And on top of that, catch normalized deviance before it kills anyone. Some examples on this flight:
…and no doubt others.
I HOPE that AF learned from this and 447, since I fly with them quite a bit, but the evidence isn’t good – e.g. the two recent incidents at CDG.
I agree totally. We can always learn.
And yes Air France has got a lot of work to do to get its reputation back. Perhaps their human resources department have to rethink their selection procedures.
normalized deviance
That was clearly the biggest thing with the Concorde crash. The thing which led to the huge cover-up was that this was the flagship end of French aviation. The aircraft and the crew were the “Crème de la crème” and nobody was willing to face that they were actually pretty careless. One of the most telling bits was ATC reading them the tailwind and zero reaction by the crew.
I HOPE that AF learned from this and 447
AF447 was different. Not really an AF issue; it was a deep cultural issue in the “elite” French pilot training system, which was supposed to be the best in the world. Had the crash been a bit more “normal” it would have had much less impact, but the two pilots were about 2nm behind the aircraft. They were also about 5nm behind in knowledge of the aircraft systems but I think that one is actually normal in present-day big jets. Airbus – a French company – was also implicated, so two major issues blew up at the same time. And they blew up so big it was impossible to cover it up.
gallois wrote:
And yes Air France has got a lot of work to do to get its reputation back.
I’m pretty sure they are on the right track. From querying current pilots the spirit seems to have changed considerably since the Colin report in 2006, especially the generalized complacency / macho spirit which prevailed back then. But old habits (and old sea-dogs) die hard and slow, and they started from very low standards.
@Peter please explain “huge cover up”
If that’s what you got from AF447 then there’s nothing more worth saying.
The criminal court case against AF447 on which both Air France and Airbus were found not guilty was a punch to the stomach for the families of the victims.
Fortunately the civil case against AF and Airbus went the way of the families.
I said the opposite.
Peter wrote:
AF447 was different.
It was very different, but in quite a different way.
The main issue was that the condition of unreliable airspeed at altitude which brought the initial upset about was not something that anyone had ever thought about, hence training was not only inadequate, it was outright wrong. This changed after the accident.
Clearly, there was also an issue in how the Airbus logic behaves in such an event too. And there was the issue that 3 fully qualified pilots did not reckognize a stall when they were in the middle of it. Again, this was mainly a training problem but also a philosophy problem. I think that Airbus did reckognize at that time in a brutal wake up call that their approach towards what the pilots functions on the flight deck was, was inadequate.
As @Gallois sais, both Airbus and AF lost in court in the civil case. That sais enough and is quite astonishing.
There was also one major difference: The ACARS ground link traffic during the crash sequence was public the same day the airplane was lost. Hence, quite a few very important factors were out in the public. And it can be genuinely said that the way this case was handled was how it should be really, maybe also because of this. And probably also because of the magnitude of the problem was reckognized.
I can’t say about Concorde, but since the Habsheim accident recorder “loss” court proceedings in France are such that court takes custody of fatal air accident evidences, BEA/civil accident investigators having to “beg” court for access…
Since the Überlingen disaster and subsequent unhampered legal and, worse still , public prosecution to ATC, there is a non-written code within Swiss ATC on minimal voluntary reporting
As a society we are simply more collectively interested in penalties and compensation than truth: free access to so-called “data” on the internet makes it worse. “We” seem to know better.
How’s that for safety?
