Airspeed is indicated by the air pressure pushing against the pitot tube. AT first, the tube iced and froze and gave no reading. During the descent, they were IIRC effectively “pancaking”, falling flat-ish downward rather than the nose leading the direction of travel, so the airspeed indicator would not really have told them anything meaningful. What would it indicate, a (confusing) slow forward motion despite the rapid descent and full engines?
Perhaps criminal negligence would be more appropriate? Is there such a crime in French law? Basically, a design where the two joysticks cancelled each other out with no feedback to indicate the conflict - is an obvious, in this case lethal, design flaw. If one had been the decider or the pilots had felt the conflict, maybe things would have been different. As it was, the result that it did basically nether of the pilots’ commands is disconcerting. There’s the whole issue of the “Alternate Law” system and training required to understand this that may also play into the severity of charges.
I have mostly forgotten what I have read about the crash but my impression was that it was basically a situation of general incompetence all around–the manufacturer, the airline and the pilots: not a criminal situation.
Incompetence… or recklessness? And I’m not just being coy: one way to get to manslaughter, at least in the US, is by a showing of recklessness resulting in death.
So the crew got an audio “dual input” warning message, although admittedly it seems this wasn’t enough to get their attention. If there are a bunch of other alarms going off, and the crew is already on mental overload, it’s not terribly surprising that they didn’t notice it. Boeing’s “tug-of-war” yoke linkage, which also puts both yokes out in plain view, would have made it much harder for Dubois to miss Bonin’s counterproductive control inputs.
Maybe an apt comparison would be the Pinto or Crown Vic fuel tank configuration - an engineering flaw resulting in immolation of occupants. As I said, a design flaw that resulted in a large number of deaths, the same as the aircraft essentially deciding to ignore both critical controls by averaging them out. It may not have been the only cause, nor even a primary cause, but it certainly was a key factor.
At what point does incompetence (in design) rise to the level of “criminal negligence causing death”?
I’m also wondering if there’s a legal and translation difference that is giving is “manslaughter” instead of “criminal negligence”? I don’t know the nuances of French criminal law.
Well, indeed - that’s why the charge is manslaughter, not murder, right?
Having said that, my general view is that bringing criminal charges is not typically conducive to the promotion of increased air safety. No doubt if I were a friend or relative of a passenger on AF447 I would be pretty pissed off (hell, I’m not, but I’m still pretty pissed off that it happened), but what good will criminal penalties bring? If the design was unsafe, fix it. If the training was inadequate, fix it. Both much better uses of time and money.
Thankfully, aviation safety has come a long way and is still improving. According to this list, there have been no commercial flights with a higher number of fatalities since AF447 where the cause was pilot error and/or failure of aircraft systems (MH17 was shot down and MH370 was almost certainly pilot suicide/homicide).
According to the news articles, they’ve been charged with « involuntary manslaughter ». I don’t know anything about French criminal law, but that doesn’t sound like an allegation that anyone intended the deaths.