Air France flight crash

[SuperBuickGuy]

So let's see - two tails blown off, now their planes are so smart they simply drop the plane into the ocean.... talk about poor engineering
I'm seriously considering that when I book tickets I'll also check whether or not it's a Airbus airplane - and change my flight if it is to anyone else

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/05/27/air.france.447.crash/index.html?hpt=P1&iref=NS1

I hope they try the engineers for manslaughter... unexcusable.

[BangShift McT]

There's more to it than that. According to the report that I have read so far this morning, they had no airspeed indication: A sure sign that the pitot system iced. If that's the case, they lost altimeter too. Second, they started and ended nose-up. In any plane, you go nose-down to build speed and try to regain lift during a stall...nose-up just worsens things because you keep the angle-of-attack high.

I'm sitting and waiting for the full report.

[BBR]

but they weren't really in a stall were they? Just got the stall warning because the pitot iced up. I don't know what the whole 'throttles back to idle' part was about though.

[BangShift McT]

An attempt to drop the nose, which by the time they realized it, would've been too late...enough air would be pushing on the nose in it's up state to not let that happen. Is there an official report released? I haven't seen a point-by-point yet, just summaries...

[SuperBuickGuy]

the plane literally dropped out of the sky, it fell 11,000 feet in one minute. That should never happen when the motors are operational - here's my bet, the plane overrode the pilot's inputs. There is a system on board airplanes that can override (came out of a variety of crashes where an airplane piled into a mountainside) the pilot because the computer knows better - given the Europeans love of governmental control; my money is the computer was given the last word in the command decisions and refused to correct because what the pilot was doing didn't make sense to it.... no one had thought "what if all the speed sensors froze up"

[catchmeblue70]

Awww crap...this isn't good. I have 40 students leaving for France on Sunday. I gotta go check their itineraries....

[TheSilverBuick]

You've lost me here. They were in a known area of high turbulence/wind. A powerful storm can drop planes from the sky with down drafts easily. Other wind effects can literally take the air out of the sails so to speak. It looks like a freak accident of a combination faulty speed sensor and bad upper atmosphere weather. IF your assumption of the computer having the final say is correct, then the article did a poor job of giving the pilots voice transcripts, because I'm sure we would of got a lot of "OH $H!T, I'm pushing down but the plane is nosing up!" statements as well as info on the control sticks being pushed forward but the plane pulling up, etc etc.

[SuperBuickGuy]

here's the support for what I'm saying

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_envelope_protection

There is a "pilot protection system" that prevents pilots from doing something that will overstress the airplane - problem is, if both speed sensors were faulty, the pilots would have known the problem and simply maintained a nominal throttle setting .... except Airbus doesn't trust the pilots so the pilots cannot override the system.... and that would really suck, knowing what's wrong and being on that roller coaster all the way to the ground - yet being helpless

[TheSilverBuick]

I've seen that before, and I remember the series of crashes attributed to it. But I don't think this is a case of that. I think the pilots would of said something or the control sticks would of measured movement contradictory to what the plane did.

According to the article, the pilots believed they were going faster than they were and according to the article the plane responded as they directed, namely they pulled up thinking they were going fast enough to gain altitude.

[BangShift McT]

Until the NTSB breakdown of the recording comes out (instead of this quick summary) I'm assuming dead input gauges/system and a failed stall recovery, though Randal is right, they were flying in an area well known for microburst activity.

[pdub]

It's a tragically odd situation for sure. As far as the plane techno-crashing itself because the pitots froze, I can actually imagine that, though I sure don't know anything about the systems that are in place.

What I CAN'T imagine is, pilots flying an Airbus across the ocean who really actually amazingly literally don't know how to fly, as in which way to point the nose up or down in a situation, etc. That's not possible. They wouldn't be in those seats if they didn't already know how to fly, and fly well at that.

So yeah, I'll bet a cup of coffee the plane crashed itself. I read another "report of that report" earlier today, and with a different slant and spin, the writer of that story was trying to make some significance out of the fact that the pilot (captain?) was not in the cockpit at the moment when the whole episode started. Like that made any difference. Somewhere between politics and journalistic slant, we can hardly believe what we read or see, other than we can rest assured something happened.

And the noise about entering a turbulence zone, that's just like when the space shuttle Challenger exploded just a few seconds after pilot Mike Smith acknowledged, "Roger, Go at throttle-up." So the thundering herds assumed that throttle-up had everything to do with what happened. No, it didn't, not even barely. Just a mark on the clock.

[Barry Donovan]

You've lost me here. They were in a known area of high turbulence/wind. A powerful storm can drop planes from the sky with down drafts easily. Other wind effects can literally take the air out of the sails so to speak. It looks like a freak accident of a combination faulty speed sensor and bad upper atmosphere weather. IF your assumption of the computer having the final say is correct, then the article did a poor job of giving the pilots voice transcripts, because I'm sure we would of got a lot of "OH $H!T, I'm pushing down but the plane is nosing up!" statements as well as info on the control sticks being pushed forward but the plane pulling up, etc etc.

I agree.
I thought that first thing during initial accident a few years ago.
it is the most violent weather patterns.

flying by seat of pants only has gravity.. to do the opposite of the right thing , well, you get the idea.

there is still old WW2 planes crashed like 20 miles off the coast in the same drama.. no instruments but a pilot judgement and bad wind.

[jaybnve]

There's more to it than that. According to the report that I have read so far this morning, they had no airspeed indication: A sure sign that the pitot system iced. If that's the case, they lost altimeter too.

I doubt that they lost the altimeter. The altimeter is just a barometer, and on the airplanes I'm familiar with it doesn't get its air pressure data from the pitot tube. The article also said that the pilots noted they were coming down to level 100 (10,000 feet), indicating they knew their altitude.

What's confusing to me is why they kept the plane in a nose up attitude while they were falling. It seems to indicate that they didn't really know their attitude; maybe they lost their artificial horizon as well. In a storm, where you have no visual cue by looking out the windows, and with no airspeed indicator and no artificial horizon, you are really flying blind...

[SuperBuickGuy]

keeping in mind that the 1st thing that the manufacturers do when confronted with their own inept design - blame the pilot. The computer would allow the pilot to pull the nose up to generate lift - it wouldn't allow the pilot to drop the nose if it thought the plane was going too fast.... I stick by what I believe (again, armchair quarterback) - that the computer flew that plane into the ocean.

[BangShift McT]

I doubt that they lost the altimeter. The altimeter is just a barometer, and on the airplanes I'm familiar with it doesn't get its air pressure data from the pitot tube. The article also said that the pilots noted they were coming down to level 100 (10,000 feet), indicating they knew their altitude.

What's confusing to me is why they kept the plane in a nose up attitude while they were falling. It seems to indicate that they didn't really know their attitude; maybe they lost their artificial horizon as well. In a storm, where you have no visual cue by looking out the windows, and with no airspeed indicator and no artificial horizon, you are really flying blind...

Fair enough. I would suspect though (without studying the A330's actual layout) that they would use a pitot-driven system to at least serve as a backup of some kind...basic redundancy. Maybe conflicting readings between the main and backup systems confused the computer...I can speculate all I want, but I don't start really looking until the NTSB makes their final call and says "done".

Side note: I couldn't help myself...I know most military aircraft have unofficial nicknames-BUFF (Big Ugly Fat F**ker) for the B-52 comes to mind- so I searched for any for the Airbus.

*NintendoJet
*Peppy (from StarFox, a Nintendo game. "Do a barrel roll!" was his favorite line...)
*The Toulouse Grasscutter
*ScareBus
*Chainsaw (The difference between an Airbus and a beaver? 4000 trees per hour...)