HE was one of Air France's "company babies"

[OurMoney1]

Gotta love the clowns who throw dead folks into their grave and then kick them on their way down.

Dark cockpit....alarms.....thunderstorms.....turbulence.....flashing displays.....no airspeed indications.....throttles that don't move.....an airplane that flies with a keyboard....over a black ocean.....startle factor.....bad indications.....

Yeah heroes......let's see you pull it off......Jackholes!!!

Agreed. It was another set of circumstances that led to a bad situation with a deadly outcome. The idiots that judge are fools waiting for fate to knock on their doors.

 

[Mud Eagle]

What?? No fury over this comment in the article?

Doerr said he doubted that American pilots, who typically come from military backgrounds, would have been overwhelmed. “The European airlines select people with virtually no flight time at all and train them pretty much from the ground up,” he said.

 

[OurMoney1]

What?? No fury over this comment in the article?

Doerr is an idiot.

 

[SMcC]

Yeah that was ignorant too

 

[nwaf16dude]

True, but they may have lost the tail section by then. They found it a couple miles away from where the main section of the plane was found. It's hard to fly without the tail. Going through bad weather in the dark, with false indictions, probably made the whole deal a lot worse.

Apparently this same scenario was used on some unsuspecting sim people during a loft after this happened, and it was very confusing to them too. Not good.


Bye Bye--General Lee

According to Nova, which is usually pretty reliable, the investigators determined that the tail was still attached when it hit the water. The distance away is explained by the fact that the tail floated after breaking off on impact.

 

[Metrojet]

WRONG.


First of all, you don't understand crew rest for INTL crews. The Captain INITIALLY WAS IN THE BACK ON BREAK. The other two pilots are FOs, one being senior in the right seat, and the other is the "floater" or third guy who sits in the left seat when the Capt is on break, and the right seat when the FO is on break. This is NORMAL. According to this article, the Captain came back after about 1 and a half minutes into this emergency. Apparently the pitot tubes had problems, and gave false indications. This was at night, and in the weather in the ITCZ near the Equator. A similar event happened to a DL A330 crew flying from HKG to NRT after this happened, but it was during the day in VFR conditions, and they landed safely. Big difference when you are flying during the day in clear weather vs flying at night near thunderstorms. If the indications showed that they were near a high speed, most people would bring back the power. Apparently on the airbus there are different "laws" concerning the onboard computers, and one will not let you stall. But, when it reverts to "normal law" (?) everything reverts to manual.


Here is the article:


Two co-pilots facing faulty instrument readings and a stall fought to regain control of an Air France flight before the plane slammed into the Atlantic in a 3 1/2 minute fall, killing all 228 people aboard, accident investigators said Friday.

A preliminary report into the crash of Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris also revealed the captain was on a routine rest break when the trouble began on June 1, 2009 and he never retook the controls. The new information came from data gleaned from the Airbus 330's black boxes, which were recovered in early May.

But the report does not answer the key question: what caused the crash and who the third voice is?

Asked whether faulty sensors, other mechanical issues or the crew's actions were responsible for the disaster, air accident investigation agency director Jean-Paul Troadec said: "It's a combination of all of this."
Friday's report by the French air accident investigation agency BEA was a factual description of the chain of events beginning with takeoff in Rio de Janeiro until recordings fell dead nearly four hours later.

Some families of victims who said they were given information in a meeting with the agency said it was possible their loved ones went to their deaths unaware of what was happening because there was apparently no contact between the cockpit and cabin crew in the 3 1/2 minutes.


'They did not suffer'

"It seems they did not feel more movements and turbulence than you generally feel in storms," said Jean-Baptiste Audousset, president of a victims' solidarity association. "So, we think that until impact they did not realize the situation, which for the family is what they want to hear — they did not suffer."

The report revealed that the plane's captain, Marc Dubois, was out of the cockpit on a routine rest break when the problems began.
The data flight recorder and cockpit recorder were dredged from the ocean in April, along with some bodies, in the latest effort by investigators to explain the disaster. Both of the boxes were readable.

They show inconsistent speed readings, two co-pilots working methodically to right the plane manually and a resting captain returning to the cockpit amid what moments later became an irretrievably catastrophic situation. The data also showed that the plane went into an aerodynamic stall — a loss of lift brought on by too little speed. Investigators only provided partial quotes from the voice recorder in Friday's report.


The report confirmed that two sets of instruments on the plane were giving conflicting speed readings. On the voice recorder, one co-pilot is heard to say "so we've lost the speeds" about four minutes before the crash.

Experts have suggested external monitoring instruments iced over. Air France has now replaced the monitors, called Pitot tubes, on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft. The plane was passing through ominous weather in mid-Atlantic, about three and a half hours after taking off, when the problems began.

Co-pilots in control

More than eight minutes before the crash the co-pilot at the controls, one of three members of the flight crew, advised the cabin crew "you should watch out" for turbulence ahead. He said the plane could not climb out of the cloud layer where the turbulence was happening because it was not cold enough.

Turbulence caused the pilots to make a slight change of course, but was not excessive as the plane tried to negotiate a normal path — passing through a heavy layer of clouds. Four minutes later, the plane's autopilot and auto-thrust shut off, the stall alarm sounded twice and the co-pilot at the controls, 32-year-old Pierre-Cedric Bonin, took over manual control.

A second co-pilot, David Robert, 37, was also in the cockpit.
Pilots on long-haul flights often take turns resting to remain alert. Dubois returned to the cockpit about a minute and a half after the problems started but did not take back the controls.

Just over two minutes before the crash, Bonin is heard to say "I don't have any more indications." Robert says "We have no valid indications."
The interim report by accident investigation agency BEA did not analyze the data or cockpit conversations or assign blame. A full report on the crash is not due until next year.

More questions than answers

Air France said in a statement that, based on the report, it appears "the initial problem was the failure of the speed probes which led to the disconnection of the autopilot" and loss of pilot protection systems.
The airline defended the captain, saying he "quickly interrupted his rest period to regain the cockpit."


Independent aviation analyst Chris Yates said the report appears "to raise more questions than it answers." "It would seem to me, reading between the lines, that the cockpit crew weren't confident of the information that was being presented to them on the data displays. Maybe — and it's only a maybe — they took some action that led to the stall warning, and the plane stalling and then being unable to correct it."

The flight recorders were found along with bodies in early May in the latest in a series of meticulous searches using small submarines and robots to comb the ocean depths.



Bye Bye---General Lee

C'mon General -

Don't start talking about Airbus "Flight Laws" if you don't know what your talking about - Normal Law is not manual - and by the way - all these terms referencing "laws" really means flight loads. I HIGHLY suggest you go to Airbus School and get 500 hours on the Airbus before you become the "know it all expert"!

Metrojet

 

[B727Driver]

Approaching 15,000 posts, he is the expert. Just ask him.

 

[Hawker800]

Aren't the pitot tubes heated on the airbus? How could they ice up?

 

[jonjuan]

Aren't the pitot tubes heated on the airbus? How could they ice up?

Watch the Nova episode. There may be the answer to your question.

 

[dougdrvr]

According to Nova, which is usually pretty reliable, the investigators determined that the tail was still attached when it hit the water. The distance away is explained by the fact that the tail floated after breaking off on impact.

If the tail came off, it would have been followed shortly by the wings failing in negative load as the airplane tumbled forward.

 

[EuroWheenie]

Appreciate there's a vast difference between the hours expected from a candidate applying for a US major vs. that of a European ditto. I also appreciate that having had 1000 hours fooling around in bugsmashers teaching doctors not to kill themselves, getting lots of stick time in the process, has a certain value when it comes to basic feel of aircraft handling.

There are, however, many ways to skin a cat, and the highly specialised integrated or modular approach to creating a ATPL orientated pilot has its values too.

Our lot has hired quite a few 200ish hour FO's directly on the B727 and B757, but we haven't done it for the A300B4. I got in with 377 hours on the B727, with the first batch of still-wet-behind-the-ears-need-a-note-from-momma-to-fly-nights kids, and that aircraft turned out to be quite a handful for all of us. The airline flies with "real" FEs, so we went directly to the RH seat. It was a very steep learning curve, but we got through and the experience served to improve the curriculum.

We're but a small yellow painted boxhauler, but all the majors from BA over AF to LH etc hires kids at the age of 20 and with 200 hours to be FOs their short-haul fleet. Of all the airlines, LH is probably the only one who've gone and done things the proper way, by having its own flight school and hiring kids straight out of college. It's said that getting in on the LH programme is more difficult than getting into the top German universities. But all of the reputable airlines have a very tough selection process, so the candidates they let in will have the skills and aptitude required to drive big jets.

The worst example are the Frozen ATPL factories, who churn out 200 hour cadets, the majority of which has no prior affiliation with any airline. The more talented of that group manages to land a job, but the vast majority cannot find employment and then buys a 30K Euro type rating followed by another purchase of 100, 200 or 300 hours on the line with an airline. If they manage not to bent anything or kill anyone, they've now got around 500 hours and thus more marketable.

It's one of the worst scams in aviation; a program in which it's nothing but your parents cash separating you from an airline job, not your abilities as a pilot. And let's face it, once you've sat 500 hours behind the FMC of a modern Boeing or Airbus you can pretty much fool anyone into thinking you know what your doing, and rely on the good hearted nature of your TRI/TREs to let you slip by in the sim and on LOFT.

One might expect only 3rd tier airlines to employ a program whereby a part of your FOs are actually paying to be sat there, but that's not the case. It's a practice that's been embraced by the LCCs with joy, so next time you board an Easyjet or Ryanair flight keep that in mind.

"They could teach monkeys to fly better than that ..."

 

[Tail Gunner Joe]

MOving the thread to the Correct section..

not nice to pee on the graves of others... none of you were there...

you sound french.

In the U.S. libel does not apply to the deseased.
So pee away, if you must. It's the law of the land*

*USA!, USA!, USA!

Anywho, there is a lot of interesting and pertinent info coming out in this thread

 

[Mr. Bean]

Good post, EuroWheenie, appreciate the info on how it's done over there.

My take is that the average, non-military pilot in the US has had uneven training but excellent experience, where the LH-type ab-initio guys have great training but limited experience. This works ok for the US as long as a pilot shortage isn't on, when uneven training meets limited experience.

I think the US way gives pilots a bag of tricks to rely upon, or to at least try, when something crummy and novel is thrust upon them.

As to pissing on graves...didn't Ross say that "in this business we play for keeps?" We dissect accidents in hopes of immunizing ourselves against the same. To say that a crew screwed up ISN'T saying they were bad pilots or people, nor is it saying that the commenter would have done better, all it's saying is that the crew screwed up, and IF you're saying it, then somewhere in your mind you have some idea of what you'd do differently, and maybe that'll keep you and yours alive some day.

Tell the truth- how many of you honestly believe that you would have done the same as AF447's crew?

Two things about AF447 I'm fairly certain of:
1) Their airplane betrayed them, very likely in ways unique to an Airbus.
2) The means to their salvation was at hand, but went unrecognized.

When I have more info, I'll sweeten these up. Even if I'm totally wrong about what caused this accident, I'm still ahead as I've considered several scenarios and what I might do if faced with those situations.

Fly Safe!