Air France 447 Archives - Golf Hotel Whiskey

Ron Rapp of the the House of Rapp blog has noted an extensive article in Popular Mechanics about Air France 447’s flight recorder transcripts that shed some light on what really happened in the cockpit as the aircraft plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Brazil (also check out our post from last June: Air France 447 and pilot error: More questions than answers). Apparently, there was chaos and confusion in the cockpit and the Popular Mechanics article does a great job of showing this by reprinting various excerpts from the transcripts and then analyzing them.

Meanwhile, Ron noted similarities between the Air France 447 crash and the Colgan Air 3407 crash where the aircraft had stalled and the captain did not understand what was going on as he physically held the aircraft into a deadly deep stall all the way to impact. He also pointed out that these mistakes happened because:

…they did not believe the airplane could be stalled at all.
That’s on par with believing in the tooth fairy…
Ah, the myth of the un-stallable airplane! Is this what Airbus, airlines, and the FAA are allowing instructors to teach pilots?

Ron then went into some detail about stalls, aerodynamics and the fact that a stall can happen at any speed (along with computer and equipment failures) if the conditions are right – such as the thunderstorm Air France 447 flew right into. Moreover, Ron pointed out that in his experience, stalls are poorly understood by a majority of pilots – all the more reason to read both the Popular Mechanics article about the Air France 447 tragedy along with Ron’s further analysis of it.

Recently, the French found Air France flight 447’s black boxes nearly two years after the A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of Brazil. Hence, both Rob Mark of JetWhine and Brett Snyder of the Cranky Flier blog have written detailed posts about the accident that are well worth reading by all pilots (You can read Rob’s post here and Brett’s post here)

Starting with The Cranky Flier blog, Brett noted a few important or apparent facts about the accident:

Pilots Were Not Inexperienced
Turbulence Was Not a Factor
Frozen Pitot Tubes Are the Likely Trigger
Ultimately, the Pilots Screwed Up
But the Pilots Aren’t To Be Blamed Completely

Specifically, Brett noted that irrespective of the frozen pitot tubes, the pilots deserve a great deal of blame. Before the autopilot was shut, the pilots noticed that they could not go higher than 35,000 feet due to weight and outside warm air. Hence, the pilots should have kept the plane where it was. Instead, they put the aircraft into a climb that led to a stall and then a crash into the ocean – going against a basic rule of flight as Brett then noted:

When an airplane stalls, that means its angle of attack (the angle of the wing as compared to the direction of the air) is too great. Fixing it is pretty straightforward and it’s something that gets trained at very basic levels

Source: The Cranky Flier

However, Brett concludes that the pilots might have gotten so distracted by inconsistent speed readings, failure messages, the autopilot disconnecting and a really bad storm that they forgot the most critical thing they needed to do as pilots: Fly the aircraft.

Meanwhile, Rob Mark noted the many questions still surrounding the Air France flight 447 accident and concluded by saying:

The TV folks asked me, “Was there anything the pilots could have done to make their airplane fly again.” There was only one correct answer. “Absolutely. They could have reduced the angle of attack to a point where the airplane would once again fly.”

However and for some reason, the Air France flight 447 pilots never did – leaving one final question: Why?