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It was actually a voice alert. I'm not making any judgement about its appropriateness. In fact by the time it arose, the aircraft may already have been in an u

by theoh 10y ago

It was actually a voice alert. I'm not making any judgement about its appropriateness. In fact by the time it arose, the aircraft may already have been in an unrecoverable dive (or whatever the word is for rapid descent while stalled), I don't remember. So it's not a primary cause of the accident.

mikeash 10y ago
A voice alert in a cockpit where people are probably frantically shouting at each other is just as ridiculous. There's no substitute for physical feedback. It's instantaneous and impossible to miss. It's completely beyond my comprehension that Airbus eliminated it. As I recall, the one pilot held full back stick all the way down, while the other pilot tried and failed to recover. Releasing the back stick and executing a normal stall recovery would have saved the airplane at just about any time.
- theoh 10y ago
  I understand the Boeing approach of physical linkage to be the best idea, rather than any kind of indirect force feedback which is possible to misinterpret. As for your last point, I'm not an expert, and I'm not as incredulous about this scenario as you seem to be. (As a teenager I did fly a lot in PC flight simulators, though.) The non-technical Vanity Fair article I referred to claims that the accident investigators estimated the last point at which the aircraft could have recovered from the dive was around the time it passed 13,000 feet: "Though precise modeling was never pursued, the investigators later estimated that this was the last moment, as the airplane dropped through 13,000 feet, when a recovery would theoretically have been possible. The maneuver would have required a perfect pilot to lower the nose at least 30 degrees below the horizon and dive into the descent, accepting a huge altitude loss in order to accelerate to a flying angle of attack, and then rounding out of the dive just above the waves, pulling up with sufficient vigor to keep from exceeding the airplane’s speed limit, yet not so violently as to cause a structural failure. There are perhaps a handful of pilots in the world who might have succeeded, but this Air France crew was not among them. There is an old truth in aviation that the reasons you get into trouble become the reasons you don’t get out of it."
  - mikeash 10y ago
    If that's what they did then I believe it. I'm coming from a light aircraft background where stall recovery takes much less altitude. Still, they had about two thirds of their descent to initiate recovery before it became too late. If the controls had been linked, the other pilot would have discovered the problem instantly.

by theoh 10y ago

mikeash 10y ago

A voice alert in a cockpit where people are probably frantically shouting at each other is just as ridiculous. There's no substitute for physical feedback. It's instantaneous and impossible to miss. It's completely beyond my comprehension that Airbus eliminated it. As I recall, the one pilot held full back stick all the way down, while the other pilot tried and failed to recover. Releasing the back stick and executing a normal stall recovery would have saved the airplane at just about any time.

theoh 10y ago
I understand the Boeing approach of physical linkage to be the best idea, rather than any kind of indirect force feedback which is possible to misinterpret. As for your last point, I'm not an expert, and I'm not as incredulous about this scenario as you seem to be. (As a teenager I did fly a lot in PC flight simulators, though.) The non-technical Vanity Fair article I referred to claims that the accident investigators estimated the last point at which the aircraft could have recovered from the dive was around the time it passed 13,000 feet: "Though precise modeling was never pursued, the investigators later estimated that this was the last moment, as the airplane dropped through 13,000 feet, when a recovery would theoretically have been possible. The maneuver would have required a perfect pilot to lower the nose at least 30 degrees below the horizon and dive into the descent, accepting a huge altitude loss in order to accelerate to a flying angle of attack, and then rounding out of the dive just above the waves, pulling up with sufficient vigor to keep from exceeding the airplane’s speed limit, yet not so violently as to cause a structural failure. There are perhaps a handful of pilots in the world who might have succeeded, but this Air France crew was not among them. There is an old truth in aviation that the reasons you get into trouble become the reasons you don’t get out of it."
- mikeash 10y ago
  If that's what they did then I believe it. I'm coming from a light aircraft background where stall recovery takes much less altitude. Still, they had about two thirds of their descent to initiate recovery before it became too late. If the controls had been linked, the other pilot would have discovered the problem instantly.