Originally Posted by tsquare

If you have enough lead you can get everything else you need... right?

Originally Posted by Vikz09

The end of the article mentions 4 people interrupted the meeting demanding wage increases. Apparently one was from the company who pushes wheelchairs. Hopefully one of the others was Donatelli!

Originally Posted by dalad

Yep, I bought a VEPR-12. A Russian made tactical shotgun with a 12 round mag. The ultimate home defense weapon.

Originally Posted by badflaps

You blow off 12 rounds, had better stock up on wall board too......

Originally Posted by tomgoodman

"For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with a 12-gauge shotgun."

--Hunter Thompson

Originally Posted by satchip

You mean the company that pushes the wheelchairs down the 30 min after we land while we wait there with the passengers for them? That company?

Originally Posted by index

A very good article about AF 447. I think it provides a fairly detailed account of what happened and why.

Originally Posted by Aviation Today 2-7-2011

The NTSB said another incident may have occurred on June 23, 2009 on a Northwest Airlines A-330 flying between Hong Kong and Tokyo. The aircraft landed safely in Tokyo; no injuries or damage was reported.
The Northwest A330 was cruising at 39,000 feet on autopilot near Kagoshima, Japan, when it encountered intense rain and both the captain's and co-pilot's airspeed indicators immediately showed a huge rollback in the plane's forward velocity. With autopilot and automatic-throttle controls disengaged, the cockpit was filled with beeps and bright warning signals indicating various system problems. The Northwest crew said the event lasted more than three minutes, but they maintained airspeed, manually flew the most direct route out of the storm and nobody was hurt.

Originally Posted by Vanity Fair

Occupying the right seat was the junior co-pilot, Bonin, whose turn it was to be the Pilot Flying—making the takeoff and landing, and managing the automation in cruising flight. Bonin was a type known as a Company Baby: he had been trained nearly from scratch by Air France and placed directly into Airbuses at a time when he had only a few hundred flight hours under his belt. By now he had accumulated 2,936 hours, but they were of low quality, and his experience was minimal, because almost all of his flight time was in fly-by-wire Airbuses running on autopilot.

Originally Posted by Vanity Fair

A C-chord alert sounded because the indications of altitude had deviated from the selected 35,000 feet. It is likely that Bonin was gripping his control stick much too hard: the data recorder, which measures stick movements, later showed that he was flailing from the start, trying to level the wings but using high-amplitude inputs like a panicked driver over-controlling a car. It caused the airplane to rock left and right. This was possibly the result of Bonin’s unfamiliarity with handling the Airbus in Alternate Law, particularly at high altitude, where conventional roll characteristics change. Had he been more seasoned, he might have loosened his grip—backed off to his fingertips—and settled things down. The record shows that he never did.

But worse—far worse—was what Bonin did in the vertical sense: he pulled the stick back. Initially this may have been a startle response to the false indication of a minor altitude loss. But Bonin didn’t just ease the stick back—he hauled it back, three-fourths of the way to the stop, and then he kept on pulling. Alain Bouillard, the French investigator, equated the reaction to curling instinctively into a fetal position. The airplane responded by pitching up into an unsustainable climb, causing its speed to slow and its angle of attack to increase.

Originally Posted by index

A very good article about AF 447. I think it provides a fairly detailed account of what happened and why.

an interesting paragraph:

"But by the 1970s, a new reality had come into view. Though the accident rate had been reduced, the accidents that continued to occur were being caused almost entirely by pilots—the very people, many of them still at the controls, who had earned a nearly heroic reputation for having stood in the way of the mechanical or weather-related failures of the past. Pilot error had long been a recognized problem, but after the advent of jets it was as if an onion had been peeled to reveal an unexpectedly imperfect core. The problem was global. In Europe and the United States, a small number of specialists began to focus on the question. They were researchers, regulators, accident investigators, test pilots, and engineers. The timing was unfortunate for line pilots, who had begun to fight a futile rear-guard action, ongoing today, against an inexorable rollback in salaries and status. The rollback was a consequence of the very improvements in technology that had made the airlines safer. Simply put, for airline pilots the glory days were numbered, and however unfortunate that was for them, for passengers it has turned out to be a good thing."

I'm curious who the writer believes is fighting against "an inexorable rollback in salaries and status." It sure ain't ALPA. Must be talking about European pilots.