[Blueflag]

Officially, so far, the ‘findings’ blame the pilots and their training.

Essentially the pilots encountered atypical icing conditions after flying into bad tropical weather (thunderstorms) which caused the flight computers to “give up” flying the aircraft on autopilot.

When the crew took over, they APPARENTLY (deduced from telemetry) operated the controls in a manner that put the aircraft outside the controlled flight envelope, lost control of the aircraft, and the plane ‘flat spun’ onto the surface of the ocean like a frisbee. Forensics on bodies and aircraft structures recovered indicated ‘vertical compression’ which led investigators to conclude the pancake impact.

NOW ... if we have the FDRs we can work with more than a few cryptic telemetry signals and forensics.

Personally I think the pilots will NOT be exonerated, but, this was a situation they did not (apparently) adequately train on. Blame Air France. OTHER airbus aircraft and flight crews have emerged successfully on the other side of similar instrumentation/flight computer malfunctions.

Also, other aircraft with the old pitot tubes like this ship have had failures that the crew handled.

When fly by wire fails on cruise/autopilot, the crew has seconds to save the aircraft; apparently that did not happen.

**IF** real data can be retrieved, it’ll answer a LOT of questions and stop a lot of conjecture.

[HerrBlucher]

Wow, a flat spin from 30k, what a horrible way to go for the passengers, unless the g forces caused them to pass out.

[Defiant]

That was a very informative post. Thanks.

[Leisler]

It wasn’t atypical. There is a record of Airbus pitot tubes freezing up and flight system crashes. 20 plus. There was a program in place that was replacing them.

[Hulka]

The pilots operated in accordance with procedure and their action, based upon erroneous data inputs, likely put the jet out of control.

So, basically, not a real “pilot error” situation.

Don't have off-hand John Cox's video link on this. John Cox described in detail on Discovery or NOVA, can't recall, the most logical sequence of events and simple pilot error was not a factor.

Wrong input by the jet matched by correct pilot input based upon best (wrong) available input, does not equal pilot error.