[Vertrek]

Dear craigwatson,

Hmm.. It’s easy to blame other people, the things is, when flying at night, in stormy weather, above the ocean with failing equipments and the non-stop reminder sign and panic. We tend to lose our ability to maintain memory and become confuse, try to imagine when you are nervous, now times it with how many millions when your life and 400 people life at stake.
We do not know what exactly happened there nor the truth, If i am not wrong, in early 2010, they blamed the pitot tube, now the pilot….
Perhaps the pilot need more training, perhaps it was the pitot tube, at least everyone can learn something out of it.

As “big passenger planes do not just fall out of the sky” I do agree, accident like this had never happened (at least to my knowledge) before to an A330 + AF has deployed them for this route or many years, and I am pretty sure the exact weather had occurred before, therefore, A330 and AF pilot training should be able to handle it, and to blame the A330 and pilot training, it is quiet weird since I am sure pilot share information to each other and the company and non of the previous A330 operated flight had this problem.

Therefore, the possibility for it to be shot down is there, not to mention, they lost contact with the ATC before they actually crashed, my question is why? and how?

[Bucksnet]

Craig, I cut out the middle of the quote because the report is now out.

The point is that an expert stated “This is an air accident the like of which we haven’t seen before” which means it’s not likely to be an accident. Also “big passenger planes do not just fall out of the sky” means that something has caused the incident.

[craigwatson]

Vertek, I am a commercial pilot so do think I know a bit about what it’s like.

And unfortunately there have been numerous other aircraft loses due to UAS situations and frozen pitot tubes in particular, and most (but not all) have been due to pilot error. There should not have been as the situation is not all that dramatic, but as usual other factors come into play and it’s a cumulation of factors that cause an accident.

So yes alot of factors contributed to this accident but put a different crew in this exact same situation and 99 times out of 100 the passengers would not even have noticed anything was amiss.

I would wager that at least 1 person on this forum has been on an aircraft that has had a UAS situation before and didnt ecven notice it, because the crew dealt with it professionally.

[1nfrequent]

Just to make the point that it is incredibly difficult for a submarine to hit a moving aircraft using on-board missiles, not least because of the ranging problems of hitting something that’s moving fast at great height. Also, any missile activity is going to register on satellite observations and I don’t think that kind of thing can be kept quiet.

I’m more inclined to agree that this was a dreadful conflation of dodgy parts and poor reactions that made for a tragedy than a conspiracy of some sort.

1F

[canucklad]

There was an incident were an aircraft crashed because it took off with the pitot tubes covered over with tape…

The crew became disorientated because of the random speed readings and altitude readings…..The over riding factor in making this an unrecovarable situation was that the effect of the pitot tubes being covered up did not happen until the aircraft reached cruising altitude and more importantly was now over the ocean at night time !!

This removed the crews ability to fly the aircraft using visual reference points…..if it hadhappened during the day the crew would have recovered the situation….. i’m sure this set of circumstances also occured on 447

[LuganoPirate]

Some 25 odd years ago, in order to settle a bet, I flew a 737 simulator belonging to KLM. The bet was, could I, a 200 hours single engine ppl pilot with virtually no IFR experience, take over the controls of a 737 in bad weather, in which both pilots had become incapacitated at 33,000′ and safely land it back at AMS. In other words re-creating the scene from many films – is there a pilot onboard!!!

The answer was “NO” as I managed to total the plane.

My point is this, while then it was probably less realistic than today’s simulators, the whole thing felt very real indeed, and I managed to almost get the thing on the ground. However, in the back of my mind, I knew, no matter what would happen, this was not going to kill me, and my only loss would be a round of drinks in the Aero Club.

I don’t know what you think Craig, but surely there must be a vast difference in a professional pilots mind, no matter how often he has trained on a simulator, between that and a real life emergency where if you do the wrong thing it could be quite catastrophic?

[canucklad]

A point i made earlier was that part of the issue in this case seems to be the pilots over reliance on resolving the crisis by protocol and process…Ref : The flight director

Again we will never know exactly what their mindsets were at the critical decision making moments…

You absoluteley need a diagnostics tool to resolve a crisis.. i would theorise that dogged application can some times make things much worse…as was the case with the Swissair crash !

[craigwatson]

lugano – having never been in a situation like that, I can only make assumptions, but I would think that you would be to busy trying to rectify the situation to start dwelling on the what ifs. But then again only one who has been put in a situation like that would be able to say for sure.

Canucklad – your case with the covered pitot tubes ( or was it the static source?) is different to this case. Their problem would never have resolved itself and even had they got it sorted in flight I would not have wanted to try and make that approach to land.

With frozen pitot tube ( the ONLY thing that will be affected will be speed readings ) that problem will only last a few minutes and you just need to fly the aircraft until the pitot heat unfreezes the tube, its not difficult or time consuming.

The main thing here is the crew just didnt recognize that they had a simple UAS ( unreliable airspeed reading ), and started doing things that any 200+ hour pilot would know better not to do.

The first thing you are ever taught is Aviate, Navigate, Communicate in that order, they were’nt aviating (flying) at all.

They did have a “protocol” as you put it for this exact problem and had they followed it as they should have this plane would have landed uneventfully.

[JamesBAgold]

I’ve just watched the Channel 4 documentary on this tragic event.

While it’s all well and good saying that the pilots ‘should’ have done XYZ, in this case go into a dive in order to pick up speed, the reality is that three experienced pilots were unable to determine what was happening to them/the aeroplane in the Airbus cockpit environment.

The inability of the Captain to have a clear indication from the cockpit environment that his co-pilot was still attempting to climb (and keeping the nose up) has to be a worrying design flaw.

Very sad and depressing viewing.

While the pitot tube (speed sensors) may have now been upgraded it was by no means clear from the programme that the other contributing factors have yet been addressed.

[spudseamus]

The main thing here is the crew just didn’t recognise that they had a simple UAS ( unreliable airspeed reading ), and started doing things that any 200+ hour pilot would know better not to do.

That is a chilling sentence ! I have been unable to get it from my mind .

[Bullfrog]

Having watched the TV program and seen the experts opinions and the remake ‘within the cockpit’, one thing stood out to me.

The youngest pilot kept his hand on the joystick demanding constant lift for the aircraft nose. The location of the joystick and the fact that the action of one joystick is not mimicked by the other joystick meant the other pilots were not aware.

Whilst this was not the initial cause of the auto pilot disengaging, did this design and functionality prevent the two other pilots from knowing exactly what was happening ?

Would a traditional double central yoke with mimicked actions be preferable ?

[watersz]

Like all disasters , many small errors make a huge one.
Had the first officer verbally stated “I have control” when he took over the joystick as the norm . Then the least experienced pilot would not have been still pulling back as he was trying to push it forward.

falling at 10000ft /min+ doesnt give a lot room for recovery .

[canucklad]

Having watched the programme as well, what would concern me is the following….

1) The almost bravado like attitude leading to the decision to fly through the storm whilst other aircraft crew chose to diverty around it.
Why would a crew choose this option……AF fuel cost directives?

2) The Senior Captains in-ability to ask the correct questions to gain an holistic understanding of the problem on his return to the cockpit

3) The documentary just touched on AF’s role in this……..they never really pursued AF’s culpability in choosing inferior pitot’s or they procasternation in changing them!

Overall i thought the documentary was insightful to a degree but could have been more revealing if it had the courage to go more in-depth….it’s conclusions were pretty wishy washy, the pilots were at fault but you can’t really blame them for their training nor can you blame AF for following modern airmanship protocol!!!!!

I’m afraid they missed the point….If aircraft a just big flying computers, then you need to have a better back up plan than …………..

Switching it off and re-booting!! which you can’t do at 30.000 ft

[AnthonyDunn]

Yep, the Channel 4 documentary was frankly astonishing in showing that, in this day and age, it is possible for a crew with an experienced captain not to know that their aircraft was in a nose-up 35 degs angle of attack, that its airspeed was too low and that, lo and behold, the “STALL, STALL, STALL” voice warnings were for real. What I don’t understand is why there is not a physical device in a cockpit showing the horizon, aircraft attitude and wing roll. If you can have a magnetic compass with such characteristics on a boat, why not on a plane? This way, there would be no possibility of misinterpretation if the flight director computer is in overload/default/shut down mode.

Otherwise, the best article I have found is:

http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/2012-07-08/final-af447-report-suggests-pilot-slavishly-followed-flight-director-pitch-commands

If you scroll down to the comment piece below by Nalliah Thayabharan on August 1, 2012, it would appear that he has a pilot’s take on the catastrophe. Chilling.

[Bucksnet]

It is frankly astonishing that people cannot accept even the possibility that AF447 was shot down.

The crew would have known all the warnings if they actually happened, and there is a physical device in the cockpit showing the horizon and wing roll – it’s called the artificial horizon. All planes have these are far as I’m aware, even those with electronic instruments as it acts as a backup. And the GPS would give altitude and speed as well as location, so it matters not if the pitot tube fails. The one in my car does this.

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