Air France flight crash

[Caveman Tony]

The newscaster's quote of "45-degree up angle" is true.... sorta.

This guy is a great news guy, not so great of an aerodynamics instructor.

The "45-degree angle" is in reference to the airflow, not the ground. Any winged aircraft in that angle better have some afterburners, or a LOT of altitude to perform a stall/spin recovery... which is a basic skill taught to pilots before they ever solo.

The pilots (if they were aware of their true airspeed, angle, and spin) would have pushed down/forward on the controls, steepening and straightening the dive, thus correcting the angle of airflow over the wings and then leveled off.

Betcha 5-1 that the systems either over-rode their inputs, or didn't respond correctly to what the pilots wanted.

This vid is a basic view of stall recovery---nose up, stall, flop over, spin, straighten, level off.

[moparmaniac07]

The article says 2009, did this happen 2 years ago and they're just reporting on it now because they recovered data? I'm kind of cut off from the outside world during the summer so I don't know if it just happened, but after 2 years, I figured there would have been more to say.

[TheSilverBuick]

The article says 2009, did this happen 2 years ago and they're just reporting on it now because they recovered data? I'm kind of cut off from the outside world during the summer so I don't know if it just happened, but after 2 years, I figured there would have been more to say.

Yeah, incredibly enough they located the black box at the bottom of the ocean two years after the crash. And apparently is in good enough shape to get data off of.

I'm curious like Bryan as to what the final report will say since the news hasn't reported an obvious "The plane responded in the opposite way to the pilots inputs" or the pilots cussed the computer system out a lot in the final moments.

[TheSilverBuick]

Here is another article. Still no mention of the flight computer taking over. Simply says the pilots continued to command the nose to be up and the engines were at full throttle.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110527/wl_nm/us_france_brazil_crash

To me it's sounding more like pilot error or what's being reported is flat wrong, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I'm inclined to think it's moving towards pilot error on how the situation was handled....

**Adding more.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110527/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_france_brazil_plane_crash

"You have to rely on your instruments," Barr said. "That's why when the instruments aren't telling you the truth, you have a hard time deciding what to do. Which ones are right and which ones are wrong?"

It was night time, they were in clouds, and dependent on instrumentation for flying, the instruments were lit up like the fourth of July and had two guys in their 30's at the wheel.... Think perhaps inexperience may of caught up to them?

[BangShift McT]

The A300-series has had issues with it's fly-by-wire since before they were officially on sale. In '94, during a demonstration in Toulouse, FR of it's ability to recognize a "oh, hell" situation and self-correction, the aircraft failed to self correct and flew low and slow into a forest. You can find the footage on YouTube.

[TheSilverBuick]

The A300-series has had issues with it's fly-by-wire since before they were officially on sale. In '94, during a demonstration in Toulouse, FR of it's ability to recognize a "oh, hell" situation and self-correction, the aircraft failed to self correct and flew low and slow into a forest. You can find the footage on YouTube.

Yeah, that's the famous "The plane did not do what we commanded it to do" video.

[Silver68RT]

What I'm wondering is if the pilots of these things are so used to the computer flying it that they just can't cope with a situation where the computer can't do it due to sensor failure. I'd think they should have to fly this kind of scenario in the simulator, but maybe it was considered so unlikely they didn't plan for it. I think there was a commuter plane crash recently where bad weather, pilot inexperience, and relying on the auto-pilot in a bad situation killed a bunch of people. The Air France situation sure sounds like pilot error to me, with the pilot commanding nose up inputs when they're in a stall. You're falling because you're too slow, and you're in a stall. You can't recover unless you put the nose down and pick up some speed, and they had over 4 minutes to figure that out. WTF?

Ever since I first heard about this accident, I've wondered why they couldn't use a GPS-based backup system for speed in case of pitot tube failure. Surely that would be better than nothing.

[TheSilverBuick]

I've wondered why they couldn't use a GPS-based backup system for speed in case of pitot tube failure. Surely that would be better than nothing.

It's an air speed versus ground speed issue, though I have to agree with you about it being better than nothing since all they would really have to do is make sure they are flying at least 400mph to account for a any possible tail wind. Upper atmosphere winds could get around 100mph at times (sometimes more), so they'd have to be positive their air speed is above their stall speed. Which is what, around 200mph with no flaps? 250?

[fast Ed]

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 was having dinner with a friend last night who is an Air Canada pilot (Airbus 320 series), and also a senior flight safety investigator. He basically echoed these comments ... when the plane is falling, it is counterintuitive to drop the nose, but that's what they needed to do to get out of the stall condition. Figured it out too late as mentioned, they were falling at around 11,000 ft. per minute.


cheers
Ed N.

[SuperBuickGuy]

I was having dinner with a friend last night who is an Air Canada pilot (Airbus 320 series), and also a senior flight safety investigator. He basically echoed these comments ... when the plane is falling, it is counterintuitive to drop the nose, but that's what they needed to do to get out of the stall condition. Figured it out too late as mentioned, they were falling at around 11,000 ft. per minute.



cheers
Ed N.

these are commercial jet pilots with thousands of flight hours, you mean to suggest that they pulled about the most rookie of all moves when confronted with a stall? the only more rookie move is the over/under shoot a landing ....

[Silver68RT]

these are commercial jet pilots with thousands of flight hours, you mean to suggest that they pulled about the most rookie of all moves when confronted with a stall? the only more rookie move is the over/under shoot a landing ....

That's exactly what I'm saying, and it's pretty sad if it turns out to be the case. When's the last time any of these video game pilots flew a stick and rudder plane? They did not apply the correct control input, they did the exact opposite, I don't know what other conclusion you could draw. Apparently at some point the engines were pulled back to idle too. That seems like the second worst thing to do also.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576349112775425674.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_News_BlogsModule

[fast Ed]

Thinking is maybe the faulty airspeed indicator contributed to this ... they didn't realize how slow the craft was going, making it that much easier to put in to a stall condition. My pilot friend mentioned that he has seen record of this happening before with the wrong correction being made, by experienced crew in many different types of aircraft.


cheers
Ed N.

[TheSilverBuick]

Thinking is maybe the faulty airspeed indicator contributed to this ... they didn't realize how slow the craft was going, making it that much easier to put in to a stall condition.

That was my thought too. Figuring the speedo was lying to them and the engines were throttled up.

[Silver68RT]

Thinking is maybe the faulty airspeed indicator contributed to this ... they didn't realize how slow the craft was going, making it that much easier to put in to a stall condition. My pilot friend mentioned that he has seen record of this happening before with the wrong correction being made, by experienced crew in many different types of aircraft.


cheers
Ed N.

I have no doubt that they were confused by the loss of airspeed indication, but for an otherwise perfectly serviceable aircraft to be lost due to the failure of one sensor is just hard for me to understand. Surely if you keep the attitude of the aircraft level, keep the throttles where they were, and don't do anything, it will continue to fly. If you pull the nose up, and it starts to fall out of the sky at 10,000 fpm, you're doing something wrong, so try something else, but don't pull the engines back to idle, because that won't help the aircraft stay in the air. How can three supposedly professional pilots be that incompetent? It hardly inspires a lot of confidence in the state of pilot training, or in Airbus.

[Silver68RT]

Saw a pretty detailed post on WIX that by a user called jtramo that I thought I'd share.

http://warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=40753