Following the BEA report there was a public enquiry in which the BEA were heavily criticised for not looking at certain factors. The BEA’s defence was that it’s job was to show the sequence of events that might have caused the accident to occur.
The enquiry pushed to answer certain questions. One being.why the most junior pilot, sitting in the RHS, with 1500hrs was fixated on continually climbing despite information that a stall was occurring (which was questioned). Was he fixated eg on the fact that the aircraft was descending even though he was trying to out climb weather. Another factor was why it took so long to come to the flight deck and why the experienced first officer did not take control. (There was some suggestion that he did, in the same way as has been described for the American system ie “I have control” "you have control:) However, it is suggested that he did not actually get control ( and this would need confirming by someone who actually flies this type of aircraft) he did not flick the appropriate switch or pull a lever for the control to pass to him.
An very good hour long tv documentary covered all these factors.
Both Air France and Airbus as well as the BEA received some criticism at the end of the enquiry.
IIRC the Air France critique was aimed around crew fatigue and its possible causes which has led to procedural changes within Air France.
The PIC, First Officer and Junior officer had all received stall recognition and recovery training, during their initial PPL (as all pilots do) and at regular training sessions and revaldations.
IIUC it is the procedures regarding crew fatigue which is the base for the families of the victims taking AF to court.
The Airbus case AIUI is a little more tenuous and involves the ergonomics of some systems.
Most of the comments in the media, including social media claim as fact, some things which can only be supposition or opinion.
As I’ve said before, the #1 cause was a lack of knowledge of aircraft systems, namely that they had no idea the pitch showing on the PFDs was derived from INS and could therefore be trusted in the face of an unreliable airspeed.
I disagree completely. I don’t think they even got to the point of questioning the attitude indication. Instead, they were presented with conflicting „overloading“ information, were startled, and did all kinds of things „into the blue“.
Now, everyone is smarter and knows „whatever the plane does… we keep 82% N1 and 2,5° pitch“… easy to say.
Even if all pilots would have had 1 on 1 training the day before this flight about the horizon not being affected by loss of pitot data, the crash wouldn’t have occured? Highly doubt it.
I also don’t think it’s even possible to nail it down to one single highest ranking cause.
If you’d insist on one, I will give you „the way the airline industry works behind closed doors“. Focus on ever tightening „monkey SOPs“, more and more commercial pressure, a ton of fatigue* tighter margins etc. The system works so well statistically, but it’s also under tension, that calling dispatch and telling them to change the route and a couple tons payload for some fuel doesn’t happen.
There was an AD on these probes… with generous time for compliance.
And as airliners could fly longer and longer, the airlines lobbied the regulator to allow for less costly relief pilots to lead the flight in cruise, instead of paying for a full relief crew.
Those guys were simply the end product of the mold they got pushed through over the years. „Airbus can’t stall“ being a top mantra.
These planes with all the tech doing it’s magic in the background are as easy to fly when everything works as they are complicated and difficult to manage when things go wrong.
*takes one to know one. It is not possible to imagine fatigue without having worked a busy longhaul line for a few years.
I agree with all of that, Snoopy, but you are seeing it from the “present situation” POV. I don’t think I would start from where we are now.
Graduates from the world’s elite aviation academy (=perfect pilots), working in a system with SOPs (=perfect procedures), flying an aircraft designed by world’s best engineers (=perfect aircraft; just push buttons), etc…
You probably have to have a system like that, because – according to ATPs I know – out of every 100 young and keen CPL/IR (whoops I meant “frozen ATPL”) holders only about 5 will be really good pilots, but you have to make it work so the other 95 don’t smash the plane up.
They had multiple opportunities for sorting it out, but were startled and confused. I am not saying I would not have been, but these were paid to be current and had regular sim checks.
However, it is suggested that he did not actually get control
The black box confirms this and the crew didn’t recognise that there were two inputs and in effect it creates an ‘average’. The FO kept his override button on.
EASA is still confused, and CAA, in not promoting an industry standard stall recovery where the first action is ELIMINATE all symptoms of the stall.
In addition to poor ergonomics on the fly by wire control panel, there was poor training and ergonomics on the airplane switching to alternate law and the Airbus alpha floor recovery actions were no longer valid.
The problem with Airbus FBW system is that guys have no indication about others sidestick position.
So unless you press red takeover button you dont really know what is your FO/CPT trying to do. There is no feedback nor any info about it on the screen except when on the ground.
I am still yet to hear of a good reason why the sidesticks are not linked such that they always move in unison. Surely this most obvious indicator of what your flight deck colleague is up to is a good thing to have.
@RobertL18C I believe an ‘eliminate stall symptoms’ methodology would have run up against the alpha being so high that the computer considered the value invalid and so stopped the stall warner. When they pushed forward briefly to see if that helped things, alpha ran back into the valid region and the stall warner sounded. It must have been pretty baffling to push and get a stall warner, but pull and it stops.
Arguments will rage forever about the design philosophy and whether it contributed. I think it probably did, because these pilots were left needing to think like an Airbus, not just an aeroplane. In that moment when the AP disconnected, if you’d eliminated all the systems, the control laws, the advanced instruments and all the clever things the aeroplane was trying to do and left them with nothing but a basic attitude gyro, altimeter, and an N1 indicator…… they’d have been ok.
I am sure a “committee decision” was made, after years of discussion on how “intellectually pure” it is to not have a force feedback yoke.
Graham wrote:
I am still yet to hear of a good reason why the sidesticks are not linked such that they always move in unison. Surely this most obvious indicator of what your flight deck colleague is up to is a good thing to have.
Even just a vibration would indicate that there is someone else moving their stick. My car steering wheel vibrates when it thinks I’m going out of my lane, and it gets my attention. And it’s rarely wrong.
Raven wrote:
he problem with Airbus FBW system is that guys have no indication about others sidestick position.
So unless you press red takeover button you dont really know what is your FO/CPT trying to do. There is no feedback nor any info about it on the screen except when on the ground.
I have always – and still do – failed to comprehend how this system ever got certified. I mean, an AB is a multi-crew airplane by design and some ‘clever’ engineer decided to hide what effectively is the most vital control input from the other pilot? Who signed off on that? It simply beggars belief, but here we are.
So yes, IMHO including Airbus in the lawsuit makes sense.
Airbus FBW is very safe and effective.
But here it showed its dark side connected with lack of Very Basic manual flying skills. Anyway we are still pilots and should practice basic flying maneuvers (like stall recovery) unfortunately if you sink into airline there may not be many occasions to do it. What is trained in Airbus is that you should pull the stick all the way and keep it in case of some scenarios, like windshear or gpws escape maneuvers. But there are no exercises to do it in degraded law required by authorities as the probability was deemed extremely low. (In degraded law Airbus flies like any other traditional aircraft).
The crew coordination in that fatal flight was really bad. Two pilots acting on controls at the same time (dual input message). No positive transfer of controls. No takeover button used.
The startle effect was huge. The captain who returned to cockpit didnt realize that FO was pulling all the way up. Maybe if there was flight controls position indicator (like it is on the ground) the captain would have realized some seconds earlier… We will never know.
