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 7.29 p.m. local time for a scheduled 11-hour trip 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 11 a.m., they concluded that 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.

Over at Popular Mechanics I've got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I'd like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety.

Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert.

The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane's external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand -- something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at that altitude.

The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean.

As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem -- including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times -- they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, "We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything."

Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.

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.

Compounding the problem was a peculiar feature of the Airbus's cockpit layout. Unlike a Boeing jet, in which one pilot's movement of the control yoke moves the other pilot's yoke as well, an Airbus features "asynchronous" controls, meaning that moving one control doesn't cause the other to move as well. Bonin's colleagues probably never knew that he had the controls all the way back -- perhaps because they never imagined that any certified airline pilot could engage in such a misguided response.

Perhaps the most tragic moment of the entire transcript occurs in the final moments, when Bonin at last tells the others that he has had the controls back the entire time. "No, no, no," says the captain. But by then it is already too late.

in honour of Cally' French don't do aerospace'

Dude's family must be proud of him. What a clown.

.... paying closer attention to the weather and to what the planes around you are doing; explicitly clarifying who's in charge when two co-pilots are alone in the cockpit; understanding the parameters of alternate law; and practicing hand-flying the airplane during all phases of flight. ...

That's basic ground school stuff. Just how the heck did these first officers get signed off to fly these planes?

And what was Airbus thinking of when they designed the flight controls to work independently of each other?

Well, that should teach ya. Don't go to Rio de fuckhead or fly to the city of Queers. Seems simple enough to me. You couldn't pay me enough to go to either of those places given the current saturation of muslim scum and coke dealers in the general vicinity.
Jackasses.

TheMadPoet wrote:

the french incopetence kills all aboard.

Well, well, what should we make of that?
Take that as an informed post offering insight and useful lessons and of course compassion for the victims.
Well, not apparently.. More disgusting comments, no respect whatsoever for the deceased.
This from an expert who can not spell correctly his 'copetence'.

Seriously, open your mind, learn things, develop yourself Mad.

In my opinion, one thing that is clearly an issue is:

- Not the lack of competence - France is good at creating lots of mathematical minds, good engineers..

- But the lack of acceptance of the 'Lessons learned' phase in any activity, human project by the arrogant French character..

THANK YOU VERY MUCH MadPoet! Thanks to you, we know that the Airbus was NOT the problem! Thank you once again, for saving european jobs! Boeing is very proud of you!

syscom3 wrote:


And what was Airbus thinking of when they designed the flight controls to work independently of each other?

They weren't thinking at all, obviously

Never knew that factoid
I will NEVER fly on an airbus

This is a flying deathtrap; based on this info it is apparent that the airbus is specifically designed to fail
who is the euro peon shithead who came up with this brilliant design? He should be executed, at the very least


And wtf does Jobim have to do with anything? Couldn't Brazil dredge up someone of more national importance to name their airport after than a bossa nova singer?

.


... I can't even begin to imagine an aircraft with dual controls that move independently. How stupid can you get? ... Also, every aircraft starts shaking before going into a full blown stall. The inboard areas of the wing are purposely designed at a higher pitch angle, causing them to break up the smooth airflow, stalling and shaking first, while the outboard areas and ailerons continue functioning during the inboard shake warning, allowing ample time for recovery. Anyone who calls himself a pilot should be very familiar with this and react instinctively. Many light aircraft even have small wedge shaped sections mounted on the rounded inboard leading edges of the wing to purposely generate warning vortices during high angles of attack before the rest of the wing stalls. ... All the fool had to do was release the controls and the aircraft should have corrected and flown itself automatically, without human, instrument, or computer inputs. ... Of course with French designed and piloted aircraft you never know.



.

syscom3 wrote:

And what was Airbus thinking of when they designed the flight controls to work independently of each other?

They do not.

... I can't even begin to imagine an aircraft with dual controls that move independently. How stupid can you get? ..

How ignorant can you get?

"Thanks to you, we know that the Airbus was NOT the problem! "

Asynchronous controls. Is that not a manufacturer's problem? We'll see if this gets changed.

robert99 wrote:

Asynchronous controls. Is that not a manufacturer's problem? We'll see if this gets changed.

Bob, if the two side sticks are sending different messages, and nobody pressed the priority button, the aircraft takes the average.

If one pilot presses the button, that takes priority. If the other one then presses his/hers, it reverts to that one.

Capiche now? Good, now you go explain it to the other idiots.