How Panic Doomed an Airliner

jeffwise.net ^ | December 7, 2011 | Jeff Wise

[BenLurkin]

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic.

How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

[BlueLancer]

Bump to read later ...

[Haiku Guy]

Turns out that pilots of these modern airliners are very good managers, and not very good pilots. As the process becomes more and more about managing the machines as they do the flying, the “stick and rudder” instincts of the pilots becomes less and less important... until it becomes suddenly very, very important.

[CGASMIA68]

I sez...In experinced pilots not dealing correctly(overcompensating) for a stall......
For years our all pilots had loads military training,train train train...these kids now a days have zero and freak out and over compensate for all kids of crap

[texas booster]

Thanks. BTTT.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Wow, this is something I’ve wanted to hear about. When they say “earlier THIS YEAR”, do they mean this young calendar year? Incredible.

So sad. Waiting for the “Seconds from Disaster” episode.

[BenLurkin]

“Seconds from Disaster”

I like that show.

[Barney Gumble]

Wow. I read the full Popular Mechanics article. Anyone who’s played Microsoft Flight simulator knows about stall.

I wonder if it is brain freeze or simply over reliance on technology. Per article: “The flight control computer under normal law will not allow an aircraft to stall, aviation experts say”

[Intolerant in NJ]

The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level...no, the proper thing to do would have been to wake the senior pilot form his nap, now that they found they had encountered a "large tropical storm" - but then I'm not a pilot, so what do I know?....

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

The black boxes were recovered last April and early May, and the preliminary findings released a couple of months later. There were several threads about it: Pilot errors outlined in 2009 Air France crash

[Reeses]

Airbus features “asynchronous” controls

Even worse, it averages the two inputs, which is a terrible design. One pilot was pushing forward, while the other full back, so the airplane's computer did neither up nor down. Who designs an airplane to operate by democracy? A chain of mistakes combined to cause this accident but bad socialist engineering played a large part.

[BenLurkin]

"Who designs an airplane to operate by democracy?"

Je ne sais pas!

[ken5050]

Remember the Gimli Glider?..whoever would have thunk that a modern airliner could RUN OUT OF FUEL 35,000 feet in the air...

[wrench]

That wonderful GEE-WIZZ glass instrument panel is what killed those folks. That and not training and making the young pilots to fly the airplane without all the electronics.

To be certified, the aircraft must be able to fly and land safely after a total electrical failure. It can be done, but not if you neglect this configuration in training the pilots.

[SuziQ]

Air France accident ping!

[TalonDJ]

Even worse, it averages the two inputs, which is a terrible design. One pilot was pushing forward, while the other full back, so the airplane's computer did neither up nor down. Who designs an airplane to operate by democracy? A chain of mistakes combined to cause this accident but bad socialist engineering played a large part.

Ok, genius, how does 'conservative engineering' handle control inputs? Ignore the copilot? What if the pilot passes out and slumps over the wheel? There is a lot of 'democracy' in a redundant system. You don't want any single failure to bring down the plane. If you don't know how these things are designed then refrain from insulting engineers you have never met.

[expat2]

In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls, in a kind of panicked death-grip, all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again.

In IMC, if the air-speed sensors voter was erroneously indicating a high A/S, then the pilot would (properly) be trying to reduce speed to avoid exceeding the NTE speed, which is much more dangerous than a high-altitude stall. Once you exceed NTE the plane will start to lose a wing or elevators and it is doomed. A high-altitude stall can be recovered from, but there is no recovery from a lost wing or tail.

The triply-redundant fly-by-wire flight control system on the Airbus is unable to handle two erroneous data streams (e.g., two bad sensors) and instruments are then lying to him.

[expat2]

Humans are very good at handling complex situations, but are very poor at monitoring systems over long periods. Unfortunately, the engineers have tried to use computers to handle complex situations and use humans to monitor the computers, the reverse.

[expat2]

No, the glass cockpit didn't kill them - it was the bad air-speed sensors that did it. And the Airbus cannot be flown without the electronics -- there are no steel cables between the controls and the flying surfaces, everything is electronics with electrical signal from the controls to the computers and electrical signal to the control-surface electrical actuators.

[Barney Gumble]

Well there you can blame the metric system. (always a good scapegoat)