Any updates on the Airbus lost in the Atlantic?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576341631579541512.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

 

No problem.

The negative ramifications for Airbus Industrie, as well as various European business and political interests is huge.

They could have recovered the data recorders in weeks IF THEY HAD WANTED TO. See my previous posts on that subject referring to Dr. John Craven, the Scorpion, the K-129, the recovery of the lost B-28's at Palomares, and Phoenix missiles removed from the North Sea. Post your rebuttal here and base it on the deconstruction of the facts from the actual historical events I have referenced and have at it......LOL !!!

It is always better to let emotions slide, memories fade, and hysteria subside, before seeking to dig up the truth, then bending it to fit your needs for public release......which is exactly what has happened here. It wasn't the first time this formula has been followed, and it certainly will not be the last.

I don't fly on Airbus aircraft unless I have absolutely no other choice and must get somewhere urgently. The same will apply to the new plastic Boeing 787.

 

No problem. You're an idiot.

And that's factual.

Edit: P.S. sorry I'm not one to suffer raving fools gladly.

 

Oy vey... another nutter.... Sorry missed that the first time.

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BTW Anyone who is not nutters might read that WSJ link above....

Apparently -like most failures- there was a chain.

The Captain was not on deck when 'unexpectedly heavy icing' caused them to lose airspeed indicator, then they did not follow proper procedures for the problems/alarms that went off. Also of note, none of the pilots were trained on that exact procedure.

....

For all the incessant talk around here about how fly by wire is spawn of the devil, the larger issue nobody has addressed is that as they make these machines more and more complex, humans are not capable of processing data as fast as the computers can spit it out...

(In other words) If you read about the failures of modern passenger jets, every report mentions dozens or hundreds of alarms the crew got at once... I forget the exact facts and figures but on that Rolls-Royce engine that flew apart, the crew had like 200+ alarms go off.... How can anyone process that much information? Many got ignored.

As an aircraft designer what do you do? You can't suppress data the pilot needs YET (if you read the WSJ piece) it sounds like whole AF crew forgot the first rule of piloting. (First, fly the aircraft.)

It -sounds like- the poor guys were looking at alarms and simply forgot to fly the airplane. (ie maintain airspeed)

As a geek I can tell you I'm not worried about fly by wire systems. And I'm not even worried about composites. I am getting worried about the user interface between the aircraft and the pilot. Humans make enough mistakes without a computer confusing them.

 

After reading the WSJ link that was the first thing that popped into my head. These guys quit flying the airplane because they were too busy with the bells and whistles going on around them.

They broke a cardinal rule of never having "Two Heads Down". Meaning, ONE should ALWAYS be pilot in command and flying the airplane while the other(s) look for the problems. In this case it sounds like three heads down.

(The first incident I heard of this was back in the late 70's early 80's? A DC-10 that couldn't get a down-lock indication for the nose gear IIRC. It was already at low altitude on approach and they did a go-around to fix the problem.

Both got busy and didn't notice that the auto pilot disengaged. The airplane gradually lost altitude and flew into a swamp in Florida under cruise power.

I tried to Google this but kept getting the Value-Jet incident.)

I'm still curious to know WHAT the airplane did from altitude to the sea. I read something about heavy icing in the report which would kill the aerodynamic lift of the wings and become useless. Also something about failure to maintain power settings which would magnify the condition. Just speculation.

 

I think that you are correct here and it reminds me of the PAA 707 gander dive. The captain was in the first class passenger cabin chatting with the VP of Pan Am Atlantic Div., the co-pilot was busy working a navigation problem, and the flight engineer was preoccupied. The auto pilot breaker popped and nobody noticed it and the airplane gradually went into a spiral dive as it accelerated. At that time there was no Mach warning BELL but there was a light that no one saw.If the captain hadn't noticed the increase in airspeed noise and the sight of ocean when he should have seen sky, the airplane would have continued to a point beyond recovery. No heads up in that case.

 

Actually, that aircraft was an Eastern L-1011 in, I believe, 1972. which may be why you didn't find it on Google. But you're right; I was thinking the exactly the same thing. They were so preoccupied with the warning light that they forgot to keep flying the airplane, and with no visual references in the Everglades at night (and no TCAS in those days), they allowed the aircraft to descend into the swamp. Fortunately the watery nature of the ground kept the death toll from being any higher. (My aunt had flown the same flight a few days earlier!)

 

Glad I 'm not the only one thinking that...

I did it as a kid, flying a 172 that lost electrical power and I was so busy thinking about that, I made like 4 piloting errors in a row. Luckily my CFI let me screw it up then nearly took my head off for doing it wrong. He was the the kind of guy that knew when to be supportive and when to humiliate you and that day humiliation was called for.

It can happen really quick.

 

You are thinking about Eastern 401 a L-1011 for this accident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401

Here is the NTSB report...

http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR73-14.pdf

 

Right now we are just getting leaks and partial information. The crew could very well have been preoccupied with the multiple warnings that were being annunciated, but it is hard to believe they just flew it into the water.

Still Possible but...

At the altitude and speed they were flying, there is very little difference between cruise and stall speed. We know that the flight control system went into "alternative law" and the autopilot disengaged. Trim was set at the last known setting and there was no airspeed indication. Autothrottles were disengaged, so now this highly automated airplane is about as dumb as a 172, and worse, there is no force feedback in the stick. No feel or any way to know if you are pushing the envelope in either direction. If the person at the controls pulled back a tiny bit it is very easy to stall the aircraft at this point.

We have yet to hear what happened between 30,000 ft and the water. Did the aircraft stall? Was the stall recoverable? Did the pilots even know it was stalled? Did it just spiral down? Seems like if the aircraft was under control that it should have taken a while for it to come down from that high an altitude and the pilots should have gotten an idea that they were losing altitude. Absolutely possible, that they just flew it to the water, but then why did they lose maintenance data transmissions four minutes after all of the warnings went off? If it took a long time for them to get to the water the data transmissions would have continued and they didn't. Coming down at 7,500 fpm is a pretty fast rate, you would think somebody in the cockpit would notice that kind of descent rate.

There is a lot more to know and understand. Somebody is leaking what they want to leak for their own reasons, and I have a feeling that there is a lot more to come out than what has been leaked to the press. They are saying that the pilots became preoccupied with the warnings and made some mistakes, but with all of the warnings being presented, what ones are important and which ones do you ignore?

One press report said the crew wasn't trained on how to handle this type of situation???? Then what were they doing in the cockpit in the first place?

There is supposed to be a preliminary report on Friday and there should be a lot more in there. Still a lot of unanswered questions.

 

Thanks Rob. It was a long time ago.
They even did a made-for-TV movie on this one.

"The effects of this crash on the airline industry continue today and resulted in the development of Crew (or Cockpit) Resource Management (CRM), a technique that requires air crews to divide the work in the cockpit amongst available crew ensuring that someone continues focusing on flying the plane while troubleshooting continues. United Airlines Flight 232 is one of the most well known examples of effective CRM."

 

As I said at the end of my post, just speculation.
I am well aware that this is a preliminary report.
I agree with what you say.

 

Perhaps........but at least I don't look like one in "this" thread.

I'll ask you again, please explain in detail using facts, logic, and reason, how the time lines, methodology, and results, obtained many, many, decades ago in the undersea recovery incidents I posted as examples of my position, do not support my stance. Then when you are finished trying to squirm your way out of that closed box, you can proceed to substantiate the great job the French authorities did in their search in the face of my supposition.

Nothing more than a stop watch, ocean charts, a slide rule, and a pencil and paper was used in locating the first 3-4 wreck sites back in the 60's at depths equivalent (in 2 cases) to the AF447 parts. Maybe it is simply that the European mind is deficient, as I am sure they had access to better tools today, mais non ?

 

Giving facts, logic and reason to a conspiracy theorist is like lending your tuba to a banana slug. All you'll get for your trouble is a mouth full of slime.

Really, I'm not dumb enough to chase nutters down rabbit holes.

 

I saw an interesting interview once with a 30 year, well respected, MLB umpire. He admitted that occasionally, they blow calls.

But he offered this explanation and to me it made perfect sense.

He said that the most times umpires blow a call is when something "unusual" happens. The players flub a play, drop the ball, make a bad throw, run around in an unusual way, a player is out of position or stumbles, the ball takes a weird bounce, the runner makes some kind of mistake -- anything that's not routine.

That throws everyone off, including the Umpires who are expecting one thing and then see another. In a split second, they make a poor call.

I can see something like this happening to pilots. Even if the pilots didn't follow protocal, the root cause of their distraction most likely lies with another fault in the system.

 

bdelp, this brings us back 100% to my comments about the user interface of the aircraft. Few things are harder for a human than processing information that comes in quickly and breaks his preconceived notions. (like your umpires)

We can't hide stuff from pilots BUT we (the royal we) need to figure out how to give pilots the information they need IN A USABLE FORMAT to solve problems.

Maybe the manufactures do more usability work than gets publicized but I've never heard of any real work done here... We should be using simulators not just to train pilots on planes but to train the UI designers about how pilots think and react.

 

The same statement came from my pilot son who said it was like identifying the pellets in a shotgun blast.

 

Its actually not a bad idea, some failures result in numerous messages from systems that are effected by the MAIN failure. It would be good to see some sort of base message that pointed to the main system root failure that caused all the other alerts.

 

I've been working on software that does just this (albeit not for planes) for the last several years. Basically what you have is one top diagram that shows the status of every major subsystem. There are underlying "rules" that control the status of that subsystem...for example, if a component loses communication, or a temperature goes out of bounds, it will trigger a fault that will bubble up and show a failure on the subsystem level. From there, the users can drill down and isolate the problem to find out exactly what it is.

I have no idea what the user interfaces on commercial airliners are like now, but it would be interesting to find out. Do any pilots here have screen shots of what the displays are like on modern jets? If the software UIs are really that terrible, maybe there is a business opportunity somewhere in there =)

 

430man......

Well, calling someone names without being able to deconstruct their argument, and then back it up with one of your own, certainly doesn't give you any credibility here or make "me" look like an idiot or nutter.

Quite the opposite in fact.

You've been invited personally to bash me twice, now I'll make it a third time........

 

And for the third time I will decline said invite. I don't engage conspiracy theorists no matter how much they want me to. I identify them, I mock them, then I move on. Sorry but you won't use me as a foil to spread quackery.

 

I know exactly zero about commercial jet UIs... but I do have a strong background in User Interface Design and I've seen this common thread of TMD (too much data) in nearly every accident report for the last several years. That, combined with statements from pilots (eg above) tells me the UI is not as functional as it should be and (in my mind at least) might be crossing the line from helpful to detrimental to flight safety. (maybe)

And BTW by user interface I don't mean the monitors and the software... I mean the whole cockpit.

 

User Interface or the lack of it has been a problem with programer/user since the beginning of the computer era. Instructions and manuals are not written to the lowest denominator but seem to be for other programers who can handle the protocols and gobbledegook that the learner is totally baffled by. They habitually omit the small steps that are essential to bridge the way from one step to another leaving the student without a rudder many times. And if I heard it once I heard it a thousand times, " Well, YOU have to assume that such and so is ...." So, the architects of these ramified and complex computer systems in the airplanes have no problem wending their way through THEIR DESIGN as they are designing it and they ASSUME that everybody else can keep up with the firehose flow of data coming out of the panel. You're correct. Display the root cause and then some sort of descending order of what the hell is happening. Humans cannot keep up with the speed and massive gathering of information like computers and the systems architects should take that into consideration.

 

You know, after thinking about it a bit, we sort of have that already because the messages appear on the screen in order of appearance. The first is at the top last at bottom etc etc.
Color coded and the ones with triangles are "must take care of right now" type of alerts. So in a way you could glean alot of info just by the order they are in.

 

Yeah, I figured as much but I'm just assuming that the best way to display alarms to a user is through a software user interface where they can easily control the granularity of the data. It sounds like an application that could interface with a planes subsystems and gather status data, and effectively display that data in a hierarchical fashion, especially when there are alarms/faults, would be extremely useful if it doesn't already exist.