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wildcard451

Air France Flight 447 - finally solved.

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I'm a student pilot who wants to know how in the world this sort of thing can happen. There's a lot to learn about exactly how. "Trust your instruments." Instruments aren't working. "Then check for outside cues." There aren't any. "Trust your instinct" Instinct says pull up.

There are some fundamental issues that plenty of us are very interested in.



The "instinct" in this situation should have been to push-over. It's the PF who completely ignored the stall warnings because he didn't think the aircraft could stall. The PNF never acknowledged the stall warnings because he didn't think he had to; it wasn't his job to teach a professional airline pilot what a stall was and how to recover from it. He just assumed that the ID-TEN-T error sitting next to him would have been trained in stall recoveries to at least the level of a student pilot and was already doing everything he could to recover from the stall when in reality he was doing everything he could to keep it in the stall.

This crash is just so unbelievably stupid!

It makes you wonder, what if they hadn't crashed? What if the PNF had figured it out when they still had enough altitude to recover? What would have happened to the other pilot? Fired? Probably not!
It's all been said before, no sense repeating it here.

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Why not leave the AF447 bantering to professional airline pilots? For example, pprune.org.

Most people on here can't even fly a canopy!



I'm a student pilot who wants to know how in the world this sort of thing can happen. There's a lot to learn about exactly how. "Trust your instruments." Instruments aren't working. "Then check for outside cues." There aren't any. "Trust your instinct" Instinct says pull up.

There are some fundamental issues that plenty of us are very interested in.



It's as much psychology as anything (maybe more).

The pilot was trained the full throttle and stick back would result in a climb and that the plane couldn't stall.

He simply couldn't get his mind around the fact that it wasn't working. The insturments (other than the airspeed) were working properly. He ignored the stall warning, the extreme descent and basic piloting procedures because he fixated on the TOGO procedure of full power, full stick back.

As soon as the captain realized the copilot was holding full stick back, he instantly recognized what was going on and initiated recovery procedures, but it was too late.

As far as instinct goes, certain instincts have to be trained out. Kind of like how a canopy pilot needs to "unlearn" reaching for the ground to prevent a gust induced turn from becoming a toggle turn into the ground.
Pilots need to build the instinct of pushing forward, even when the ground is filling the windshield and every fiber of their being is screaming "pull up."
"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

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"Trust your instruments." Instruments aren't working.



They pretty much had a full panel.
Only the airspeed sensors were temporarily inoperative but this caused the computer flying the plane to change modes from"you cannot break or stall me" to "Do whatever you want, i'm afraid and confused". Note that this computer is the fly by wire system and different from the autopilot. Immediately after the computer lost airspeed information, autopilot was disengaged and the pilots were manually flying the plane. The pilots were not trained in this mode change. It can be assumed that they still thought the airplane could not be stalled. Though the computer wasl screaming "stall" at them,it was not warning them of this the entire time the plane was actually stalled. (when the computer thinks the plane is going too slow to sense the angle of attack, it does not scream "stall" at the pilots[confused])

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"Then check for outside cues." There aren't any.



But there was, aerodynamic noise. (going fast is loud, even in well insulated airplanes you can hear it) The plane normally going 400kts going down to below 60kts is a big difference. Not to mention major buffeting from the stall.
***
"Trust your instinct" Instinct says pull up.


It obviously did for those pilots. It shows design flaws and training issues.

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perhaps this is the result of the way they train pilots now.
the fast track system that gets them into the seat at 400hrs, we don't want any stinking pilots with outside expierience that earned it the hard way!
then spend 95% of their time on auto-pilot.
Experience is a difficult teacher, she gives you the test first and the lesson afterward

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perhaps this is the result of the way they train pilots now.
the fast track system that gets them into the seat at 400hrs, we don't want any stinking pilots with outside expierience that earned it the hard way!
then spend 95% of their time on auto-pilot.



I'll agree with that.

Spending a couple hundred hours teaching is invaluable experience. Both from the idea that you have to understand something to teach it and to have students pull the most amazing things on you.
Toss in a few hundred flying jumpers where you have slow (or at least slower) flight with weird CG situations and odd control response from the airflow being disturbed by the floaters hanging off the side.

But then the pilot has too much independent thought about how stuff should be done, has bad habits that need to be "unlearned" and all the other issues that the dedicated training was supposed to address.

I really don't know the right answer.

Maybe some non-flight emergency reaction or stress response testing. As in the "psychological mumbo-jumbo" to see how the pilot handles unusual situations, the good old "thinking outside of the box" kind of thing.

That ability isn't something that can be taught very easily. you either have it or you don't.
The problem is that that sort of response isn't easy to test.
Sort of like simulator training, while very, very valuable, has it's shortcomings. The pilot knows that he is in for a workout. They don't spend money on sim time to see how well a pilot watches the autopilot.

Although I would bet very heavily that future Airbus sim time will include the computers going into the Alternate Law situations.
"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

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I just think that the actual "feel" and experience in real situations goes a long way.
The guy that taught me to fly put me into attitudes to demonstrate his point.
It is very difficult for anyone to be told something and when it actually is in that configuration be able to correlate the "learning" what they were told, with the actual feeling they are expieriencing.
I.E. The grave yard spiral.
Experience is a difficult teacher, she gives you the test first and the lesson afterward

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I really don't know the right answer.



Best post in the thread yet:P

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"thinking outside of the box" kind of thing.



But this is the wrong way to approach this situation.
The problem I have with this crash is that they did not need to think "outside the box".
Without a computer thinking it can outsmart the pilots into avoiding a crash, it would not have put the events that caused the crash into motion.

Maybe the FBW system is needed to keep pilots honest in their flying. Or maybe the problem is the overworked, overstimulated and under-experienced pilots being thrust into a situation that they or their superiors never dreamed was possible because the only thing they ever needed to know was how to control the computer.

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>Yes they are. As others have said, they also decouple when there is an excessive
>force difference.

The 767 yokes, at least, are not physically connected. There is a hydraulic connection (i.e. force is transmitted between the two) but there is no physical connection i.e. no cables/rods as you have with a Cessna 172 yoke. With enough force the two yokes can be operated independently, which is a useful feature if you have a jammed surface.

The same thing can be done with sidestick controllers.

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>"Trust your instinct" Instinct says pull up.

Really? I've only got 250 hours flying but when the shit really hits the fan and you have altitude "pull up" is generally the worst thing you can do. Indeed, the stall training that pilots go through is intended to reinforce this - when the plane is stalled, recover by relaxing back pressure to get the nose down.

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>Without a computer thinking it can outsmart the pilots into avoiding a crash, it would
>not have put the events that caused the crash into motion.

Unfortunately the computer did exactly what it was told to do in this case. Indeed, the problem here was that the computer lost its ability to outsmart the pilots - and thus allowed them to stall the plane into the water. Had the computer not reverted (and more importantly had the pilots been able to fly the plane manually) the incident would not have occurred.

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>"Trust your instinct" Instinct says pull up.

Really?



This guy's did. Apparently it was so out of what that nobody bothered to think the damned pilot was causing it.

None of the malfunctions made sense because the malfunction was at the controls.


My wife is hotter than your wife.

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>>Really?

>This guy's did.

Yeah, but I'm wondering how that came to be. Imagine a skydiver telling you "so there I was, still in freefall at 1000 feet, so I trusted my instincts and went into a head-down." You would probably question whether or not that guy had any training at all.

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I really don't know the right answer.



Best post in the thread yet:P

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"thinking outside of the box" kind of thing.



But this is the wrong way to approach this situation.
The problem I have with this crash is that they did not need to think "outside the box".
Without a computer thinking it can outsmart the pilots into avoiding a crash, it would not have put the events that caused the crash into motion.

Maybe the FBW system is needed to keep pilots honest in their flying. Or maybe the problem is the overworked, overstimulated and under-experienced pilots being thrust into a situation that they or their superiors never dreamed was possible because the only thing they ever needed to know was how to control the computer.


Bolding mine.

That's what I mean by "outside the box."

From the article:
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While Bonin's behavior is irrational, it is not inexplicable. Intense psychological stress tends to shut down the part of the brain responsible for innovative, creative thought. Instead, we tend to revert to the familiar and the well-rehearsed. Though pilots are required to practice hand-flying their aircraft during all phases of flight as part of recurrent training, in their daily routine they do most of their hand-flying at low altitude—while taking off, landing, and maneuvering. It's not surprising, then, that amid the frightening disorientation of the thunderstorm, Bonin reverted to flying the plane as if it had been close to the ground, even though this response was totally ill-suited to the situation.



What he needed to do was revert to basic stick and rudder flying.
If he had acted as a pilot not a systems manager, this wouldn't have happened.

But in the middle of a thunderstorm, that would not have been easy.

And having it pounded into his head over and over that the systems woudn't allow for this to happen make it very easy to understand how this happened.
"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

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