OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

[oddlots]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...ce-447-6611877

Fascinating and chilling account of flight recorder info. Gives a real insight into wrestling with the physics of flight with a complex technological interface etc.

Good illustration of the idea that the more you try and banish risk the more this effort itself generates it.

[sunpearl71]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

Excellent but chilling article! Thanks for posting.

[Mega]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

They were French & they f*cked up............not unknown happening.
Mike

[Prazak]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

One of the frightening aspects of this crash is the extent to which these massive jumbo jets are flown on auto-pilot and how defective some of the sensors are.

[sunskyfan]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

This is a great read especially if you are interested analysis of catastrophic system failure. What makes this appropriate for this site is that is seems to parallel what is going on with the world economic system. The computer has disengaged because of conflicting or non-existent data. One group has the controls full down and another group has the controls full up while the captain has been disengaged and confused. All as the plane is stalled and from every perspective from outside of the cockpit is obviously heading for contact with the ocean.

[gwynedd1]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

Oh we do that all the time. We prevent hardware failures but unfortunately add so much complexity, we just get more human error out if it. I fight it everyday.

[BiscayneSunrise]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

A little background on me: I've been in aviation all my adult life and worked closely with jet transports (mostly Boeing) and their crews.

The main takeaway from this accident is that many modern airline pilots, especially in Europe and Asia, have been trained specifically and solely to fly big jet transports.

Way back in the olden days, student pilots started out in basic machines an learned basic airmanship and aerobatics with just the wind in their face and only the most rudimentary of instruments. Pilots developed a certain amount of "seat of the pants" feel for they airplanes. Civilian or military, it didn't matter, the syllabus was pretty similar. It was only after demonstrating mastery of airmanship did pilots advance to instrument training ,and even later the use of autopilots and autoflight systems. This is still pretty much the model in the US but elsewhere win the world where light aircraft flying is too expensive they have been moving more to simulator based training. For that matter, now, even the US Air Force is training the UAV pilots now with only very minimal training in a real airplane,

About 10 years ago, the training model for airline pilots outside of North America changed. Youngsters were hired by some airlines at age 19 or so and trained from day 1 with the understanding there were to be flying big jets, just straight and level. There was only a minimal amount of training in real airplanes and even then very little emphasis on basic airmanship. The emphasis was on operating all the computer systems that made the airplane more efficient. After a very brief portion in a real airplane much of the balance of the training was accomplished in a simulator. Some of these students never developed that "seat of the pants" intuition.

The design philosophy of the autoflight system at Airbus is notorious for designing the pilot out of the system. Their reasoning goes that if we place enough safeguards in place, the pilot only has to give general direction to the computer; everything will be foolproof. Airbus places the pilot secondary. in Boeings their autoflight systems are seen much more as a tool for the pilot to use, not a replacement for intuition and skill.

So in AF 447, you had at least the junior copilot and maybe both who had trained mostly in simulators and had accrued thousands of hours of flight time only watching the autopilot fly. A couple of contributing factors: 1)They were probably distracted and flew into the thunderstorm rather than deviate. 2) In the storm the anti ice heat of the sped sensors failed. Virtually unheard of in modern airplanes. Then when the pilots were faced with a one in a billion failure, in a high stress situation, they didn't have the raw airmanship skills to figure it out and react properly.

Training departments and flight schools around the world are using this accident as a clarion call. I'm not certain what changes are in the works exactly but I expect a return to basic airmanship as a key part of the syllabus.

[ltullos]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

+1

[nedtheguy]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

redacted

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

A little background on me: I've been in aviation all my adult life ..

Thanks, Biscayne. I was keen to hear your take and jtabeb's. As a young engineer I worked as a civilian for the US Air Force in safety, and had to read several official mishap reports, which include the full transcript of the cockpit voice recorder. This one is tragically typical of fatal crashes, where the aircrew are doing things wrong, and often realize it, but too late. The last entry in every official USAF transcript is "sound of impact".

Suskyfan's observations also present an interesting and powerful analogy to the financial disaster now unfolding.

[oddlots]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

Thanks Biscayne Sunrise, that's "disconcerting" news , as Bill Black would say. Flying to South America next week. I'll check to see the pilots are wearing goggles.

What you're saying is all too predictable and seems immediately plausible.

The moment in the disaster that really caught my eye was this:

"Again, the stall alarm begins to sound. Still, the pilots continue to ignore it, and the reason may be that they believe it is impossible for them to stall the airplane. It's not an entirely unreasonable idea: The Airbus is a fly-by-wire plane; the control inputs are not fed directly to the control surfaces, but to a computer, which then in turn commands actuators that move the ailerons, rudder, elevator, and flaps. The vast majority of the time, the computer operates within what's known as normal law, which means that the computer will not enact any control movements that would cause the plane to leave its flight envelope. "You can't stall the airplane in normal law," says Godfrey Camilleri, a flight instructor who teaches Airbus 330 systems to US Airways pilots. But once the computer lost its airspeed data, it disconnected the autopilot and switched from normal law to "alternate law," a regime with far fewer restrictions on what a pilot can do. "Once you're in alternate law, you can stall the airplane," Camilleri says. It's quite possible that Bonin had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions."

This kind of puts a finer point on your analysis: pilots are actually robbed of any tactile or - over time - experiential interaction with the "operating envelope of the plane. Beyond that, the fact that there are two settings for this system, one of which - alternate law - actually puts them in contact with the raw physics of flight while they can - possibly - be under the assumption that they can't have such contact and it's checkmate: a crash like this was really inevitable.

This is so familiar from every day life it's not funny. Someone is under the assumption that you believe x while in fact you are operating under belief y. Comedy or tragedy ensues.

The example that always comes to mind is the last shot in the Coen Bothers movie Blood Simple.

M Emmet Walsh: "Well, Ma'am, If I see him, I'll sure give him the message."

One of my favourite lines ever.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

your entire post.....

Cheers for that.....very informative.

Speaking of seat of the pants....my biggest issue learning to fly was being instructed to sit on my hands to control the nose wheel steering.

[BiscayneSunrise]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

Funny Lake about sitting on your hands for taxi. For the non aviators, airplanes are controlled during taxi by steering with the rudder pedals, bigger airplanes also have tillers that are controlled by hand, but by and large, ground steering is by feet. Neophytes ALWAYS revert to trying to steer the airplane on the ground by grabbing the yoke. It takes a while to un learn car steering and go fully to airplane steering mindset.

The issue of airmanship and experience also came up with the crash of the Colgan flight in Buffalo a few years ago. After a distraction the pilots stalled the airplane and did several wrong things during the recovery attempt. Several other contributing factors like fatigue, training and labor issues around being unable to fire people who had competency issues.

Which leads to the point made by nedtheguy. Accidents don't happen because of just one event. They happen because a series of events lead to an accident. It's called an error chain; break any one link along the way and you can prevent the accident. In very long error chains, the causes can develop over months and years with nagging problems like a bad safety culture or inadequate training. Then once airborne, you may already be two or three links into an error chain and it just takes one or two more airborne to precipitate an accident. I saw the same dynamic with the BP oil spill. One could even argue it was an error chain that lead to the financial crisis. It wasn't just one thing but a series of events ignored by too many.

odd lots talks about believing X but the reality is Y. We call it situational awareness. You can't make good decisions unless you are completely aware of the reality around you. Making what you think are good decisions for what is the wrong situation leads to accidents. (i.e. "I know there is no mountain here so I can keep on descending") Again, financial crisis analogy. Policy makers making decisions on an incorrect perception of reality. "Housing will never go down, so we can keep on doing more of the wrong thing", etc.

Funny: Airbus calls the paradigm where you can't stall the airplane "normal law" and the paradigm where you can stall the airplane "alternate law" Sounds like they have it backwards.

As thrifty points about about cockpit recordings there is often confusion leading up to an accident. Sometimes the crews grapple with problem for a few minutes before impact, sometimes not until seconds before. If the last note on CVR transcripts is the chilling "sound of impact". The second to last is something like "Oh ****! or "What did we do to the altitude?!" Or something like that.

Lots of good lessons about accident prevention that could have been transferred to the financial world if only they had listened. Very sad that it had to happen this way.

[Mega]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash

French pilots !!!!!!

[Mega]

Re: OT. - Great Article re. Air France 447 crash