Personally I've always thought Airbus relied to much on automation. At the very least the pilots should be able to take manual control of the aircraft. I find it outrageous and sickening that these experienced aviators were reduced to amatuer computer repairmen desperately trying to reboot the flight computer as they fell helplessly from the sky instead of being able to take control of the plane.

Originally posted by danwild6
Personally I've always thought Airbus relied to much on automation. At the very least the pilots should be able to take manual control of the aircraft. I find it outrageous and sickening that these experienced aviators were reduced to amatuer computer repairmen desperately trying to reboot the flight computer as they fell helplessly from the sky instead of being able to take control of the plane.

You completely and totally misunderstand the situation in both this flight and general Airbus aircraft operations.

The myth that pilots have no manual control over an Airbus aircraft is just that - a myth.

Airbus control law has 4 laws, and 5 states.

The laws are:

Normal Law - everything operating as it should. All aircraft protection limitations are in place in this law, meaning the pilot cannot make a manoeuvre which will damage the aircraft.

Alternate Law - multiple system failures. Most aircraft protection limitations are disabled, meaning the pilot has direct control of the aircraft in 99% of manoeuvres.

Abnormal Alternate Law - aircraft has somehow gotten into an abnormal manoeuvre or attitude. All protections are disabled, pilot has full control to recover the aircraft.

Direct Law - no flight control systems in place, no functioning computers. Pilots commands are held as a direct relationship between controls and command surfaces.

The fifth 'state' is in addition to the above:

Mechanical Backup - flight controls not responding to input. Thrust, pitch and yaw have direct mechanical backups on the flight deck.

In this flights case, they would have degraded down to Direct Law, as the flight computers became unavailable but they still had power to transmit control signals. This means that the aircraft was never not in the pilots control.

The reason the pilots rebooted the computers was because they were seeing bad information, and were trying everything to reconcile that with the real world. How many times have you rebooted your desktop computer to see if it will fix a problem, only to find the problem is not solved by said reboot?

The problem with this flight was not that Airbus aircraft take control away from pilots, but that bad data being reported to the flight deck, whether interpreted by a computer or a human, is fatal.

Without reliable pitot static data, the pilots do not know quite a bit of information, and there is no current backup on either Boeing or Airbus aircraft for this as a standard feature. In a IFR (instrument flight rules) situation, bad pitot static data will probably result in any aircraft crashing.

Take a look at the Boeing 757 crash which involved taped up pitot static ports - the pilots had no chance, couldnt work out where they were or what they were doing, and crashed the aircraft into the ocean. And that was in an aircraft with no flight control computers.

[edit on 28/2/2010 by RichardPrice]

S+F cause this is good stuff!

I would have preferred 'Magnitude 11 gay, disgruntled tax paying alien didn't bring down Flight 447' as a title myself.

RichardPrice above this post has some real good insight into this too, maybe even enough to reboot (sorry) the whole debate.

Good info, let's see how it turns out.

-m0r

Well, here we are, several years after the event itself and also after all of the speculation.

Today, we have loads more information, thanks to Airbus, the BEA and the French governments efforts in continuing to search for those black boxes.

And in the light of that information, boy does that Spiegal article look like a hatchet job!

So, as it turns out, the computers didn't crash, the aircraft didn't "have a stroke" and infact remained eminently flyable throughout the entire incident.

It was the human element that failed those passengers. Those three pilots uhmed and ahhed for several minutes in that cockpit, and still couldn't solve the issue - not because it wasn't solvable, but because they weren't working together.

The evidence that points to faulty information and late reaction is that they understood that they were losing altitude, most probably due to the loss of airspeed, and presumably countered with the standard procedure of increasing thrust..but, was the engine stalled or did the pilot(s) just react too little, too late? The angle of impact seems to show they were reacting with incorrect data, for if they knew they were going in the correct manuver would have been to slow airspeed as much as possible for the best chance of an emergency water landing, yet evidence shows no warnings to the passengers (and especially none to the stewardesses).
I don't understand how they couldn't have used visual sighting of correct altitude as the moon was out, the turbulence and poor visibility was at higher altitude. The article only guesses that the automated warning system was telling them "terrain, pull up!", it's unknown until the black box is recovered.
The main flaw of the airbus may be an unrecoverable stall when the lift is reduced due to faulty sensors. Given only four minutes until disaster, this leaves almost no time to react and get that 200 ton elephant enough lift again to recover.
Flying is still MUCH safer than Florida drivers however..any day of the week and especially in bad weather.

Originally posted by rlever1
The evidence that points to faulty information and late reaction is that they understood that they were losing altitude, most probably due to the loss of airspeed, and presumably countered with the standard procedure of increasing thrust..but, was the engine stalled or did the pilot(s) just react too little, too late? The angle of impact seems to show they were reacting with incorrect data, for if they knew they were going in the correct manuver would have been to slow airspeed as much as possible for the best chance of an emergency water landing, yet evidence shows no warnings to the passengers (and especially none to the stewardesses).

I suggest you go and read the reports on the matter, they answer all of your questions.

In short, the pilot flying reacted to the initial instrumentation issues wrongly, and never corrected his actions during the entire descent. The interaction between all three pilots on the flight deck indicate that no one was actually "working the problem", all of them were almost literally just sitting there going "uhm, wtf?"

The constant nose up attitude put the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall, meaning that the angle of attack of the air over the wings no longer produced any lift - which produced the very high descent rate of the aircraft. The pilots basically didn't believe this was happening, right up to the end.

I don't understand how they couldn't have used visual sighting of correct altitude as the moon was out, the turbulence and poor visibility was at higher altitude.

Because "visual sighting" is useless in such a situation - you are over a featureless ocean, with no datum points. There is nothing for you to make any sort of judgement on.

But then again, the altitude indicator was never showing an invalid reading. Neither was the rate of descent indicator. But the pilots were ignoring both.

The article only guesses that the automated warning system was telling them "terrain, pull up!", it's unknown until the black box is recovered.

Both black boxes have been recovered - read the reports.

The main flaw of the airbus may be an unrecoverable stall when the lift is reduced due to faulty sensors. Given only four minutes until disaster, this leaves almost no time to react and get that 200 ton elephant enough lift again to recover.

The stall was recoverable from (multiple senior pilots have suggested ways, and its been done in the simulator), the lift was never reduced due to faulty sensors, it was reduced because the pilots reduced it through their actions.

Modern large civil aviation pilots are not trained to recover from stalls, because you should never ever put a large aircraft into one - pilots train regularly and thoroughly for recovery from the approach to a stall, there is significant amounts of guidance on the topic and significant amounts of help in the cockpit. But an approach to a stall should never be allowed to develop into a full stall - that is left to the test pilots.

In this case, a fully developed stall occurred because the pilot reacted wrongly to the original problem - he should have pushed the nose down and increased power to the engines (the established procedure for invalid readings at altitude - "fly the aircraft by AoA and thrust"), but instead he pitched the nose up and continued to pitch the nose up, and thus the aircraft entered the stall.