Anyone see the Air France 447 Doc last night?

[Nesti]

How scary was that???

[leinad]

Very. Good doco.

[Nesti]

Yes it was.

I'm still trying to get my head around one thing, the notion that two people went from couch potatoes monitoring something which pretty much does everything for you, to fault finding while being handed more and more manual tasks with more an more master caution alerts (24 in all), with the possibly that the situation may have degraded to a point where they expected to fly a commercial jet on instruments only (zero visibility), including the possibly of extreme attitudes (inverted, tip-stalls etc), while at the same time having no indication of air-speed at all.

All the issues like not diverting, not seeing the second storm front, radar upgrades, retarding throttles, Pitots icing, Pitot replacements, flight computer shutting down, not advancing throttles to 85% in a timely manner, air-speed concerns, induced stalls, [advanced] corrective maneuvers and crew training...all of these are only contributing factors, the cause itself may well rewrite the way the future of aviation is perceived to progress...ie the mode of commercial flight.

I noticed the issue of "Design Philosophy" came up a few times (the mode)...it's now being penciled-in as a possible cause of the accident. This is huge...it's like saying the reliance of computers is inherently dangerous and businesses should look at going back to ledgers and traditional bookkeeping.

[M_Lewis]

Not having seen that particular episode I can't comment on it specificially, however in my pilot training, one thing CASA always drummed into the training was:

Aviate, then navigate, then communicate.

When we did shock reaction testing in flight training, some people froze solid for 12 seconds before the brain kicked back into gear again, assessed all the information in front of them, then they went back to flying. 12 seconds is a very long time for an out of control plane...

[avandonk]

While all about you goes skewwhif fly the plane!

What Nesti said is not the reason or cause. To blame systems failures is simplistic.

The problem is that the exotic electronic systems of the aircraft need pilots who are totally on top of the system.

If you do not understand fully every system on your aicraft you should not be flying it!

To call pilots couch potatoes is a very big call Nesti. My brother is a check Captain for Qantas. They are continually looking at inherent systemic procedures that could lead to a fatal crash.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The old adage that if you think safety is expensive wait till you have a major accident!

Here is a bloke that knows what he is doing. He did a barrel roll in a 707!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZBcapxGHjE&feature=related

Bert

[Nesti]

"couch potatoes"...LOL...you know full-well I was highlighting the contrast between hands-off auto pilot flying/monitoring and hands-on 'dangerous situation' type flying...and I've got nothing against good pilots.

It was a 1G Barrel Roll sometimes called a Shondell...as he remarks, it's safe enough. Tex Johnston freaked everyone out and especially his bosses because he did it while the 707 was still undergoing trials and it's not something you want to advocate with airliners.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KNbKFMBsQE&feature=related

"What Nesti said is not the reason or cause. To blame systems failures is simplistic." Ummm, Bert, you might wanna get up-to-speed on what the issue actually is. AF447 is showing us that there may be a possible over-reliance upon fly-by-wire and flight computers, an over-reliance which stems from design philosophies which, are safer in a general sense, but this particular accident may well have been caused because of that reliance. A clue to this, as highlighted in the documentary, was the 15 second delay in the average time it took pilots to advance the throttles from previously experienced similar situations. Is this 15 second delay attributed to fault-finding and diagnosing computer systems. In general terms, are these modern systems distracting pilots when they need to take direct control and fly the aircraft themselves?! THAT is the question being asked Bert.

I remember very well that it's not that easy to simply stop concentrating on a test flight schedule and running diagnostic, and to suddenly bring one's attention to a particular problem (master caution perhaps). As M_Lewis (Mark) pointed-out, there is a delay between being advised and being able to decisively react. The pilots of AF447 received a string of master caution alerts.

[avandonk]

You are dead correct Nesti. I am not an airline pilot that flies complicated aircraft. I have never liked fly by wire poorly implemented instruction.

If a fifteen second delay of control input was the problem from how far away?

As I said 'If you do not understand fully every system on your aircraft you should not be flying it!'

I used to regularly do 'chandelles ' in Cessnas and Pipers. Then our flying club got a Bellanca. I did the full aerobatic course.

I later had the fun of flying a Pitts and going all the way to flick rolls. It was also the first aicraft I did a tail slide in safely and legally.

Bert

[Nesti]

I agree with this comment Bert whole-heartedly, 'If you do not understand fully every system on your aircraft you should not be flying it!'

Now, you like aerobatics, right, you've mentioned it a few times so I'm assuming that you do. Okay. During aerobatics you have a good level of 'Situational Awareness', because you've built up your experiences in orientation and what it feels like, so you can think properly while doing aerobatics, handle an engine failure etc, right?! Well, if you ever get the chance do HUET Training, do it, and see what it's like to totally lose all situational awareness. When the helicopter simulator rolls up-side-down for the first time, all your planning goes straight out the window, your heart rate sky-rockets and you cannot think. bubbles go the wrong way and it damn confusing! Some people even try to swim to the bottom of the pool believing that way is up even when they can see. Because the situation is so out of the ordinary the human mind cannot cope. It can later, but that's because the mind is learning the more you do it...eventually you get accustomed to it and you can plan your movements and it's fine. My point here is that the very first time a person's mind is exposed to something completely new, it freezes while trying to recognize something familiar, something for reference. Not just attitude, but even in instrumentation. For the AF447 crew, a situation where everything critical to flying starts shuts-down may have broken their situational awareness and their brains reacted just like HUET dunking for the first time; it starts looking for something recognizable across the instrumentation; this takes time.

[Nesti]

Oh, the air accident investigator found a trend in similar incidents, in that the average time it took crews to advance throttles to 85% and maintain 5 deg nose up attitude (as per flight manual and training), from a flight computer error, was 15 seconds...some crews took up to 60 seconds.

It's not known if AF447 had carried out that task. It may never be known if they even thought to do it if they were inundated with other alerts.