Intense read! What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

It's hard to describe the sensation you get when an airspeed indicator goes bad on you at night, but imagine you're blasting down I-95 at 80mph when suddenly the steering in your car gets reversed --you turn the wheel left, the car goes right. You turn the wheel right, the car goes left. You stomp on the brakes, the car accelerates and the radio volume goes to max. Everything is reversed and nothing does what it's supposed to. Now imagine what that's like at 37,000 feet in turbulence at night with no visual cues other than an airspeed indicator that appears to be working fine and telling you that your airspeed is increasing to a dangerous level and you need to stop it NOW.

I've seen highly experienced pilots fly simulators right into the ground under less trying circumstances.

But now that I'm retired, I don't worry about such things any more.

Airbus should be sued for that stupid design. The guy in the right seat was pulling back on the stick the entire time thus averaging the inputs together but due to the design the other pilots did not know this.

That is just asinine.

I'm no pilot, but I've been in the cockpit of a Scarebus, and as a layperson, the lack of conventional controls is startling. It looks like one arcade game joystick.

"If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."


Qantas plane dive passengers win million dollar payout from Airbus

Almost 150 passengers who were on the terrifying Qantas flight to Perth which plunged 150 feet in two seconds three years ago have won millions of dollars in damages from Airbus...

...Australian Transport Safety Bureau this week released its report into the October 7, 2008 incident, which found the Airbus A330 dived twice unexpectedly after one of three airspeed sensors malfunctioned.

"If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."

Exactly. The few people that I know that have been through similar situations were on AirBus planes. One of their stories is very similar to the Air France accident, and it happened about 3 months after that one. Now every time he flies he has to be almost sedated to get in the airplane.

Thank you for taking the time to post all of this Wayne, it was really interesting.

I don't understand this part:

5.) Stall Warning. What most people don't realize is that an airplane can stall because it's going too slow OR because it's going too fast.

I tried to do some research and I still don't get it. I understand how you can stall a plane at an speed with a sharp enough maneuver, or with an angle of attack that's too high, but how do you stall a plane with a good angle of attack by going too fast?

I grew up in airplanes on skydiving drop zones, but all propeller planes. Have I never heard of this because it's not possible for a propeller plane to go that fast?

...The The B-777 I flew would throw up an alert on the ICAS screen...

That's nice and all but the acronym EICAS stands for Engine Indication & Crew Alerting System and you should not have omitted the E.

Wouldn't manufacturers tend to keep elements common in their contemporary designs though? For example, I know an E430 Mercedes of the same model year (or close to it), despite having a bigger engine than my E320 and a slightly longer wheelbase, will have the same interface and features overall. And the little warning icons are the same for all Mercedes.

Or in computer terms, my Macbook has the same interface as Tech's Macbook Pro, despite different processors and hard drives, and so on. They're both Macs and the interface and warnings and so on are the same.

So, if you A300 lacked those warnings, wouldn't it stand that an A330 lacked them as well?

The A300 flightdeck was the predecessor of the two crew A318/A319/A320/A321/A330/A340/A380 flightdeck architecture. The inputs on A300 & A310 were direct cable to hydraulic valve connections via a centralized hydraulic system (with redundant systems operating every primary control surface). Due to weight considerations (especially on the A380), Airbus opted for a 5,000 psi system (smaller diameter hydraulic tubing able to carry fluid at higher pressure) which accepts electronic pulse inputs to redundant computer (servo) controlled valves mounted directly onto actuators that are powered by individual hydraulic systems. This means that the software based control systems are quite different on the newer generation A330/A340/A380 than on the more traditional A300/A310 aircraft.

...
5.) Stall Warning. What most people don't realize is that an airplane can stall because it's going too slow OR because it's going too fast...

The funny part is that, technically, aerodynamic stall is indirectly a result of airspeed. Directly, it is a result of angle of attack and airflow separation on the cambered upper surface of the airfoil. Pilot manuals typically address stall as a function of decreasing airspeed because it is more common to find an IAS gauge in a traditional cockpit than an AOA indicator.

But reading the report, I noted that, after the initial increase in airflow around the cockpit (louder airstream heard by the F/O's), there is no mention that the aircraft stalled because it was flying too fast. It seems to me that the F/O's thought they were flying too fast and they increased their AOA to reduce airspeed. Since the dynamic pressure ports on the pitots were blocked by icing, the airspeed reported to their MPDUs was inaccurate. As soon as 2 of the ports unclogged and the readings became accurate, they should have checked if the readings agreed and then reduced their AOA. Based on my interpretation of the described scenario, it seemed they stalled because their VS and AOA were too high (and hence IAS was too low).

My suspicion is that there are aerodynamicists, software engineers and management folks at Airbus Industrie that are extremely relieved this accident was attributed to pilot error.

"If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."


Qantas plane dive passengers win million dollar payout from Airbus

Almost 150 passengers who were on the terrifying Qantas flight to Perth which plunged 150 feet in two seconds three years ago have won millions of dollars in damages from Airbus...

...Australian Transport Safety Bureau this week released its report into the October 7, 2008 incident, which found the Airbus A330 dived twice unexpectedly after one of three airspeed sensors malfunctioned.

What I have learned from this post is exactly this:

Leave your seatbelt unbuckled as much as you possibly can.

Nobody died in this incident, and the ones who weren't buckled in got a pretty serious knock on the head, but will each be getting multi-million dollar payouts as a result.