Airbus A330 control system/ Air France flight 447

Factual Questions
41

Not a military plane.
Not a home built.
An airliner with hundreds of passengers all the time.

Pretty good does not get it.

Not heard of many people demanding an Airbus.

Many people I know practice, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.”

Here is my biggest fault with Airbus.

I learned to drive a stick shift.
Drove only a stick shift for many years.
I’m 68 now & I still stamp the clutch pedal position in a true PANIC stop situation. That does no harm.

What if in some new car, stamping the floor in a panic situation caused it to kill the occupants? A good design?

All pilot training I ever heard of, you are taught that at or below max maneuver speed you can not hurt the airplane with control inputs.

In the some of the airbus aircraft you can not do that with the rudder, the airplane will break.

So the pilots practice that before flying the line.

In a true panic situation, what will a pilot likely do? He will do his oldest & strongest habit that he was taught was perfectly safe things to do. 30 years of training & repetition or a less than 200 hrs in an simulator?

It is always the pilots fault & I agree with that… But making a design like that is wrong & shows a willingness to kill hundreds of people to so disregard a normal human reaction.

IMO, thank good pilots, not the airplane.

Not all pilots are equal, including me. When the stuff hits the fan, better a good airplane, than a not so good one as a good pilot can not always overcome a built in defect. Average pilots are even more in a hole.

I’m sure these problems are being addressed in the simulator training as a stop gap measure but until pilots start from scratch with those kinds of reactions built in, then not fixing the airplane is criminal IMO..

And who can we force to do that, which country, which company? It is a committee after all. And we know how well that usually works. ( <– personal bias that I hold when it comes to airplanes I was expected to fly. )

Your Flight Time May Vary

42

That is religion speak. Aeroplane religion. Boeing pilots think Boeing is best, Airbus pilots think Airbus is best. You live in America where Boeings are made, you’re most likely surrounded by Boeing pilots.

That training is wrong. At and below the manoeuvre speed you will stall due excessive angle of attack before you exceed the G limits. This protection is in the pitch axis only, you can still break the aeroplane with full and abrupt rudder inputs, particularly if you reverse the inputs.

That’s the same in nearly all aircraft and it’s not an issue. A couple of days in the aeroplane and your muscles are reprogrammed. All right handed captains in Boeing aircraft fly with their non-dominant hand.

43

I agree that this is a likely explanation of what was going on. But I wonder why they were not cross-checking with other instruments (e.g. attitude indicator), which could have quickly cleared up the confusion. The evidence suggests that the airspeed indication is the only one that appears to have failed - all other instruments behaved properly throughout.

Yet, by your theory (which I agree is quite plausible) their actions were largely controlled by this one system - which they didn’t understand.

44

More than a decade ago, I saw a TV show where an executive from Luftansa said much the same thing. He felt the fly-by-wire use by Airbus had a major flaw in that the pilots could not feel feedback through their controls, and therefore had to gather all of their information about what the plane was doing through their eyes. “Too much information through one channel”, I believe he said.
He also said that Luftansa would not buy Airbus planes as long as he was with the company, because he did not think they were safe.

Just saying that anti-airbus sentiment isn’t limited to the US.

The show was a series called Survival In the Sky, and it was all about crash investigation. I think it ran on Discovery or The Learning Channel, back when they both showed shows that were actually informative.

45

Just wanted to say thanks for the further replies (particularly from Absolute) which have helped me to understand this a bit more. Presumably (I must admit I haven’t checked) the full accident investigation report is still some way off - when it is published, that will inform us all further. I guess that’s when the lawsuits agains Airbus/Air France will begin…

46

Richard, you fly the big iron, I don’t. Which aircraft will break below max maneuver speed with aileron & / or rudder inputs?

47

At the end of the day, Bonin pulled back relentlessly on the control.

He just kept pulling back. ** I mean, it doesn’t matter what was going on, what alarm or safety was built in, what alarm was going off, what each pilot thought, who was napping, what was served for dinner… it doesn’t matter what training took place or what color the planes… the dude just kept pulling back to climb.** THE WHOLE TIME.

I mean… barring an AI device that recognizes an officer/pilot is going to kill everyone and deactivates their control the only safety mechanism that could have helped was an ejection seat at that point.

All this discussion, and time and time again, the answer was spoon fed to him. But he kept pulling back to climb.

He just pulled back the whole time. That is not flying or being in charge of anything. That’s like the folks who press the accelerator down on a car and hold it there until they smash into a building or run people over. Forget all the reasonable input for reasonable people. Forget the gauges and car working properly. Forget ABS brakes and warning signs.

When they add in more safety features, it will be to help reasonable people make decisions and fly the plane. At the end of the day, what will be put in place to address unreasonable people?

.

48

But what I’ve been trying to figure out was: Was Bonin pulling back, and–if so–for how long?

49

It’s all funny,** Earl,** until someone dies.

50

Not that they’re exactly “big iron” but in my training on both the Dash 8 that I used to fly and the BAe146 that I currently fly, we were warned not to make full abrupt rudder inputs at any speed. I know it was an Airbus A300 that had the rudder failure but it really just highlighted a misunderstanding about Va in the piloting community. Va gives no protection against over controlling the rudder, all it means is that if you pull back abruptly on the yoke/stick the wings will stall at or before reaching the max certified g loading so you can’t break the wings.

To be honest I’m not a big fan of the Airbus design philosophy although I’ve never flown one except for an hour in a simulator a while back. I think there is too much hand holding by the aeroplane and I suspect it leads to a gradual loss of real flying skills, but there are plenty of pilots around who’ve flown both Boeings and Airbusses and think highly of the Airbus. It’s mainly a matter of what you’re used to and personal preference.

51

A couple points I’d like to bring up:

I agree that Bonin’s panic was the leading cause of the crash, in other words, that it was human error.

That doesn’t mean the aircraft design didn’t also contribute to the crash-- and I would not be surprised at all to see the stall warning system revised as a result of this crash.

But to be fair to the aircraft, (as I’ve learned from reading this thread), it already had a control to cut-off Bonin’s input, and that control was not used.

The real tragedy here is that Bonin here was put in charge of the aircraft, when Robert (his co-pilot at the time) seemed to have a much better grasp of what was happening. I believe that if Robert had been left in charge of the aircraft when Dubois left for his rest, the plane would have gotten through this situation.

I’m not a pilot, or in the industry.

52

Lufthansa has been flying Airbus planes since the 1970s. They actually make a point of not being dependent on any single manufacturer, be it Airbus, Boeing, or whatever.

Airbuses are every bit as safe as Boeings.

53

I agree this is likely. But at the time there was no particular reason not to leave Bonin on the controls.

But if, when the he returned to the flight deck and saw that things were clearly out of control, the captain had taken the controls himself, the chances are excellent they would have recovered from the stall and flown to Paris - and there was all sorts of justification for him to have done that.

54

Any data to support this? (Not being snarky - I’m genuinely interested in how such a comparison would be done).

55

This might be a good starting point.

56
57

I don’t know what sort of people you hang out with but that’s simply preposterous. I’ve spent the last ten years flying constantly, and if people were refusing to board Airbus planes, there’d be people all over a major airport making a fuss about it, it’d screw up scheduling, and airlines wouldn’t buy Airbus products.

Most passengers, if you challenged them in the middle of the flight to name the kind of plane they were on at that very moment, would not know without looking at the safety card.

And as the statistics note, which have already been linked to, if you do refuse Airbus planes in favour of Boeings, you’re doing so despite the fact there appears to be no reason to do so. In fact, the Airbus 330 is an unusually safe plane even by the standards of airlines. The 737, by comparison, is a relative deathtrap.

Of course, even a cursory examination of the data shows it ain’t the airplane, it’s the airline.

58

Can one of the pilots try and explain Bonin’s actions? That commentary makes it sound as if he kept the joystick back almost the entire way down the ocean, for no real reason, and for most of the descent the plane was functioning perfectly, including its airspeed sensors. Did he really make such a devastating error that sounds so basic? If so, why? Would pulling back on the joystick have made sense if the plane was still operating in “normal law”?

59

I’m not a commercial pilot, but it does seem like in normal law, although pulling back on the stick is not the worst thing you can do, it is also not ideal. You will get the maximum angle of attack without stalling, which is at least not dangerous, but you will also not be at your maximum rate of climb (with regards to either distance or time).

More important, though, is that you are letting your plane “train” you into a habit which is exactly the wrong thing in a different context. It’s only kinda-bad in normal law, but exceptionally bad in alternate law–or for that matter, lots of aircraft under all circumstances.

60

As I posted in #25, Airbus procedure was to pull the nose up and climb if airspeed indicators became unreliable. Of course, this doesn’t explain why he held the stick back for four minutes, if that’s what he did.