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Black box data released in 2009 Air France crash

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So it was pilot error, when the stall warning goes off push the nose down and not up! All pilots are trained to feel a stall and by instinct correct it. If the airspeed indicators are wrong trust your instincts. It is possible the advance avionics did the deed and pull up the nose.

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Yeah, looks like a combo of faulty instruments and pilot error. Sad.

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Yuri

It is possible the advance avionics did the deed and pull up the nose.

The autopilot disengaged itself as soon as it sensed a discrepancy in airspeed indications so the avionics didn't make the pilots fly the stall into the ocean. Toatally pilot error. Reports say that almost all control inputs were nose-up and that the pilots never really tried to recover from the stall despite the warnings telling them that's what they were experiencing. Didn't help that the senior pilot didn't return to the cockpit until it was probably too late for them to recover and that he never even took the controls. This accident sure doesn't say much for Air France's pilot training that's for sure...

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Hmmm forgot to de-ice the Pitots it seems. Gotta push that button on the overhead panel once you hit transition altitude. I've had it happen to me on Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The Auot-Pilot would rev the engines up to the max and if you aren't paying attention you'll overspeed the aircraft cause terrible stress. (There goes the wing). The computer gets an adverse reading from the Pitots. FL350 is freakin cold outside.

It this case it was stall. Somebody wasn't doing their job. An engine stall at FL350? Come on!!!!

Now lets get down to what could be the scandal. Who else was in that cockpit with those romantic French men? Why did they pull up instead of pushing the nose down to correct the stall? Any pilot knows that plane even with ehgines at idle will glide at 0.50 mach during descent.

I bet it was a mile-high club thing.

Just kidding of course. 3 minutes 30 seconds total time of descent from FL370. Scary.

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I've had it happen to me on Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Thank you NetNinja, you made my day with this sentence!

perhaps because he was confused by the incorrect readings.

See, unlike you, some people can imagine that piloting through a shitstorm while the captain is away and multiple indicators are failing may be a confusing situation.

Hell I wasn't there but I would like to know how the guy is supposed to know which display to believe when they are all reporting crap.

Ho and yeah, in a moment like that, I am sure the guy has plenty of relaxing time to consider "his gut feeling".

Gentlemen, I seriously doubt any of you is an active airline pilot given the level of your comments. Experts are saying many questions are left unanswered. Besides human error does not necessarily mean crappy pilot, all pilot make mistakes, and the conditions will determine the consequences...

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No of casualties from air crash went down to 884 in year 2008,in 2009 it was 1103 and in went up to 1115 casualties in 2010. Casualties should be going down,with better planes and more better aircraft operators,aircraft maintenance and better others in air transport.

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rajakumar

The best of airline safety is indeed getting better, but with cheaper air travel in all respects there are more and more crappy low-cost, safety ecomising airlines that just care about the bottom line, mainly in developing countries, but even the major carriers will only develop a safety feature if they think it's "cost-effective" even if they know there is a potentially airline crippling and death causing safety problem, either in aircraft design or safety procedure

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NetNinja

An engine stall at FL350? Come on!!!!

It wasn't an engine stall; it was a wing stall. The engines were running at close to max power during the descent. The plane went down nose-up at a high AofA with the only engines trying to keep the plane airborne with little to no lift from the wings. Basically this plane fell out of the sky instead of flying down to the ocean. This was caused by the pilots incorrectly interpreting the stall and other warnings and attempting to eroneously correct the stall by pulling up instead of down. Why they made such a basic error is a mystery.

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“During the following seconds, all of the recorded speeds became invalid and the stall warning stopped,” the report said, but added that the plane never came out of its aerodynamic stall.

This is the part that bothers me. The pilots did make a critical mistake in dealing with the initial stall warnings, but the warnings should never have stopped if lift hadn't returned to the wings. That's a pretty serious design flaw for Airbus if it turns out to be one.

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I feel a lot of empathy for the pilots. One could imagine suddenly suffering a total loss of airspeed indication in turbulence in the middle of the night and with all the autopilot systems suddenly failing. The indications, both visual and aural, would have been very confusing. The question for me is why did the instruments that are triple redundant, which means that there are three back-ups, all fail together?

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Falling that fast must be terrible popping in the ears... y'know something is wrong....

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No of casualties from air crash went down to 884 in year 2008,in 2009 it was 1103 and in went up to 1115 casualties in 2010. Casualties should be going down,with better planes and more better aircraft operators,aircraft maintenance and better others in air transport.

I will quote the Boeing webpage about safety:

"In 2000, the world's commercial jet airlines carried approximately 1.09 billion people on 18 million flights, while suffering only 20 fatal accidents."

The last time I took probabilities / statistics is quite a while ago, but form what I can remember, an increase of the order of 250 out of 1.09 billion doesn't sound alarmingly significant. Let me reformulate: it is a tragedy for people, but the numbers themselves do not mean anything.

As a matter of fact:

The number of passengers has likely increased every year, so comparing without having those numbers is already irrelevant.

If you know what risk management and probabilities are, then you'd know that even if you could have halved the probability of accidents by increasing flight safety, you would lower the chance of having more crashes than last year, but chances still are that it could get worse anyway (less likely, but still possible).

Blaming pilots after a plane accident is like spitting on the corpse of a driver after a car crash you didn't even witness. I find it offensive to say the least.

When the experts that have all the details at hand will publish results blaming the pilot(s) for being incompetent, then and only then you will be free to call him/them murderer(s). So far, I can only see that 228 persons have been the victims of a tragic series of unlucky (and I believe unlikely) events, and anybody judging the people involved based on the incomplete information we have is absolutely revolting.

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It's apparent that the pitots failed and that the pilots were blind to speed, but I wonder: were they also blind to altitude? Minor changes in altitude can be quite noticeable when they happen suddenly, while major ones might pass unnoticed when they happen smoothly - but even without the pitots, the pilots should have been aware of altitude loss, and the rapid altitude loss should have given them a clue about which faulty speed reading was correct: they were flying to slow and into a stall.

We won't know until the inspection is complete, but I wonder if there is some interconnection in the BAE software that feeds incorrect data from one system into another. At any rate, it is peculiar that I have read nowhere yet anything about altitude indicators.

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Xinef, there no harm in pushing for perfection ,and zero casualty rate in air transport.

We can't save people travelling on roads recklessly,that much,with almost near 1 billion vehicles on roads.

We can touch lower casualty rates,in airlines via people awareness. Global travellers,should avoid bad track record airlines and flawed design aircrafts with bad track record.

Rich Global air travellers,should increase criticisms of airlines and aircrafts,for their own safety increase and push for zero crashes.

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