Airhoss

Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics

2StgTurbine

Unlike 3407, we have a lot more evidence as to the state of mind of the pilots involved. The only silver lining I saw was that once one of the FOs announced he had been holding the stick back the whole time, both other pilots stopped chanting climb and instead chanted descend. At least the other two pilots were able to put together what was happening once they had that last piece of information, but sadly there was not enough time.

RI830

Unfreakinbeleivable........it is truly mind boggiling how a three man crew can fail to understand the gravity of the situation. I have seen how people can actually tune out or not hear the sounds such as "too low gear" or "stall, stall". Its frightening.

To me.....IMHO.....another reason to defend Boeing!

Its sad that so many had to lose their lives.

Airhoss

Both Boeing and Douglas have had similar accidents with the crew holding the aircraft into a stall from high altitude to ground impact.

I think there is a fundamental flaw in how we teach crews to recover from a stall especially in big jet airplanes. The whole pull back and power out ATP style stall recovery is killing people.

RI830

Maybe......but a crew must know that the aircraft is stalled in order to recover from it. When the airplane is flying you......it's too late!

UAL T38 Phlyer

Agreed, whole-heartedly.

I was shocked by the airline/FAA/civil stall recovery procedures coming from Air Force (and Navy) training. The airline procedure was to get close to---but not actually stall. Altitude control was the top priority, and supposedly, the biggest reason for busted checkrides.

The problem with this type of training is it leaves one with no training for an actual full-blown stall.

I've read articles that suggest the FAA is about to change this to what the military has done for decades. I hope so. It's about AOA control. Once AOA is under control, you can control altitude.

Airhoss

No offense intended but you have some serious misunderstandings about how the Airbus flt controls and warning systems operate.

The airplane was screaming STALL STALL STALL and "cricket" was chirping, which is basically the master warning, all the way to the ground. So I have no idea how they didn't know the airplane was in a stall.

Secondly the airplane was in flight control alternate law which means that the stick was giving direct commands to the control surfaces. It did exactly what the pilot asked it to do. IF the airplane would have been in flight control normal law it would have gone to max thrust and pitched the nose down automatically and overridden the pilots inputs.

Now the whole thing about one guy not knowing what the other guy is doing because both sticks don't move in conjunction with each other I 100% agree that is the most poorly designed and dangerous system I've ever had the misfortune of flying.

However in the case of the 727 and the DC-8 that both stalled and were held into a stall those guys also had full cockpit and aerodynamic indications of a stall and still held the nose up all the way to the ground. Which IMO indicates a serious training issue.

Take a look at these and tell me what happened in both cases.

This one is eerily familiar to the Air France crash.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/...1201-1&lang=en

Here is another also in a Jurassic jet.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/...?id=19961222-0

http://aviation-safety.net/investiga...cvr_abx827.php

olympic

I've been flying this plane for 7 months now ... Last sim ride did this same exact scenario , very difficult to recover but we did it and saved the aircraft at 10000 feet from 37000. Airbus says it is mandatory to do this on every sim ride from now on. Great read btw ... Very tragic.

KC10 FATboy

My ignorance ... why did you have to descend so low? Aren't there known pitch and power settings for the bus?

olympic

Yep correct, implemented in the training is the "Unreliable Airspeed" scenario. There is a chart in the QRH for the exact numbers for T/O / Cruise / Approach & Landing.

At cruise the golden numbers are 2.5 Degrees of pitch with approximately 79-80% power.

The reason we descended so low was because the TRI put us in the same stall the Air France crew got into. By the time we were able to cut power put the pitch of the nose down, break away from the buffet and recover we lost that amount of altitude.

The article was spot on regarding the sidestick feature and the other pilot not knowing what the other pilot is doing. Coming from a boeing jet it was one of the hardest things to get use to. The artificial feel is a problem during the first few hours on the plane.