What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

[Anton]

Chilling article about how pilot error brought down Air France Flight 447:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...ce-447-6611877

[Fabian]

Terrifying reading.

I will be travelling to Thailand from Australia in November and that part of the world has some crazy weather.
Hopefully i'll be flying Qantas and hopefully Qantas will still be employing Australian pilots to get me there and back home again safely.

Sadly the way things are going Qantas management is he!! bent on driving down wages and conditions and salivating at at the idea of hiring air crews from third world countries, forcing Australian pilots to accept lower wages, working conditions and quality of training.

[Skyliner70cc]

Pilots today are too engrossed in cockpit management of automated systems instead of actually flying the aircraft. Me thinks the worldwide airline industry could do a better job of training their pilots with regards to emergency action procedures.

As a former military pilot I can easily state the following. Almost all pilot are "good sticks" meaning they know how to fly/handle the aircraft. What differentiates a good pilot from a bad pilot is not necessarily how they fly but HOW they diagnose and react to an inflight emergency. I'll never forget when my copilot froze on the controls when we lost an engine during an engine test procedure on a maintenance test flight to ensure engines were capable of producing maximum power. He just sat there while the rotor rpm on our helicopter bled off dangerously and didn't drop the collective pitch or attempt to bring the 2nd engine (running at idle) back up to speed.

Air France 447 story is the reason why I'm a nervous flier as a passenger.

[Fabian]

Having previously worked in the defense science organisation that was responsible for extending the life span of Australian F-111's and modifying the vortex plume from the leading edge extensions on first generation FA-18's, and also skeletal reassembly of crash reconstructions, i can say that knowledge of flight failure weighs upon my mind.

Between pilot error/pilot fatigue, component and systems fatigue and air-frame fatigue and a reasonable knowledge of flight dynamics and how it can all go horribly wrong, i'm a very nervous flyer.

[Anton]

You think the copilots would at least understand that when there's a stall siren blaring constantly it's time to get the nose of the plane down.

[Fabian]

Surely the pilots would have felt "that sinking elevator feeling" in their stomachs as they were dropping 10,000 feet per minute, and as you say, with a siren blaring it would have confirmed they were falling fast and to get the nose down...

Imagine the horror of passengers strapped into their seats, knowing something very, very wrong was about to happen; knowing they had no input or control over the situation and knowing that it was only a matter of time with the strange whistle of wind noise over the stalled control surfaces.

[Skyliner70cc]

Fabian, the pilots would have just felt the change in downward acceleration. Once the verticial descent speed became constant aka terminal velocity, the freefall would have not been noticeably felt by the pilot's bodies. No different than a car. We feel changes in speed (acceleration/deceleration) but once we reach a steady speed, our body's vestiubular system doesn't sense constant speed.

[birdmannn101]

As a former airline pilot here is what I see happened. Bonin (the co-pilot in the right seat) said at 02:13:40 (Bonin) "But I've had the stick back the whole time!" Meanwhile Robert (in the left seat) is pushing his stick forward to try to recover by building up speed (which is the way out). The captain and Robert don't see Bonin holding the stick back and the plane crashes within 1 minute after Bonin makes his statement. The Airbuses are "fly by wire" not cable and as long as Bonin held the stick back and Robert pushed it forward they remained in a 10 degree nose pitch up condition till it pancaked in the ocean. One minute is not enough time to nose over and recover the aircraft.

[Fabian]

So, in saying, can a case be made for the failings of the airbus "fly by wire" system. If Captain Robert had synchronously linked controls he would have been able to get a nose down attitude and recover the aircraft.

Do Boeing aircraft have better pilot authority over the flight control systems?

[birdmannn101]

Fly by Wire is the new age in British aircraft. Robert, who was just another senior co-pilot would have had to know Bolin was holding the stick back in order to take control of the aircraft and fly out of the stall condition. He didn't realize that till 1 minute before impact which was too late to recover. Those aircraft are flown by 5 computers. The first Airbus A320 was doing a "fly by" at the airport with the gear down. The aircraft understood "We are Landing because the gear is down" and landed into the tree tops killing people on board. Boeing is what I used to fly so I am partial to a cable flown aircraft.