interesting take on Air France 447

[CincyDavid]

https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/...ned-with-boeing

This seems like posturing for legal purposes, but there may be some validity to the claims made by the pilots.

 

[slo town]

Interesting article, but read this. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

The Air France flight crew was incompetent. There were several reasons for this.

Scott

 

[nthach]

It can happen to any plane - Boeing or Airbus. I've always thought AF447 was a combination of GIGO, the flight crew being panicked to keep the plane in the air and design issues. And the over-reliance on automation to fly a plane, just like people putting blind faith in Tesla's autopilot or the Uber employee letting their self-driving car do the work.

From skimming the article seems like Boeing's design theory is the computers are there to keep you from doing stupid things and just because your plane is FBW, it doesn't mean you can't have tactile(yoke movements) or visual feedback(flight displays) while Airbus thinks the computers have final say and you should be deliberate, intentional but smooth at the controls - basically, (to plagiarize Kodak) you press the button and we do the rest.

 

[CincyDavid]

Lord have mercy, that was a slow-motion train wreck. Blind reliance on technology is scary.

 

[Tech819]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D-m6PqoFc

 

[fdcg27]

The aircraft lost reliable airspeed and angle of attack indications as a result of iced probes which resulted in a change from Normal Law, in which the wing can't be stalled regardless of stick input into either Alternate Law or Direct Law, I don't recall which, in which the wing could be stalled.
The pilots held full back stick until the aircraft met the sea, never having realized that what they were doing was exactly the reverse of what they needed to do. In Normal Law, their actions would have been correct. I've also written that having this marvelous envelope protection software is useless when it dumps things in the hands of drowsy pilots when things get really difficult. This crew anticipated a long and boring crossing and what they got was a disaster brought about by Thales probes known to suffer icing and the serious gotchas of the envelope protection software.
A really sad event.