So his going to the bathroom caused the crash?
The Captain would have flown the first leg of the flight, and so he would have been taking his break in the crew rest area. Normal procedure.
Turbulence would have alerted him to trouble, and he would have then rushed back to duty.
So, nothing unusual in the article, although they try to make it sound bad.
In that Egypt Air crash the one guy left the cockpit and the other started the death chanting.. Hopefully not the case here. If so, we’ll get the transcripts though. Not anymore.
<< AF 447 PING >>
(No need to worry about direct testimony or pesky rebuttals).
None of this yet explains how they came to be in the middle of a huge thunderstorm. Events leading up to the last 4 minutes are far more interesting in my book.
I’m guessing pitot tube de-icing might have come in handy.
was the co-pilot named Ach-med or somepin???
From the documentary, even flying blind they could have maintained level flight by using the established procedure of 85% engine power and 5% flaps. With all their systems shutting down, that seems like the thing to have done.
I have a question. If an Airbus flight computer suffers the blue screen of death is it still possible to fly the aircraft? If the aircraft maintained a +5 degree pitch all the way down to the ocean why didn’t the PIC or co-pilot just put the nose down a little to get out of the stall? If the controls were locked up because of the flight computer was malfunctioning then there was nothing the pilots could do except press the reset button.
As far as I know you can still fly a Boeing jet even if the flight computer is not functioning, correct?
I guess that means the PIC not having a “transatlantic bladder” is the reason.....At least to the know-nothing media mavens.
Don’t know how AF conducts its business but most lines conducting long overwater flights have at least three FULLY RATED/QUALIFIED PILOTS, (sorry for the shout, but emphasis is needed), aboard with two at the controls at all times.
Sorry, I don’t belive the presence/absence of the “Captain” in the left seat made any difference.
Flight at high altitudes is a “knife-edge proposition” in that you’re flying in what is known as the “throat”. Its a region where the aircraft’s critical mach number and its stall speed for its weight/altitude converge. Mostly this is not a problem because the aircraft, (Airbus in this instance), has redundant pressure, temperature, airspeed sensing systems feeding information to multiple flight computers that act as an “autopilot”. This system does a far better job of flying the aircraft than a human can “hand fly” it as it has far better reaction times - plus accesss to more control surfaces - than the pilot.
But this flight was crossing what I know as the “intertropical convergence zone” where great thunderstorms - with their characteristic vertical developments - can build. I posit, ‘What happens when a failure of the sensing instruments, or the computer software dedicated to reacting to this data fails’ ?
Airbus conceived a radical “globular” concept of flight management based upon computer control of all aspects of flight management. But not without accident. Its most spectacular was crashing its flagship at a public air demonstration when it wouldn’t respond - as later revealed due to software errors - to pilot inputs. Is this accident yet another example of a similar “software glitch” ?
A “stalled out” heavy in a spin in instrument conditons at high altitude isn’t something practiced or anticipated IMO. Due to fuel weight/distibution, combined with faulty air data inhibiting control responses, its possible the pilots were faced with an uncontrolable airplane. >PS
Does it actually take four minutes to paint "Airbus" on the side of a plane?