Old news but good article by Wm Langewiesche on Air France 447

Everskyward said:
Are the words "DUAL INPUT" in English? How often do they hear this spoken? Probably not much. Wondering if language could have also been a problem.
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Yes. I believe so. Thing is there was so much happening and they knew what DUAL INPUT meant but I'm not sure either pilot knew one of them was yanking back the whole damn time. There was a considerable amount of focus on correcting their bank which of course wasn't helping the matter.
 
Art VanDelay said:
This accident for me is just a shining example of why I am ALL for the 1500 hr requirement. You take someone rapidly thru beginning stages of flight and put them into automation and viola ! You get guys like this and guys like we had on the Colgan flight. In both instances they had much more than 1500 hours but they never had any time to build any kind of foundation. Or rather the training curriculum did not think to allow for it.

These guys were systems managers not pilots. When something went wrong they sought to find the system's solution instead of falling into the most basic mode and flying the aircraft. They didn't know how to fly with their butt like you guys do, to really "feel" the aircraft. All of that had never been allowed to take root in them by virtue of their training curriculum.

Ideally nobody wants to spend eleven or twelve hundred hours being a flight instructor but whether you believe it or not - you sure learn a lot from it. You don't see that going into it but you're never sharper than when you're doing it every single day. And I'm not talking about just VFR private pilot training. I'm talking about instrument instruction and multi-engine work too. It all builds a pretty strong visceral Aviator - which is just what we really want to have up front.
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Yes, the 1500 hour thing does makes sense in that context.

Heck, I stall/spun/crashed so many RC planes that I knew better than to pull up well before I ever put my hands on a 'real' aircraft. The CFI experience must be especially valuable. It all counts to some extent.

Having the Airlines train pilots ab initio to operate their aircraft seems inevitable but is it safe and prudent? The military seems to do it effectively.
 
Art VanDelay said:
They didn't know how to fly with their butt like you guys do, to really "feel" the aircraft. All of that had never been allowed to take root in them by virtue of their training curriculum.
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I'm not sure that really describes the senior captain. And the most junior pilot in the right seat who essentially put the jet into its initial stall appears to have earned a glider rating just prior to joining Air France.
 
Bill Watson said:
Yes, the 1500 hour thing does makes sense in that context.

Heck, I stall/spun/crashed so many RC planes that I knew better than to pull up well before I ever put my hands on a 'real' aircraft. The CFI experience must be especially valuable. It all counts to some extent.

Having the Airlines train pilots ab initio to operate their aircraft seems inevitable but is it safe and prudent? The military seems to do it effectively.
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There was a problem with the way stalls were being taught in jets and turboprops. Until fairly recently they were taught as a proficiency maneuver as opposed to a recovery. You were supposed to maintain altitude and not drop the nose. This required some back pressure on the yoke initially. They have gotten away from that in recent years, at least they have where I go to train.
 
Everskyward said:
There was a problem with the way stalls were being taught in jets and turboprops. Until fairly recently they were taught as a proficiency maneuver as opposed to a recovery. You were supposed to maintain altitude and not drop the nose. This required some back pressure on the yoke initially. They have gotten away from that in recent years, at least they have where I go to train.
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And it took 3 accidents to realize this... Pinnacle 3701, Colgan 3407, AF 447
 
Why didn't the A330 go back to Normal Law when the airspeed came back?
 
Once the airspeed is deemed unreliable the plane has no way of knowing if the new airspeed is reliable or not. The bird never came out of the stall so it was in the peripheral flight envelope with full control authority given to the pilot. In this case it only made matters worse. There wouldn't be any reverting to normal law without input from the crew. The sticks have no "feel" on the A330. In alternate law if you yank the stick all the way back it leaves 15 degrees of "up" in the elevator........Bonin was stirring the sticks frantically and probably had no idea the plane was helping him get that nose way up there. A tragedy all the way around, that didn't have to happen. They were going to install the new pitot tubes within a week.
 
Greg Bockelman said:
Ok, its been awhile but: The last button pushed has control. And if I recall, that pilot only has sole control as long as the button is pushed. IOW, both pilots can have control if neither button is pushed, but only the pilot that pushed AND HELD the button last has control in that case...
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Maybe the A330 is completely different but on the A320 the Priority buttons are on the glareshield and you don't hold it down.

I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, there was an acknowledged design flaw with the pitot tubes, they were slated to be replaced. Is it not true that absent that design flaw this never would have happened? :dunno:
 
Silvaire said:
Maybe the A330 is completely different but on the A320 the Priority buttons are on the glareshield and you don't hold it down.
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No, the priority button is on the side stick (same on 330 and 320). The annunciation light for priority is on the glare shield.

Silvaire said:
I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, there was an acknowledged design flaw with the pitot tubes, they were slated to be replaced. Is it not true that absent that design flaw this never would have happened? :dunno:
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Correct. But the crew took a bad situation and made it worse (fatal). The airplane was still fly able.
 
jesse said:
but I'm not sure either pilot knew one of them was yanking back the whole damn time. There was a considerable amount of focus on correcting their bank which of course wasn't helping the matter.
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Too much time spent yanking their stick, not enough time spent thinking.
 
RotorAndWing said:
Just watched a program on cars trying to beat trains at train crossings. The crossings have all of the latest technology, signs, lighting, bells, etc., but a few people still try to ignore all of that and attempt to beat the train, usually with dire results.

Who should we blame? The municipality who controls the crossing? The engineers that designed the crossing? The company that built the crossing guards? How about the driver that ignored training and decided to try to get across?

Should we build crossings with more restraints? More warnings?
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Most "victims" blame the big bad railroad and sue. Railroads usually settle rather than spend a fortune on lawyers.

Must be nice to get a reward for your own stupidity. :mad2:
 
Silvaire said:
I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, there was an acknowledged design flaw with the pitot tubes, they were slated to be replaced. Is it not true that absent that design flaw this never would have happened? :dunno:
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Agreed, it seems like that would have been the case.

But then we're back to blaming the equipment and disregarding the pilots' role in this. Being only slightly facetious; beyond showing up on time, programming the FMGS, and finding the right gate, the pilots are responsible for taking over control and doing that pilot sh-t when the automation throws up its hands and says, "your airplane".

Heck, having an extra pilot aboard should be an asset rather than a liability. Remember Sioux City!
DC-10 Landing at Sioux City
 
Art VanDelay said:
This accident for me is just a shining example of why I am ALL for the 1500 hr requirement. You take someone rapidly thru beginning stages of flight and put them into automation and viola ! You get guys like this and guys like we had on the Colgan flight. In both instances they had much more than 1500 hours but they never had any time to build any kind of foundation. Or rather the training curriculum did not think to allow for it.

These guys were systems managers not pilots. When something went wrong they sought to find the system's solution instead of falling into the most basic mode and flying the aircraft. They didn't know how to fly with their butt like you guys do, to really "feel" the aircraft. All of that had never been allowed to take root in them by virtue of their training curriculum.

Ideally nobody wants to spend eleven or twelve hundred hours being a flight instructor but whether you believe it or not - you sure learn a lot from it. You don't see that going into it but you're never sharper than when you're doing it every single day. And I'm not talking about just VFR private pilot training. I'm talking about instrument instruction and multi-engine work too. It all builds a pretty strong visceral Aviator - which is just what we really want to have up front.
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Agreed. Others are trying to find fault with the airplane, as I said before, the airplane did exactly what it was commanded to do. True there was a fault with the pitot probe, but Airbus realized this, issued a SB and had replacement parts, and had alerted operators.

The system problem didn't crash the airplane, it has been proven over and over that the system redundancy was there. The problem here was pilot error.
 
Bill Watson said:
Heck, having an extra pilot aboard should be an asset rather than a liability.
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How 'bout 3 extra? The uncontained engine failure on a Qantas A380 in 2010 or 2011 is/was another beautiful example of CRM and abnormal procedures done right. Accident report available through ATSB and numerous case studies of the CRM online.

Nauga,
and his delegates
 
Bill Jennings said:
Too much time spent yanking their stick, not enough time spent thinking.
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Absolutely. There is a memory item for unreliable airspeed, the pilots should have remained calm and worked through the problem. Had they had followed procedures the outcome would have been way different.
 
RotorAndWing said:
Explain to us systems wise why that didn't happen, otherwise you're not adding to the discussion. :rolleyes2:
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Discussing a topic that has not been discussed adds to the discussion. Posting the same thing over and over does not.
 
I am fortunate that I had an instructor (PP and IA) who was insistent upon the "fly the airplane first" doctrine, and he loved to start throwing in distractions and odd occurrences to test my adherence to the key principle. It is so easy to be distracted by a "thing" or two going off the reservation in its behavior. I have had a couple of times when unexpected occurrences could have taken me out of the game, so to speak, and Ted's teachings have served me well.

Reading about the QANTAS A380 and the potentially-overwhelming barrage of warnings and alerts they were dealing with, I was impressed by the fact that the PIC was, first and foremost, FLYING THE AIRCRAFT. That plane was crewed by pilots, not aircraft systems managers. The issues on that plane were vastly greater than anything the AF crew encountered.

As far as design elements, there is no way we can pretend that the design of the Airbus aircraft is not outstanding. The one element, however, that still stands out for me, on this particular tragedy, is this: I believe it is more likely than not that, had there been a big, honkin' yoke pulled way back in the belly of both pilots, the reality of what control inputs were causing the plane to fly as it was would have been so blatantly obvious that there would have been a realization of what control movement was required to recover.

The entire Airbus fleet could have gone for decades without this combination of occurrences and fundamentally unprepared pilots causing a crash like AF447; in the same time frame, how many disasters have been averted because of the protective control philosophy implemented by Airbus?
 
RotorAndWing said:
the airplane did exactly what it was commanded to do.
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Nobody said it didn't. The design of the airplane's systems added a needless layer of obfuscation which increased the pilots' confusion.
 
dmspilot said:
And it took 3 accidents to realize this... Pinnacle 3701, Colgan 3407, AF 447
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Yup, it introduces the wrong muscle memory. While some will say if they (especially Bonin) had more small airplane time practicing stalls the conventional way the Law of Primacy might have taken over, there is also the Law of Recency.
 
SCCutler said:
...in the same time frame, how many disasters have been averted because of the protective control philosophy...
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Statistics like this are difficult to track because they're fairly rare and a single event skews the data significantly to the negative and 'disasters averted' are not always reported as such; however, you'll have to look long and hard to find a loss of control accident in a commercial airplane with functional envelope protection. I'm not sure you'll find one. You can easily find them in airplanes with no or non-functional envelope protection - guess the primary cause?

Nauga,
and his command path
 
dmspilot said:
Nobody said it didn't. The design of the airplane's systems added a needless layer of obfuscation which increased the pilots' confusion.
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No it didn't . How can you claim it's a "needless layer of obfuscation", but yet the majority of pilots and operators haven't had a problem with it?

Do you actually understand how the systems of an Airbus operate? Or are you just guessing at it?
 
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SCCutler said:
I believe it is more likely than not that, had there been a big, honkin' yoke pulled way back in the belly of both pilots, the reality of what control inputs were causing the plane to fly as it was would have been so blatantly obvious that there would have been a realization of what control movement was required to recover.
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Aren't Dash-8 yokes interconnected? How well did that work for Colgan 3407? I think it's fair to say that the lack of interconnect and/or backdrive compounded the confusion, and I believe the accident report states as much, but I don't think it's fair to say with absolute or even strong certainty that had the sticks been interconnected that 447 would not have hit the water.


Nauga,
and his SOP
 
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nauga said:
Aren't Dash-8 yokes interconnected? How well did that work for Colgan 3407? I think it's fair to say that the lack of interconnect and/or backdrive compounded the confusion, and I believe the accident report states as much, but I don't think it's fair to say with absolute or even strong certainty that had the sticks been interconnected that 447 would not have hit the water.
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You can never say anything like that with certainty but the difference between the two accidents is that AF447 took a number of minutes to develop while Colgan3407 was over in seconds.
 
Everskyward said:
You can never say anything like that with certainty but the difference between the two accidents is that AF447 took a number of minutes to develop while Colgan3407 was over in seconds.
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But the common thread in those two accidents were lack of basic airmanship skills.
 
RotorAndWing said:
But the common thread in those two accidents were lack of basic airmanship skills.
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True, but the question I addressed had to do with the non-flying pilot recognizing the position of the yokes if Airbus had designed them to operate in unison. The AF pilots would have had a lot more time than the Colgan pilot.
 
nauga said:
I think it's fair to say that the lack of interconnect and/or backdrive compounded the confusion, and I believe the accident report states as much, but I don't think it's fair to say with absolute or even strong certainty that had the sticks been interconnected that 447 would not have hit the water.


Nauga,
and his SOP
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Has anyone in this thread said that with absolute or strong certainty? I've been one of the harshest critics of the stick system, and given my reasons why. But there is no way to say with any amount of certainty that the interconnected stick operation would have prevented this. It can't be assumed, or really inferred from the outcome.

However, what's clear is that the PNF stick did not represent the actual conditions of the plane. The PF stick was being held back significantly for a long duration. We know the flight control was deflected - exactly as commanded by the PF, but the PNF stick didn't report the dramatic condition. It reported in it's current central position no information about the control deflection, exactly as designed by Airbus. In every other plane, including the Boeing the stick/yoke represents the condition of the flight control which it serves. But no, Airbus decided to make it a useless stalk unless it was selected for manual operation. In which case - the other stick goes limp! :mad2: Oh - oh,,, except when both sticks are being used to manage the flight controls - in which case the intermixed inputs are algebraically summed, and the output is sent to the flight control! DOH!
 
Everskyward said:
True, but the question I addressed had to do with the non-flying pilot recognizing the position of the yokes if Airbus had designed them to operate in unison. The AF pilots would have had a lot more time than the Colgan pilot.
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I fly an Airbus, and I don't understand all of this fascination with the side sticks. The way it works in the airplane is actually a good system, it has warnings ( visual and aural) if both sticks are moved at the same time, and it has a lock out function.

Remember the Egypt Air plane that crashed in the Atlantic? The PF flew it into the ocean while the PNF fought him on the control yoke. A conventional system yet because the PF held it and the PNF couldn't overcome him.

Had the side sticks been interconnected do we think the outcome would have been different? :dunno: The PF (AF447) was determined to keep the control stick full aft.
 
RotorAndWing said:
The PF (AF447) was determined to keep the control stick full aft.
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Correct, but did either PNFs realize that was happening? I really don't think so.

You're so focused on the "airplane is fine" the "crew screwed up" and yes I agree with you. But crews do screw up and it's worth looking to see what could have been different about the systems that may have prevented it. Don't worry, you don't have to think like that, because you're not an engineer.

I don't build systems that fly airplanes but I do build systems that handle quite a bit of flowing money. When something goes wrong, it's almost always the mistake of an individual, and we retrain that individual. That doesn't mean I'm not going to have to own up as to why our system allowed those mistakes to take place and work to correct those mistakes, regardless of how stupid the individual was that created the problem on a perfectly good system.
 
jesse said:
Correct, but did either PNFs realize that was happening? I really don't think so.

You're so focused on the "airplane is fine" the "crew screwed up" and yes I agree with you. But crews do screw up and it's worth looking to see what could have been different about the systems that may have prevented it. Don't worry, you don't have to think like that, because you're not an engineer.

I don't build systems that fly airplanes but I do build systems that handle quite a bit of flowing money. When something goes wrong, it's almost always the mistake of an individual, and we retrain that individual. That doesn't mean I'm not going to have to own up as to why our system allowed those mistakes to take place and work to correct those mistakes, regardless of how stupid the individual was that created the problem on a perfectly good system.
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From the viewpoint of an engineer or designer - there are a lot of things to take into account. A place I where I used to work went through a big phase of "Root Cause Analysis", their shortcut was to ask "why" a certain number of times (5 levels deep, I think). So I'm looking at AF from that perspective. Why did the plane crash? Pilot error. Why pilot error? Now you get into the details of training, personalities, information presentation, control systems design, ...

One of the hard things about this accident is actually one of the good things about the industry. We've managed to make it so safe, statistically, that we are now down to being in the noise when we try to find significant ways to make even more safety changes. Interconnecting the side sticks - OK, maybe it would have helped, but there's probably no way to ever know.
 
RotorAndWing said:
I fly an Airbus, and I don't understand all of this fascination with the side sticks.
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This probably doesn't count but I flew an Airbus sim for about an hour and had no problem adjusting to the sidestick. But I was given a short, well maybe not that short for a fun flight, explanation of how they worked and what was different. I think what people are saying is that if the pilots are fighting each other for the controls but they don't know it, that could be a problem. Of course there should have been more communication, but there wasn't.
 
Bill Watson said:
Agreed, it seems like that would have been the case.

But then we're back to blaming the equipment and disregarding the pilots' role in this...[/URL]
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Right and I didn't mean to disregard the other elements but it seems that all of these catastrophic events occur through a chain of failures and the problem with the pitot tubes was a known element prior to the event.
 
RotorAndWing said:
Remember the Egypt Air plane that crashed in the Atlantic? The PF flew it into the ocean while the PNF fought him on the control yoke. A conventional system yet because the PF held it and the PNF couldn't overcome him.
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Yeah but the one guy was determined to crash and was apparently stronger than the other guy. That wasn't the case with AF.
 
jesse said:
You're so focused on the "airplane is fine" the "crew screwed up" and yes I agree with you. But crews do screw up and it's worth looking to see what could have been different about the systems that may have prevented it. Don't worry, you don't have to think like that, because you're not an engineer.

.
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I believe Airbus has quite a team of engineers at Toulouse, and I'm quite sure they have had ample time and feedback to evaluate the situation. Had Airbus felt that the system was flawed or the data showed a severe flaw a solution would have been found.

Airbus also tracks thousands upon thousands of hours of data gathered through the operating data downloaded throughout all of the operating fleet. Again the data doesn't suggest the flaw lies within the aircraft or it's systems.

Is there an aircraft built that can totally defeat an inept pilot? :dunno:
 
RotorAndWing said:
I believe Airbus has quite a team of engineers at Toulouse, and I'm quite sure they have had ample time and feedback to evaluate the situation. Had Airbus felt that the system was flawed or the data showed a severe flaw a solution would have been found.
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Or they thought about it and concluded the likelihood of it happening was remote and therefore couldn't justify the cost to design and build the system the other way. We don't know.
 
Yeah, engineers never make mistakes. Which is why we(and the French) don't need an AD system for aircraft.

Oh - wait....

That recent column about the P210 is an engineering nightmare. I really liked the part where faulty design spec helped kill the four doctors. Sure - the average pilot should have been able to get the damaged plane down partial panel no prob. Sure.
 
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