced these things.

What Really Happened Aboard Air France?

They spoke some French... that is what happened.

Why didn't you ask me that before opening a thread?

Thanks for clearing that up Tosser. Next time I'll deffer to your supreme logic and reasoning before getting all hysterical like the crazy cracker that I am.

At school we always joked "Boeing built to last, Airbus built to crash."

Seriously though- the pilots get way too much flak for this. A good plane doesn't have pitot tubes that freeze in any condition, and the independent joystick design that airbus uses for flight input is straight up stupid.

Also- flying at night, over an ocean, in a storm gives you ZERO situational awareness, and I can assure you that sensory illusions can mess even the most experienced pilot up in a situation like that.

....or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome.....

This is a troubling statement on so many levels.

Adam,

Wasn't holding back on the controls constantly a little odd?

Why did he do that?

Hell, I play Flight Simulator and I've noticed that makes you stall.

How awful it would be when you realize crashing is inevitable.

You know you're about to die.

Finally salsd t0sser says somethng good.

FF

My guess is that since they were already at full power, and may not have realized they had regained reliable airspeed indication, the guy was just trying to regain altitude- he had even said in the transcript that he was executing a go-around maneuver. Recovery from a stall is nose-down just long enough to regain airspeed, then pull back up right away.

Whatever though- I can speculate forever. My point, though, is that it's always always always the "inexperienced" "human error" fall-guy pilots that get blamed when the aircraft manufacturer and company's training program are often the root causes.

#8 | POSTED BY ADAMMM

Its pretty clear from the transcripts though that the guy didn't follow procedure, did not communicate that he was manipulating the control surfaces, neither took steps to diagnose any cause by reading the data from the instruments prior to yanking back the stick, no proper CRM chain-of-events.

I think you just have a bone to pick with Airbus :) The asynchronous flight controls is pretty fucking dumb, imho.

This was FUBARed by the pilots (plural). How could the captain not notice the plain was dropping at that many fpm? The second co-pilot should have made himself aware of the activities of the first pilot and probably should have taken control.

I'm just PO that the pilots always get the blame- and even if only part of it, the headlines still read "pilot error kills hundreds." Read about airbus slowly issuing multiple recalls and replacements for faulty pitot tubes, and Air France deciding not to follow the service bulletin and replace them. Everyone is at fault, but the "inexperienced pilot" dead at the bottom of the sea gets to bear the full brunt. It's bs.

"The thuderstorm and iced up sensors had nothing to do with the crash."

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!

Freaky Weatherwatcher Thom

"HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!"

I'm impressed. fwthom nails one.

How could the captain not notice the plain was dropping at that many fpm? The second co-pilot should have made himself aware of the activities of the first pilot and probably should have taken control.

From what I've read of other incidents, airline pilots can't gauge angles, banking or speed well without visual references. So they rely on what their instruments tell them.

"7000 feet per minute". It seems that the captain did notice this, as he was in the cockpit only 30 seconds later (after looking at the timestamps). Yes, you can certainly tell when the plane is ascending at 7k fpm. If you've ever flown, you can definitely feel when you are ascending and descending, and thats very mild compared to 7k fpm.

"From what I've read of other incidents, airline pilots can't gauge angles, banking or speed well without visual references. So they rely on what their instruments tell them."

Very true. They are trained to trust the instruments rather than what they "feel" is going on.

Forget about what happened after they flew through a massive line of thunderstorms. Why did they fly through it in the first place? Why did the captain go on his break when the thunderstorms would have been clearly visible on the weather radar?

The History Channel did an episode on this crash.

The computer animation of the aircraft's possible movements before the crash was pretty hairy.

Fucking IDIOT!

This was FUBARed by the pilots (plural). How could the captain not notice the plain was dropping at that many fpm? The second co-pilot should have made himself aware of the activities of the first pilot and probably should have taken control.

#9 | Posted by apparatchik

If you go to the second page of the article--you will read that Captain Fubar didn't take controls--he sat in the seat behind them asking what the hell was going on!

Bonin is the bonehead of the operation--he pulled the stick back and it stayed there--even when the other co pilot Fubar had taken the other stick control to push it forward. It only compensated because the stick in front of Fubar Bonin was the stick in charge.

And Fubar Bonin never yelled out what he was doing every time he was manuvering the damn stick!

Terrifying and tragic.

This appears to be too much plane for pilots with too few hours flying or training in this model of aircraft. Take the autopilot off and they didn't have a clue what the heck was going on.

When all else fails go full throttle. That reads like a nightmare. WTF sure reads like pilot error.

The pitot tubes were iced over. These are little air intake tubes on the wings are linked to the airspeed indicator. With them frozen over the pilots had no idea what their airspeed was. They were going too fast and then too slow ... back and forth - causing stress on the wings with too high speed, and stalling the aircraft when too slow. A nightmare scenario that led to overcompensation with about every move they made.