New account of Flight 447 disaster published Lack of manual flying experience contributed to the crash of a fully functional commercial airliner two years ago, killing all 228 people aboard. Air France Flight 447 crashed while flying through an Atlantic storm in July 2009, the worst ever French aviation accident. The black box recorders were not recovered for almost two …
What I don't understand is why the cockpit stall warning was not also played into the crew "resting" (I assume this means sleeping) area? Any time you have a major alarm I'd want to get every hand on deck. If the stall warning was played into the captains bunk he would have got his arse back to the cockpit a little faster. And if it *was* played to his bunk and he rolled over and ignored it like the two co-pilots...
Sure, no need to wake everybody up for trivial alerts, but for major alarms (like stall, terrain, etc) you want to make sure you have all the available help. Who knows, maybe both co-pilots have passed out and there is nobody awake at the stick.
The other part I don't understand is why the plane didn't revert to "Normal Law" once the instruments came good? I can see an argument for not automatically reverting to "Normal Law", but I would expect the plane to prompt saying it's a really good idea to revert.
It appears that instrument flying, with no reliable visual reference, is as hard as it ever was.
As some posters have alluded to, the Airbus approach does seem to somewhat isolate the pilots from the key indicators while suddenly overwhelming them with input. It's not surprising the most inexperienced pilot panicked, but he should have been a spectator by that point. I don't know what to say about the averaging of the flight controls though, I just can't see how anyone would think this was a good idea.
I also think we're all entitled to an opinion on this, any one of us could have been on board that aeroplane.
how many people who posted very poor assumptions here are actual airline pilots? (atpl with a jet rating, at least 2000 hours flying time..) we are required to do a "recurrent" training at least every six months inside a simulator to train for these scenarios (airspeed unreliable/recovery from a stall, etc). but I tell you, no matter how good you are at flying, simulated or actual, nothing can really prepare you for the real thing. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. bottomline is, ask any airline pilot and if that pilot says "that won't ever happen to me" then he has no respect for the situation and he has no idea of the dangers.
@SkippyBing 21:20 11 Dec
There are safety critical systems on pretty much every commercial airline that do not use independent design teams and/or do not use dissimilar hardware for resilience.
This actually isn't a great concern, what's more a concern is the people round here who think these techniques are in common use and therefore that all will be OK.
Everything probably will be OK, but the use of independent design teams and dissimilar hardware is not necessarily a reason why.
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