Fatal Flight 447 - Channel 4 8pm Tonight Sunday 16th

globemaster1986

Dravokivich wrote: »

I recall seeing a demonstration in a clip before regarding something similar to this. With a glass of water upon the dashboard (if you can call it that) on a plane. Pilot either spun the wings over 360 or did a loop (cant remember was a long time since seeing the clip), no spill from the water though. Don't think the level on it changed by much either.

So from that, doubt a spirit level will do much use.

I think you are referring to the infamous Bob Hoover clip below. His Autobiography "Forever Flying" is a fascinating read of an astounding career!

Dravokivich

That's it yeah.

SeaFields

Saw this documentary too and found it very interesting.

Can i ask for a expert opinion tho as I don't think it was mentioned in the doc but I had thought of it a few times after....there was the constant stall warning in the cockpit. But then the altitude warning started to sound too.

What exactly was their point of no return? i.e. by the time the altitude warning sounded would there have been enough altitude to get the nose down, get the speed back into the engines and start climbing again before hitting the water? Was it too late by the time the altitude alarm started for them to rescue the situation? If it was too late, how far were they from rescuing the situation had they figured out what was happening sooner.

cml387

SeaFields wrote: »

Saw this documentary too and found it very interesting.

Can i ask for a expert opinion tho as I don't think it was mentioned in the doc but I had thought of it a few times after....there was the constant stall warning in the cockpit. But then the altitude warning started to sound too.

What exactly was their point of no return? i.e. by the time the altitude warning sounded would there have been enough altitude to get the nose down, get the speed back into the engines and start climbing again before hitting the water? Was it too late by the time the altitude alarm started for them to rescue the situation? If it was too late, how far were they from rescuing the situation had they figured out what was happening sooner.

The ground proximity warning was far too late (an expert will know more but it would be less than 3000 feet). At their rate of descent, nothing could be done.

John_Mc

GPWS doesn't really come into it though, they always knew their altitude.

I think the fact that they were exceeding angle of attack of 40 degrees and falling at 10,000ft a minute passing FL100 was the point of no return.

Even if they did push down to the full stop at that point, the trim up of 13 degrees would have probably meant that it wasn't enough.

Maybe the real pilots on here can correct me though

Wibbs

mike65 wrote: »

That was a design failure for me (presumably based on most people being right handed?), the control unit should have been placed centrally on the inside of the pilots seat so both could see it.

Or a good old fashioned joystick/wheel. Actually can any of the knowledgeable folks explain to me why Airbus went for the little hand joystick instead of the traditional between the legs joystick, something that worked so well for so long and continues to do so? If they'd had those and got a stick shaker, they might have been more likely to think "shít! stall, get the nose down!". The physical might have been listened to more than than the audible warning? PLus would you not be more likely to feel the other guy on the controls fighting your inputs?

Regardless you would think - and this coming from a complete outsider who just has a lifetime interest in aviation - you would think falling like a housebrick + stall warning + dropping wings + holding back on stick = Eh maybe it's effin stalling Ted, get the bloody nose down. I have to say like others Im impressed at how stable the plane was in such a situation and didn't flip into a spin or pitch over.

IIRC I caught the end of another documentary on this incident and again IIRC they stuck some French air force pilots into the Air France simulator and ran the same scenario and all of them recovered the aircraft. More used to actually flying a plane beyond take off, level flight and approach and landing I suppose. Should pilot training now do similar to advanced driving type courses where drivers are taken on skid pans to get a feel for what a skid feels like and how to recover? 99% of the time they'll never need it but if they do...

petersburg2002

Just saw it on Channel 4. Scary stuff.

brennarr

Just watched the program. Scary stuff of how it went down.

Just wondering had this happened in the daylight would it made any difference?

Hondo75

This tragic accident is covered by Nat Geo on monday 9pm.

Locker10a

Hondo75 wrote: »

This tragic accident is covered by Nat Geo on monday 9pm.

WHat time? Il get mammy to record it for me .

thomasj

Locker10a wrote: »

WHat time? Il get mammy to record it for me .

The clue is in the post you quoted!

Looking forward to this episode, with the black boxes found and the report released, we should get a better account and reconstruction of what lead to this tragedy.

St. Leibowitz

This episode of Air Crash Investigation was really bad. Very disappointing, as it's usually a good and well researched program. They spent two thirds of the program scene setting and dealing with the search for the recorders, and then just explained the crash by saying the pilots didn't understand the problem and stalled it into the sea.

This is an incredibly important acccident, with repercussions for the whole industry. They should have spent two minutes on the the crash and the search for the recorders, and spent the rest of the time on the analysis.

oceanfroggie

Training seems the real underlying cause, numbing crews into procedure and automation dependancy away from common sense thinking and old hand flying skills. They had 3 working attitude indicators, could see their thrust levels, and had ground speed data. What happened to 'fly the plane'? Set power and pitch, fly the horizon, and then calmly diagnose and analyse the problems. Seems an over dependancy on systems and automation which is how they were trained.

cson

My opinion of it is that Dubois should immediately have relieved Bonin and the two most senior flight crew attempt to rectify the situation the aircraft was in. You can tell by the transcripts the lack of communication in the cockpit is ridiculous; you've Robert trying to push the nose down and Bonin trying to pull up.

fletch

I found that such a frustrating episode to watch, I was literally shouting instructions at the telly. I'm not a pilot but I'd be pretty confident I could have recovered the plane given the warnings they were receiving. Quite shocking that they didn't recover given the amount of altitude they had to play with.

St. Leibowitz

fletch wrote: »

I found that such a frustrating episode to watch, I was literally shouting instructions at the telly. I'm not a pilot but I'd be pretty confident I could have recovered the plane given the warnings they were receiving. Quite shocking that they didn't recover given the amount of altitude they had to play with.

The real point is, that they didn't have to recover the aircraft. The aircraft was in stable trim, albiet they had added more power. If the two (later three) of them had said, "feck this, I don't know what's happening here, let's go back to the galley and have a coffee and discuss it", and then come back five minutes later, the aircraft would still be flying and all OK. By Bonin holding the stick back, he was causing the stall.

My thoughts are that he didn't understand that the aircraft had reverted to Alternate Law, or if he did (Robert stated Alternate Law when the auto pilot dropped out, but Bonin didn't acknowledge this), he didn't realise the implications of what this meant. He was still in the marketing mindset of "you cannot stall an Airbus. The computers won't let the pilot stall it". We've all seen the old Farnborough and Paris videos of the various Airbusses doing low and slow max alpha passes down the runway ... pilot with stick hard back and all very safe. Of course, with the reversion to alternate law from normal law, the alpha floor protection was removed, and it could stall like any other aircraft. He was fixated with holding the nose up and the computer doing everything else for him. That is one of the reasons that this crash is so incredibly important, but none of this was covered in the program. Going further, the the issues around sidesticks vs columns didn't even get mentioned. For covering such an industry affecting crash, this program was way too simplistic.

cson

fletch wrote: »

I found that such a frustrating episode to watch, I was literally shouting instructions at the telly. I'm not a pilot but I'd be pretty confident I could have recovered the plane given the warnings they were receiving. Quite shocking that they didn't recover given the amount of altitude they had to play with.

I think that's a little bit facetious tbh.

You can imagine the confusion in there; concentrating on flying through a turbulent weather system, the St Elmos fire phenomenon, the smell in the cockpit. You can deduce from the transcript that Bonin is very very unnerved by it all. By the time the pitot tubes freeze over he's already probably on edge.

Ultimately in my opinion the crash is down to two factors; (a) Both pilots not immediately summoning Dubois when they start losing major altitude, and Dubois not asserting and taking control of the aircraft in that emergency situation and (b) the complete and utter failure of the crew to engage in communication and CRM during the incident. Granted they were likely concentrating on trying to keep the aircraft in the air manually but ironically this is what downed AF447.

It was pointed out in an article thats been posted on this forum somewhere already but the fact is they had a fully functioning aircraft not in any danger from when the pitot tubes froze over. Had they consulted checklists instead of panicking then they'd likely have recovered the situation easily.

Bonin's lack of communication is criminal, but so too is Dubois failing to take adequate control of the situation and leaving the least experienced pilot in charge of the aircraft when flying through what they knew to be a very turbulent weather system.

adamski8

I think people are a bit harsh, the programme is called air crash investigation, so it told the story of the investigation!!

lomb

Its easy to make mistakes -thats the moral of the story. Happens every day of the week. And it will keep happening.

adamski8

lomb wrote: »

Its easy to make mistakes -thats the moral of the story. Happens every day of the week. And it will keep happening.

i dont think that was the moral of the story at all!

lomb

adamski8 wrote: »

i dont think that was the moral of the story at all!

Well it should be then!

adamski8

lomb wrote: »

Well it should be then!

Is that the homer simpson blanket excuse for everything that goes wrong? 'thats why pencils have erasers'

lomb

One of my instructors told me that " its easy to make mistakes" and these days humans just monitor passenger planes rather than fly it. The manufacturers , airlines and insurers would rather that computers just fly the aircraft and still pay pilots anyway ie no real financial saving and more technology, why?? Remember Air France had employed 3 pilots to do the job= quite a bit of money and human as well as machine factors meant that they screwed it up for one reason or another. The captain who knew what was wrong at the end but sat down in the wrong seat after an ill timed sleep for a start.

Having said that I dont think Airbus have a good design at all. The sticks should have alot more movement and should most definately be coupled. The aircraft should also be stallable if desired by the pilots. Why create a confusing situation of being unstallable most of the time and when the **** hits the fan be stallable?Alot of confusion possible there.

Phil.x

Just watched this programme but even before the conclusion i said to myself what sort of training did these guys get and what sort of calibre are these co pilots, they were totally clueless.

Me as a civilian knew that when the computer gives you a false speed reading ignore it, go by the sound of the engines, the feel of the plane and the position of the throttle, nobody touched it, just keep on doing what was done during the last few hours.

They were totally all out of ideas at the end, cursing and even say we're going to crash,.. fcuk sake all those lives lost due to them not being fully aware and comfortable (due to poor training) in a real crisis.

I see this in the electrical game, sparkes running around like headless chickens when high voltage or important equipment goes down, the training and lack of it goes out the window and they just chase their tails until they run out of all options and go back to the start after they calmed down.

Gringo180

Extraordinary that he kept pulling the stick back in a stall. Didnt help with the design of the aircraft that his stick was hidden from the rest of the crew.

plodder

Gringo180 wrote: »

Extraordinary that he kept pulling the stick back in a stall.

It seems, despite all the aural warnings, they didn't believe they were in a stall. It didn't help that there was a very counter-intuitive interaction between air speed, angle of attack and the stall warning system.

Didnt help with the design of the aircraft that his stick was hidden from the rest of the crew.

and that dual-input issue with the side sticks, with its complicated system of priority buttons, warning lights and the "split the difference" algorithm for determining control. Maybe, there's something to be said for the old fashioned linked control columns. As I saw one pilot put it. If the PNF could see that the control column was "buried in his crotch" maybe he would have recognised sooner what was causing the stall.

robbie1876

plodder wrote: »

and that dual-input issue with the side sticks, with its complicated system of priority buttons, warning lights and the "split the difference" algorithm for determining control. Maybe, there's something to be said for the old fashioned linked control columns. As I saw one pilot put it. If the PNF could see that the control column was "buried in his crotch" maybe he would have recognised sooner what was causing the stall.

It's quite possible that a linked control column could have helped to increase situational awareness, but there have been other similar crashes with dual linked control columns in similar circumstances, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

The sidesticks didn't cause the crash, nor did automation or algorithms or the Airbus laws of control. Pilot error caused the crash.

plodder

robbie1876 wrote: »

It's quite possible that a linked control column could have helped to increase situational awareness, but there have been other similar crashes with dual linked control columns in similar circumstances, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

The sidesticks didn't cause the crash, nor did automation or algorithms or the Airbus laws of control. Pilot error caused the crash.

Pilot error might have been the single biggest factor, but it wasn't the sole cause. There are usually a confluence of factors, any one of which might have prevented the crash, including possibly a different control column design. That's obviously not easy to change now, which maybe why there was such a focus on the (easier to fix) factors like pilot error, in the official investigation.

PukkaStukka

At an Irish Meteorological Society Seminar on Aviation Weather in 2015, retired captain Fintan Ryan discussed this accident at length, particularly from a meteorological point of view. I got the sense from his excellent presentation that this whole terrible event was an omni-shambles.

As someone correctly pointed out previously, these things are usually caused by a confluence of factors and that most definitely was the case here. There were severe thunderstorms and icing. There was equipment failure caused by that which affected instrumentation. There was a complete mishandling of subsequent events by the crew. The was a comment made then - and I'm unsure by whom - that had the crew not reacted to the first warnings and just continued to fly the plane as normal, the situation would've passed in under a minute. A truly dreadful and eminently avoidable tragedy.