Probably not at FL300+ however. 15 degrees will stall the plane.
Airborne_Again wrote:
This point is extensively discussed in the accident report! (Please read the report.) The report includes some indirect criticism of how the captain handled the ITCZ crossing, but it also notes (I quote):
I have read the report. And I stand by my comment – leaving the ‘bridge’ during a critical time is not what a captain does. Be it air or sea. This is simply very poor commandership. Btw, it’s totally irrelevant that the P2 had more hours on SA routes. Either you are captain of a ship or you are just along for the ride. That chap was just along for the ride and a couple of hundred people paid for it with their lives.
I have only skim read.
172driver i get the impression from others it was usual for the captain to take his rest break around the time he did. To delay his rest i would have thought there should be good reasons for the delay. In the case of weather good reason to think unusual and potentially difficult conditions might be encountered. Is there evidence this was the case? Or do you have other reasons in mind?
A trial has opened charging Air France and Airbus with involuntary manslaughter over AF447
I don’t know what the relatives of the victims hope to accomplish with this. To me this is still a case of pilot error. Yes, losing your speed indicators in this setting puts you in a confusing situation, but – as has been previously discussed on EuroGA – going back to “basic airmanship” might nevertheless have saved the airplane. I mean the AI should still have been working and all that was required to solve the situation was “wings level”.
I’m not saying I would have fared any better and in hindsight human judgment is always difficult to evaluate from the safety of our desks, but precisely because the pilots were professionals I would have expected them to perform better.
I don’t know what the relatives of the victims hope to accomplish with this. To me this is still a case of pilot error.
I’m not sure why Airbus are in the Dock admittedly, but wrt Air France, they trained the pilots involved and if their procedures were lacking at the time – and they have certainly changed their training & proceedures since the crash – then they can be held partly responsible.
Regards, SD..
skydriller wrote:
but wrt Air France, they trained the pilots involved and if their procedures were lacking at the time – and they have certainly changed their training & proceedures since the crash – then they can be held partly responsib
Yes, good point. I was mainly thinking about Airbus as well. This was no catastrophe caused by bad engineering, although one could debate wheter and what could be optimised as far as instrumentation, autopilot and loss of sensors is concerned to avoid a similar disaster.
AF certainly can be investigated as far as lacking training and procedures are concerned.
The politics is going to be pretty heavy… can’t really see it going anywhere.
As I’ve said before, the #1 cause was a lack of knowledge of aircraft systems, namely that they had no idea the pitch showing on the PFDs was derived from INS and could therefore be trusted in the face of an unreliable airspeed.
Is there one aircraft where the pitch information is derived from airspeed? pitch in PFD usually takes inputs mainly from GYRO or sometimes mix of AHRS, GPS, INS…but should always remain valid in abscence of indicated airspeed data (even when airspeed is not reliable)
Pitch always has to come from a “gyro”.
In all modern aircraft it comes from what we call “AHRS”.
I mean the AI should still have been working and all that was required to solve the situation was “wings level”.
This case study is central to the requirement for A-UPRT and typically the course will devote some time, both on the ground and in the air, reviewing the accident. The aircraft was in a deep stall, and in fact the FO did attempt to keep the wings level. Letting go of the controls at around FL240 may have helped, and a SSR when the pitot probes de iced at around FL180 may have saved the day. The tragedy is that of the six traditional symptoms of a stall, at least three were arguably ‘masked’. This compounded by the ergonomics of the Airbus multi crew control arrangements resulted in the other crew members, while establishing that they were in a stall, didn’t realise the FO had full back stick. And why did the FO have full back stick? this might be argued was due to poor training and the concept of alpha floor in Airbus stall recovery, when the safety envelope is working, which it wasn’t when there was an IAS mis compare, and the automatics switched to alternate law.
We should treat the flight deck crew with respect. The real tragedy is that to this day EASA does not require three way passage of control, as required in the USA. If pilot monitoring had been given control when he asked for it, he probably would have averted the tragedy.
