Air France Jet Crash: Are Commercial Jets Safe Against Lightning?

[russ_watters]

Chilling.

 

[russ_watters]

So it sounds like the cause was faulty speed indication leading to a stall, then pilot error in recovering: http://content.usatoday.com/communi...rance-flight-experienced-35-minute-freefall/1

So I was wrong: the pilot error was much worse. Greg's article basically says that aside from sporadic and not overly serious airspeed indication faults, there was nothing wrong with the plane: nothing affecting it's flyability. The crash was caused by the one co-pilot applying full back pressure to the stick for nearly the entire event and neither the other copilot nor the captain recognizing it (except for a brief moment during the first stall) until it was too late.

All other issues relate to whether the other pilots - or indeed the airplane itself - could have prevented him from flying an airworthy airplane into the ocean. So sad.

 

[mheslep]

Somehow, automated warning systems are again being dismissed by humans in control. It seems they were oblivious to the dozens of stall warnings meaning they've come to not trust them somehow. That period where the stall warning went away because of attitude, later to return, while the aircraft was always in stall didn't help.

I see similarities to the subway crash in Washington, DC some months ago: automated signal failure, engineer oblivious, one train crashed into another.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

New article from the Telegraph

With the report into the tragedy of Air France 447 due next month, Airbus’s 'brilliant’ aircraft design may have contributed to one of the world’s worst aviation disasters and the deaths of all 228 onboard.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9231855/Air-France-Flight-447-Damn-it-were-going-to-crash.html