After this crash the French word for idiot was changed to Bonin.
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
51–60 of 231 posts
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#52It's tempting to blame the inexperienced first officers, their training, or the CRM failures on this flight, but the blame for this crash has to land squarely on the atrociously bad UX of the Airbus cockpit.
Sensory overload and no clear readout of what is actually broken (pitot tube icing in this case) is bad but the fly-by-wire joystick configuration is what really doomed this flight. In Boeing airliners and many other types of aircraft the control sticks are mechanically linked together: you can physically feel if the other pilot is fighting your inputs:
> “Controls to the left,” Robert said, still worried about their bank angle. Pressing the priority button on his side stick, he took control and locked out Bonin, but Bonin immediately pressed his own priority button and assumed control again.
If the controls were mechanically linked Robert would have recognized his inputs were being overridden and would have been able to save the plane.
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#53It's kind of amazing how many of these accidents can come down to the pilots forgetting the most basic things. In this case, ultimately, the pilot and the co-pilot were exerting opposite controls. One to pull up, one to push the nose down. In a stall you push the nose down to gain aerodynamic lift. That's like Flying 101. But I guess when you panic, the natural instinct of wanting to pull up kicks in when you're rapi…
> Unlike most other airliners, the control sticks on Airbus models are not mechanically linked and the pilots cannot directly feel what the other pilot is doing. This is a very bad design - at a bare minimum an incredibly loud and annoying alarm should go off if the pilots are fighting controls, because neither knows what the plane is receiving as an input.
[deleted]
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#55I fly a desk herding cats, I mean devs, for a living now. But as a Navy-trained aviator, this and the Colgan Air mishap in Buffalo always make me cringe. I can't entirely judge the crew, because the human mind is a strange thing that has ways of rationalizing truly abnormal situations and behavior. That said, an obvious Crew Resource Management failure compounded the issues here. That said, I believe aerobatics and o…
Time and time again we learn that people do stupid things under stress. Consider Transair flight 810 [1], in which a simple engine failure during takeoff results in a complete loss of the aircraft when both pilots mistakenly identify the _wrong_ engine as malfunctioning, despite identifying the failure correctly only minutes earlier. OP has an article on that crash too, actually [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transair_Flight_810 [2]: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/dark-waters-of-self-delu...
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#56I fly a desk herding cats, I mean devs, for a living now. But as a Navy-trained aviator, this and the Colgan Air mishap in Buffalo always make me cringe. I can't entirely judge the crew, because the human mind is a strange thing that has ways of rationalizing truly abnormal situations and behavior. That said, an obvious Crew Resource Management failure compounded the issues here. That said, I believe aerobatics and o…
To be fair, it sounds like this crash caused airlines and regulators to demand much more adverse event training, including high-altitude stall recovery. But according to the article, Airbus hasn't addressed the split control issue…
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#57It's tempting to blame the inexperienced first officers, their training, or the CRM failures on this flight, but the blame for this crash has to land squarely on the atrociously bad UX of the Airbus cockpit. Sensory overload and no clear readout of what is actually broken (pitot tube icing in this case) is bad but the fly-by-wire joystick configuration is what really doomed this flight. In Boeing airliners and many o…
* The overhead panel would've shown FAULT on the ADIRs.
* The ECAM did show IF SPD DISAGREE: ADR CHECK PROC.
* The plane did shout DUAL INPUT several times, and a button to lock out the other pilot is right on the stick. You can hear it being used by Bonin.
I'd say this is a failure of lack of crew resource management (not even technical ability) more than anything else.
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#58I fly a desk herding cats, I mean devs, for a living now. But as a Navy-trained aviator, this and the Colgan Air mishap in Buffalo always make me cringe. I can't entirely judge the crew, because the human mind is a strange thing that has ways of rationalizing truly abnormal situations and behavior. That said, an obvious Crew Resource Management failure compounded the issues here. That said, I believe aerobatics and o…
Isn't "Upset" training now mandatory for civilian pilots, partly because of AF447? https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/faq/44870
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#59It's tempting to blame the inexperienced first officers, their training, or the CRM failures on this flight, but the blame for this crash has to land squarely on the atrociously bad UX of the Airbus cockpit. Sensory overload and no clear readout of what is actually broken (pitot tube icing in this case) is bad but the fly-by-wire joystick configuration is what really doomed this flight. In Boeing airliners and many o…
> It's tempting to blame the inexperienced first officers or their training but the blame for this crash has to land squarely on the atrociously bad UX of the Airbus cockpit.
The real problem is that someone who doesn't look at his most critical instrument* in instrument flying conditions, causes a stall, doesn't respond to stall warnings, doesn't communicate, refuses to hand over controls even though he doesn't understand what is happening, is in the cockpit at all. Either the training was inadequate, or deficiencies in Bonin's flying were overlooked.
Re: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even as a flying novice, I was screaming to myself when they kept trying to pull up in a stall. I guess there had to have been some element of panic clouding their judgement, which is why pilots need to drill routine into their head so hard.
In normal law an Airbus doesn't stall with full back stick, that would just result in maximum AoA not a stall. In this case it had degraded to loose some of those protections due to icing of the sensors. That was confusing to the junior co-pilot, and they skipped basic procedures on who has control resulting in opposite inputs and a loss of control.
Yeah, I guess as someone who's had minimal instruction it seemed obvious. But reading the article it's clear that the junior FO was trained basically exclusively on the fly-by-wire Airbuses and probably didn't have that intuitive understanding when that protection was stripped away.