Any updates on the Airbus lost in the Atlantic?

That's the article that Jeff Wise wrote for PM, that he links in the post above... the huffpost is a summary.

I was wondering if the Left seat could override the Right seat... if he checked to see that Bonin was constantly pulling back in a rigor mortis grip.

Another strike against Airbus.

 

If the two side sticks are sending different messages, and nobody pressed the priority button, the aircraft takes the average.

If one pilot presses the button, that takes priority. If the other one then presses his/hers, it reverts to that one.

 

Thank you... found that on another site. Bad arrangement, especially since the 'sticks' don't actually move at all.

 

Autopilot Addition:

http://www.newser.com/story/147563/lack-of-training-blamed-for-deadly-air-france-crash.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=slate&utm_campaign=greatfinds_rss

– Airbus likes to boast that its A330 jet is "pilot-proof," but that sentiment may have helped trigger one of the worst airline disasters in recent years, experts tell ABC. They say that the co-pilots on Air France Flight 447 depended too heavily on the plane's autopilot system, and were not properly trained to deal with the high-altitude stall that occurred while the pilot was taking a scheduled nap. Tapes recovered last year from the 2009 crash reveal that a co-pilot made a fatal mistake when the autopilot disengaged, causing the crash that killed all 228 passengers and crew.

Pilots are not being trained to deal with such situations, says Bill Voss, chief of the Flight Safety Foundation, who notes that pilots are only manually flying for three minutes of the average flight—90 seconds at takeoff and 90 at landing. "We are moving toward automated operations where the pilot isn't even permitted to fly," he says. "That means the first time in your career you will ever feel what an aircraft feels like at 35,000 feet is when it's handed to you broken." Investigators will release their final report on the crash next month.

 

If I remember correctly, this plane was still climbing to cruise altitude when this happened. How was the pilot already on a scheduled nap?

 

They also reported that the captain was traveling "socially" with an off-duty flight attendant .

 

If the plane be a rockin', don't come a knockin'.

 

I believe it was PBS's NOVA that just did an explanation of the event.

Icing on the pitots that led to Automated systems control loss was their bottom line.
No high altitude break-up.

 

Nope, they'd been at cruise for a long time. The captain was on a rest break.

 

Ice on the pitot tubes was the first break in the chain, but should not have resulted in an accident, or in anything more than a slight altitude excursion.

They had three good attitude indicators at all times, and even had airspeed for most of the time.

This was truly a tragedy, as it was completely avoidable.

 

Confusing and conflicting instrument readings. Confused and conflicting control movements by a confused crew in conflict. And the airplane wasn't even at the party.

 

Airbus computers use "alternate law" when they are unable to get all of the sensor readings, or they cannot make sense of the instrument readings. That set of instructions averages out pilot input. As it turns out, one of the pilots had figured out what was happening (the plane was in a stall) and tried to adjust for it. Unfortunately, the other pilot was increasing the stall with his input (pulling back on the stick). The plane's computers averaged out the inputs, and the resulting control input was not strong enough to pull the plane out of the stall. Chillingly, the cockpit voice recorder has one of the pilots repeatedly saying "What is happening, what is happening"--he could not figure out the plane was in a stall all the way to the end.

This accident would never happened in a Boeing.

 

Nor would it have happened if the pilot had received instruction in a plane without instruments, and he could feel the stall. Even in IMC, there should be no mistaking the shudder before the stall. Poor training, **** plane equals a bunch of dead people.

Art

 

Could it be that the airplane wasn't buffeting when it was in the high angle attitude and mushing along in a pre-stall condition before separation and buffeting.

 

I suspect that in the storm turbulence, the stall buffeting was not discernible.

 

Art, you are over simplyfying what happened. The actual stall event occurred at relatively low "g" loading, at the top of the climb arc. The aircraft didn't buffet and there was no discernible "break" or drop. It simply stopped flying, and began falling and then accelerated to a higher vertical speed as it did. I don't want to use the term "deep stall" since that connotation describes a situation where the elevators are blanked by the wing, but the descent was similar in that the airplane was stalled, and descending in a stable state, without buffet or rocking that is more common in straight wing aircraft.

It is presumptuous to assume that you or anyone else could have been smart enough to recognize the situation and fly out of it. The pilots didn't and they paid for their mistake with their lives. But to simply assume that it was poor training is a over simplification, what happened was very complicated and there are plenty of reasons that they didn't recognize it. From our arm chairs, safe in our living rooms it's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback.

 

I have to agree with Art. While it's certainly true that they may not have noticed the buffet due to turbulence, with three good attitude indicators and good engines, there was no reason they shouldn't have been able to recover. Except for poor training, and some design issues with the aircraft.

Either on it's own would probably not have resulted in an accident, but put them together...

 

Was the flight recorder ever recovered ?

 

I believe both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were recovered. Thus, the transcript of the final conversation.

CW

 

I've been in severe turbulence, and had a stall. You feel it. Period. If you don't you shouldn't be in the left seat. Recovery is simple: point the nose down. They did that, and because of the **** design, they got a stall warning, when the plane was recovering. If they had understood what was going on, they would have kept the nose down and recovered. Bad design, poor skills equals a tragedy.

Art

 

I was recently watching a DVD made on the flight deck of an Air Canada 777-200LR on a flight from Vancouver to Sydney (15+ hours!). The portion of the flight through the Intertropical Convergence Zone was at night.

The first officer reported on the real danger of "dry thunderstorms" that can occur in the ICZ; these are cumulonimbus clouds with little or no rain and often little or no lightning, and as such they will not readily appear on weather radar. They still have turbulence and can produce icing conditions, and pilots crossing the ICZ have to be on their toes. It appears that the Air France A330 may have been a victim of one of these storms.

 

Nightline did a half hour show on this crash a few weeks ago. Pretty much laid out what investigators think happened minute by minute.

The most chilling part was that when the captain returned to the cockpit, he asked the two co-pilots what was going wrong and they had no clue what was wrong with the plane.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/air-france-flight-447-investigation-pilots-properly-trained/story?id=16503005#.T9_RWxfJjTo

 

Art, this is not what happened. The got a stall warning because the plane was stalled. The pilots were giving conflicting inputs, and the computer averaged them (called alternate law). The averaged input value was not sufficient to pull the plane out of the stall. Bad design yes. Poor skills, no. The bad design took the adequate skills and negated their impact by averaging the input values.

Malfunctioning pitot and bad weather were a significant factor in this crash too.

 

Add to that UTTER PANIC. They were PEOPLE. They got confused and didn't
sort it all out in time. The cockpit transcript is clear evidence of the panic and
confusion involved.

Jedi

 

They shouldn't have panicked. That is why they crashed, and it is inexcusable for professional aviators (or any pilots, for that matter).

If you want to see true professionalism, read the transcript for Alaska 261, especially the last 4-5 minutes. They were in a truly unrecoverable situation, and they kept flying right down to the water.

http://www.tailstrike.com/310100.htm