HE was one of Air France's "company babies"

[SMcC]

This is from the article....

...Online criticism has been even blunter. “It seems reasonable to conclude that the instruments failed then the pilots screwed up,” wrote Henry Blodget, an influential former Wall Street analyst, on his US website Business Insider. “First thing you learn in flight school is when there is any question about having enough airspeed, you push the nose down.”....

...A former Wall Street analyst giving expert opinion on what the pilots should have done.

 

[GogglesPisano]

This is from the article....

...Online criticism has been even blunter. “It seems reasonable to conclude that the instruments failed then the pilots screwed up,” wrote Henry Blodget, an influential former Wall Street analyst, on his US website Business Insider. “First thing you learn in flight school is when there is any question about having enough airspeed, you push the nose down.”.....

Hey Henry, the first thing you learn in that $200/yr B-school is to not make loans to people who can't afford them, then package them up and sell them to some shmuck, while pocketing a nice fee. Then demanding a federal bail-out when things go south. Then awarding your superior intelligence and acumen with yet more bonuses.

On second though, that probably is taught at B-school.

 

[nerjdriver]

Damn regional pilots!

 

[jonjuan]

http://corporate.airfrance.com/en/press/af447/pilot-training/

AF flight 447

Flight Captain:

• French
• 58 years old
• Joined Air Inter in 1988,
• First Officer until December 1997, then promoted to Flight Captain on medium-haul in June 1998 and then on long-haul in November 2006. <//li><//li>
• Qualified on the Airbus A330 in October 2006 and on A340 in February 2007
• 11,000 flight hours including 1,700 on the Airbus A330/A340

2 First Officers (co-pilots):

• French
• 37 and 32 years old
• Joined Air France in 1999 and 2004
• Qualified on the Airbus A330/A340 in April 2002 and June 2008
• 6,600 and 3,000 flight hours including respectively 2,600 and 800 on the Airbus A330/A340

Good lord-both hired at 25. What were their qualifications before flying at an international major?

 

[General Lee]

'Baby' pilot at controls of doomed Air France Airbus

That is when Bonin - who remained at the controls while Robert shouted with increasing desperation for the captain - did something that aviation experts have described as inexplicable: he pointed the nose of the Airbus upwards, causing it to slow down dramatically.

Shouting for the Captain? ((WTF? Call me a monday morning quarterback, but))

How about lower the nose, level the wings, add power.

WRONG.


First of all, you don't understand crew rest for INTL crews. The Captain INITIALLY WAS IN THE BACK ON BREAK. The other two pilots are FOs, one being senior in the right seat, and the other is the "floater" or third guy who sits in the left seat when the Capt is on break, and the right seat when the FO is on break. This is NORMAL. According to this article, the Captain came back after about 1 and a half minutes into this emergency. Apparently the pitot tubes had problems, and gave false indications. This was at night, and in the weather in the ITCZ near the Equator. A similar event happened to a DL A330 crew flying from HKG to NRT after this happened, but it was during the day in VFR conditions, and they landed safely. Big difference when you are flying during the day in clear weather vs flying at night near thunderstorms. If the indications showed that they were near a high speed, most people would bring back the power. Apparently on the airbus there are different "laws" concerning the onboard computers, and one will not let you stall. But, when it reverts to "normal law" (?) everything reverts to manual.


Here is the article:


Two co-pilots facing faulty instrument readings and a stall fought to regain control of an Air France flight before the plane slammed into the Atlantic in a 3 1/2 minute fall, killing all 228 people aboard, accident investigators said Friday.

A preliminary report into the crash of Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris also revealed the captain was on a routine rest break when the trouble began on June 1, 2009 and he never retook the controls. The new information came from data gleaned from the Airbus 330's black boxes, which were recovered in early May.

But the report does not answer the key question: what caused the crash and who the third voice is?

Asked whether faulty sensors, other mechanical issues or the crew's actions were responsible for the disaster, air accident investigation agency director Jean-Paul Troadec said: "It's a combination of all of this."
Friday's report by the French air accident investigation agency BEA was a factual description of the chain of events beginning with takeoff in Rio de Janeiro until recordings fell dead nearly four hours later.

Some families of victims who said they were given information in a meeting with the agency said it was possible their loved ones went to their deaths unaware of what was happening because there was apparently no contact between the cockpit and cabin crew in the 3 1/2 minutes.


'They did not suffer'

"It seems they did not feel more movements and turbulence than you generally feel in storms," said Jean-Baptiste Audousset, president of a victims' solidarity association. "So, we think that until impact they did not realize the situation, which for the family is what they want to hear — they did not suffer."

The report revealed that the plane's captain, Marc Dubois, was out of the cockpit on a routine rest break when the problems began.
The data flight recorder and cockpit recorder were dredged from the ocean in April, along with some bodies, in the latest effort by investigators to explain the disaster. Both of the boxes were readable.

They show inconsistent speed readings, two co-pilots working methodically to right the plane manually and a resting captain returning to the cockpit amid what moments later became an irretrievably catastrophic situation. The data also showed that the plane went into an aerodynamic stall — a loss of lift brought on by too little speed. Investigators only provided partial quotes from the voice recorder in Friday's report.


The report confirmed that two sets of instruments on the plane were giving conflicting speed readings. On the voice recorder, one co-pilot is heard to say "so we've lost the speeds" about four minutes before the crash.

Experts have suggested external monitoring instruments iced over. Air France has now replaced the monitors, called Pitot tubes, on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft. The plane was passing through ominous weather in mid-Atlantic, about three and a half hours after taking off, when the problems began.

Co-pilots in control

More than eight minutes before the crash the co-pilot at the controls, one of three members of the flight crew, advised the cabin crew "you should watch out" for turbulence ahead. He said the plane could not climb out of the cloud layer where the turbulence was happening because it was not cold enough.

Turbulence caused the pilots to make a slight change of course, but was not excessive as the plane tried to negotiate a normal path — passing through a heavy layer of clouds. Four minutes later, the plane's autopilot and auto-thrust shut off, the stall alarm sounded twice and the co-pilot at the controls, 32-year-old Pierre-Cedric Bonin, took over manual control.

A second co-pilot, David Robert, 37, was also in the cockpit.
Pilots on long-haul flights often take turns resting to remain alert. Dubois returned to the cockpit about a minute and a half after the problems started but did not take back the controls.

Just over two minutes before the crash, Bonin is heard to say "I don't have any more indications." Robert says "We have no valid indications."
The interim report by accident investigation agency BEA did not analyze the data or cockpit conversations or assign blame. A full report on the crash is not due until next year.

More questions than answers

Air France said in a statement that, based on the report, it appears "the initial problem was the failure of the speed probes which led to the disconnection of the autopilot" and loss of pilot protection systems.
The airline defended the captain, saying he "quickly interrupted his rest period to regain the cockpit."


Independent aviation analyst Chris Yates said the report appears "to raise more questions than it answers." "It would seem to me, reading between the lines, that the cockpit crew weren't confident of the information that was being presented to them on the data displays. Maybe — and it's only a maybe — they took some action that led to the stall warning, and the plane stalling and then being unable to correct it."

The flight recorders were found along with bodies in early May in the latest in a series of meticulous searches using small submarines and robots to comb the ocean depths.



Bye Bye---General Lee

 

[General Lee]

Good lord-both hired at 25. What were their qualifications before flying at an international major?

In France? There are some regionals, but the other FO at the controls had 12 years at AF. Is that not enough? Remember there were 2 pilots there, and the Captain came in also after 1 1/2 mins according to the article. It wasn't just the new guy up there. All 3 couldn't figure it out, at night, in the weather.



Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[densoo]

In France? There are some regionals, but the other FO at the controls had 12 years at AF. Is that not enough? Remember there were 2 pilots there, and the Captain came in also after 1 1/2 mins according to the article. It wasn't just the new guy up there. All 3 couldn't figure it out, at night, in the weather.



Bye Bye--General Lee

With few instruments and no visual cues and getting beat up in a storm it had to be chaotic. Until the data recorder is made public there's no way to know what partial panel they had. They do know one item from the CVR though, that they still had an altimeter. One pilot mentioned 10,000 as they went through it, so they did know they were falling.

 

[General Lee]

With few instruments and no visual cues and getting beat up in a storm it had to be chaotic. Until the data recorder is made public there's no way to know what partial panel they had. They do know one item from the CVR though, that they still had an altimeter. One pilot mentioned 10,000 as they went through it, so they did know they were falling.

True, but they may have lost the tail section by then. They found it a couple miles away from where the main section of the plane was found. It's hard to fly without the tail. Going through bad weather in the dark, with false indictions, probably made the whole deal a lot worse.

Apparently this same scenario was used on some unsuspecting sim people during a loft after this happened, and it was very confusing to them too. Not good.


Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[clr4theapch]

MOving the thread to the Correct section..

not nice to pee on the graves of others... let the reports do the talking... lessions learned afterwards... none of you were there...

 

[densoo]

MOving the thread to the Correct section..

not nice to pee on the graves of others... let the reports do the talking... lessions learned afterwards... none of you were there...

Fair enough.