As a pilot I have a hard time reading this.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec...really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec...really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877
What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447
- Thread starter MNJason
- Start date
GTdrummer
GT Owner
33Bravo
GT Owner
Sinovac
GT Owner
Very sad. I read somewhere that the heavy reliance on automation in the cockpit has diminished pilot competence in certain situations.
GTdrummer
GT Owner
I guess I am a rube but saw my first Airbus 380 in LA a week ago. God almighty! I have flown 747s a far amount but that thing is really spectacular.
Gulf GT
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CH53Driver
Shelby GT500 owner
Interesting that they never mentioned the possibility of vertigo in that whole synopsis. From me, the loss of airspeed indication, the fact the one of the copilots kept pulling the control stick back, they were "in the goo" and that they obviously had been concentrating on other things until manually taking control of the aircraft all point to a certain degree of vertigo in the cockpit. I've lost a few friends because of vertigo, (the official came for the subsequent crash is called "CFIT" for Controlled Flight Into Terrain) and I myself have found myself in very bad weather, at night and experiencing first hand how insidious it can be to develop vertigo. Even scarier when you realize the guy sitting next to you has it too. A sad event for sure and worse as things become more and more automated pilot proficiency in these areas will continue to decrease.
GT38
GT Owner
I don't have a hard time reading this because unfortunately I've read this kind of thing a thousand times before. But I do have a hard time reading it without becoming angry that circumstances could exist to set this crew up to fail at what they get paid the bucks to do - to keep the aircraft and the trusting folks in back out of danger, and to fly the damned aircraft under whatever adverse circumstances they could possibly encounter.
One of my first instructors in the USAF hammered into me that the implied first step in ANY emergency or abnormal situation is to, "Maintain aircraft control." The next step is always, "Analyze the situation and take the proper action." Sometimes that action has to be really, really quick, but above all it has to be the proper action or things get worse in a big hurry.
It's easy to dump blame on the pilots involved, but to some extent they too are victims of their lack of training and experience. Thousands of hours sitting in a cockpit programming a computer-flown aircraft doesn't prepare anyone to hand-fly it when the computer can't or won't. The only way to get that experience is with simulation of bad things happening - over and over again. It doesn't appear that this crew had either the training or the experience they needed. They should have been able to revert to basic airmanship and partial-panel analysis & training to solve the problem, but they didn't. Yes '53 my friend, vertigo is indeed insidious and most likely was a factor, but it should not have been. Simulators can induce vertigo, even non-motion simulators with the proper visual cues, but apparently their training did not cover that sufficiently. Overcoming and dealing with vertigo and flying various partial-panel + simultaneous systems failures is something that the Air France crew should have proven competency in. That's something that's been a known training issue since Jimmy Doolittle first flew blind in 1929. I know for sure that you got all this kind of training in the Marines, and it was damned better training than what this Air France crew got because it kept you alive in those hairy situations.
Training is an economic factor for airlines, and I suppose to some extent when all is going well it is easy to think you are doing it right - and maybe even cut back on the training (especially when you have this wonderful system that thinks for the pilot and flies the airplane for him).
It is instructive to compare this accident with a couple of other well known airliner crashes - the 2009 US Airways Airbus ditching in the Hudson, and the 1989 United Airlines Souix City DC-10 crash. Both of those aircraft suffered catastrophic mechanical failures (much more severe than the problem Air France initially encountered), but yet both pilots maintained control of their aircraft and each brought them down in the best possible way - and against all odds in the DC-10.
What was the difference? I think it was the training and discipline of the crew. Sully Sullenburger in the Airbus was a former USAF Phantom pilot. He was two years behind me in pilot training, and I know exactly the kind of fundamental stick & rudder training he received - and never forgot. Al Haynes in the DC-10 was a former Marine aviator, trained in the 50's. If anything, Haynes training was perhaps even more intense than Sullenberger's. Do the airlines train like the military? No, but I think they should, certainly with respect to fundamental airmanship.
One of my first instructors in the USAF hammered into me that the implied first step in ANY emergency or abnormal situation is to, "Maintain aircraft control." The next step is always, "Analyze the situation and take the proper action." Sometimes that action has to be really, really quick, but above all it has to be the proper action or things get worse in a big hurry.
It's easy to dump blame on the pilots involved, but to some extent they too are victims of their lack of training and experience. Thousands of hours sitting in a cockpit programming a computer-flown aircraft doesn't prepare anyone to hand-fly it when the computer can't or won't. The only way to get that experience is with simulation of bad things happening - over and over again. It doesn't appear that this crew had either the training or the experience they needed. They should have been able to revert to basic airmanship and partial-panel analysis & training to solve the problem, but they didn't. Yes '53 my friend, vertigo is indeed insidious and most likely was a factor, but it should not have been. Simulators can induce vertigo, even non-motion simulators with the proper visual cues, but apparently their training did not cover that sufficiently. Overcoming and dealing with vertigo and flying various partial-panel + simultaneous systems failures is something that the Air France crew should have proven competency in. That's something that's been a known training issue since Jimmy Doolittle first flew blind in 1929. I know for sure that you got all this kind of training in the Marines, and it was damned better training than what this Air France crew got because it kept you alive in those hairy situations.
Training is an economic factor for airlines, and I suppose to some extent when all is going well it is easy to think you are doing it right - and maybe even cut back on the training (especially when you have this wonderful system that thinks for the pilot and flies the airplane for him).
It is instructive to compare this accident with a couple of other well known airliner crashes - the 2009 US Airways Airbus ditching in the Hudson, and the 1989 United Airlines Souix City DC-10 crash. Both of those aircraft suffered catastrophic mechanical failures (much more severe than the problem Air France initially encountered), but yet both pilots maintained control of their aircraft and each brought them down in the best possible way - and against all odds in the DC-10.
What was the difference? I think it was the training and discipline of the crew. Sully Sullenburger in the Airbus was a former USAF Phantom pilot. He was two years behind me in pilot training, and I know exactly the kind of fundamental stick & rudder training he received - and never forgot. Al Haynes in the DC-10 was a former Marine aviator, trained in the 50's. If anything, Haynes training was perhaps even more intense than Sullenberger's. Do the airlines train like the military? No, but I think they should, certainly with respect to fundamental airmanship.
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2112
Blue/white 06'
Or make it a priority to hire ex-military pilots?
Remember, when the captain arrived, He stated "I don't know" about what was happening. Not to mention the other 1st officer as mentioned in the earlier posts.
H
HHGT
Guest
Back in the early 1990's I worked on a Navy funded program call SMATCALS - Signature Managed Air Traffic Controlled Approach & Landing System. It was supposed to have become a system that automated an aircraft landing on a carrier in high sea-state conditions. The ONR - Office of Naval Research - quickly concluded that Pilots should be in control of their aircraft and that programs of the sort were dumbing down the pilots.
It's hard to imagine the horror those guys must have endured.
Sinovac
GT Owner
All this wonderful technology is making the individual weak(er) minded.
"In the Year 2525", anyone? For a long time I thought this song was funny. Now it just creeps me out.
"In the Year 2525", anyone? For a long time I thought this song was funny. Now it just creeps me out.
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CH53Driver
Shelby GT500 owner
I agree with everything you have stated GT38. Yes, my training saved my butt on a few occasions and for that I have to thank all my former instructors. I was also fortunate to be an instructor for a couple years before I got out and one of the things that greatly concerned me was that the new generation of students I saw were becoming more reliant on the technologies available to them. It was always fun to take a student out on a low level visual navigation flight, especially at night. Almost every single student I had made me turn off the aircraft GPS units because they always went back to trying to use the GPS. Technologies change but training should not, especially with the basic stick and rudder skills. The term that was drilled into my head in training was : AVIATE, NAVIGATE, COMMUNICATE. I still find it odd that nothing was mentioned of vertigo though. It sure sounds like the junior copilot was suffering from it and neither of the other pilots recognized it or corrected it.
Kayvan
GT Owner
- Jul 13, 2006
- 4,782
I think PC'ness and today's mush mouth culture doomed them
Get on the PA yell "emergency Captain report to flight deck"; crew locate Captain
He would have known these guys lost control by aisle 5, and dove on that stick by instinct and locked eyes on altimeter
Reminds of Titanic crew that didn't want to steer violently to awake VIPs
Get on the PA yell "emergency Captain report to flight deck"; crew locate Captain
He would have known these guys lost control by aisle 5, and dove on that stick by instinct and locked eyes on altimeter
Reminds of Titanic crew that didn't want to steer violently to awake VIPs
Gulf GT
GT Owner
GT38 has the right idea about the military training. My father was an exec for a large oil company and traveled over 150,000 miles a year for decades, much of it in small jets and helicopters. They flew in and out of places like Soviet controlled Angola and encountered everything from third world military nuts with happy trigger fingers to unbelievable bad weather and all kinds of mechanical failures in the middle of nowhere. All the pilots were mostly ex-Nam era pilots and certainly military trained, and he couldn’t even count how many times these guys got them out of certain disaster. No space to tell stories here, but real unbelievable stuff, and they did it like it was nothing, in fact they loved it when the s?&* hit the fan, calm as cucumbers. When he was winding down his career in the 90’s my Dad used to say that the new civilian pilots the company hired were good pilots, but they were missing that quality that can only be gained by flying over North Vietnam while being fired at by anti-aircraft, having the hydraulics blown, and no working gauges all the while running a fever from a weekend of fun in Saigon. Simulators are no replacement for the real thing when it’s real life and death.