Air France airliner with 228 aboard disappears over the Atlantic

[Berkut]

Bonin sounds like someone who has no idea how an airplane works. I hate to hate on the guy, but seriously...how can you not know this?

Exactly.. but how can the captain, seeing that Bonin is yanking back on the stick when in a stall, allow him to kill the captain himself and all the passengers?  It would have taken superhuman self-control for the captain to resist the temptation to save everyone's lives by kicking Bonin out of the left seat.

The Airbus uses side sticks, so it is almost certain that is actually wasn't obvious to either of the other pilots that Bonin was pulling back on the stick the entire time.

[DGuller]

02:14:23 (Robert)   Damn it, we're going to crash... This can't be happening!
02:14:25 (Bonin)   But what's happening?
02:14:27 (Captain)   Ten degrees of pitch...

You have to admire the Captain's cool and collected attitude.  In his place I probably wouldn't be collected enough to describe how exactly the co-pilot were killing us all two seconds before my death.

[dps]

02:14:23 (Robert)   Damn it, we're going to crash... This can't be happening!
02:14:25 (Bonin)   But what's happening?
02:14:27 (Captain)   Ten degrees of pitch...

You have to admire the Captain's cool and collected attitude.  In his place I probably wouldn't be collected enough to describe how exactly the co-pilot were killing us all two seconds before my death.

You (and many of the rest of us) might have been tempted to make sure the co-pilot died before the crash.

[Berkut]

I don't know why, but I have become kind of fascinated by this disaster.

There is a good write up, a bit more technical, here - this goes into more detail about the training gaps and actualy reasons why the pilots made so many errors:

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20090601-0

The aeroplane went into a sustained stall, signalled by the stall warning and strong buffet. Despite these persistent symptoms, the crew never understood that they were stalling and consequently never applied a recovery manoeuvre. The combination of the ergonomics of the warning design, the conditions in which airline pilots are trained and exposed to stalls during their professional training and the process of recurrent training does not generate the expected behaviour in any acceptable reliable way.
In its current form, recognizing the stall warning, even associated with buffet, supposes that the crew accords a minimum level of 'legitimacy' to it. This then supposes sufficient previous experience of stalls, a minimum of cognitive availability and understanding of the situation, knowledge of the aeroplane (and its protection modes) and its flight physics. An examination of the current training for airline pilots does not, in general, provide convincing indications of the building and maintenance of the associated skills.

[lustindarkness]

My ten year old daughter learned about stalling her remote control airplane the first day she flew it.


Yes, the plane survived, I know you were worried about it. LOL

[Berkut]

I think what they are saying is that there was a context problem - the issue was not that the pilots did not know what to do when the aircraft stalled, it is that they didn't recognize that it was stalling to begin with, and never did until it was too late.

The basic training problem being that all the context of training around stalls is about them happening during takeoff, landing, maneuvering of some kind. The idea of a stall happening in what they saw as cruising flight just never really occurred to them, even though it seems kind of obvious.

So this "first cause" one would expect was psychologically dismissed as an explanation for what was happening, because it didn't fit into their training and experience - stalls don't happen in cruising flight, so there must be something else going on, and they are trying to figure out what when the real problem is blindingly obvious...but has been dismissed.

It is like spending an hour trying to figure out why your TV won't work, and it turns out it was unplugged all along. It isn't that you don't know it needs to be plugged in, it is that you mentally think you already checked that, and you know it isn't the problem, so you don't even return to it. It takes someone else to "start over" the diagnostic process to go back to basic checks. Which is why the captain really was deficient as well. Had he simply said to the junior pilot "Get up, let me take over" the problem would have fixed itself almost immediately. Hell, the captain probably would not even had had to sit down! The moment Bonin took his hand off the control, the co-pilot would have likely been able to correct.

Combined with the multiple inputs from the two pilots who it never really clicked that the other was doing things that were counter-acting themselves, and the framework for the crisis is just mentally all fucked up, so they never responded properly to what was, in fact, a very simple problem - maybe the most simple of problems that every most junior of pilots learns about on their first day of training.

[The Brain]

When Mart is in a stall he taps his foot.

[Siege]

They just released fresh new transcripts from the Polish presidential plane crash from 2010. Same thing there - incompetence plus people coming into the cockpit telling the pilots they "have to land" and that the "president is getting impatient". We should let robots pilot our planes.

Come over to the Singularity side, brother.
The future is bright.

[KRonn]

I used to practice stalls when I took pilot's lessons. It was mostly basic stuff in light airplanes and we did it from higher altitude to give room to recover. When a plane stalls need to put the nose down to regain airspeed, and/or give it throttle. Need to get the airflow back over/under the wings for lift. Pulling back on the stick/wheel to try and gain altitude makes it worse/disastrous, until airspeed/airflow is recovered. There's more to it of course, and stalling at low altitude such as landings and take offs don't give much room to regain altitude and airspeed, obviously. But what I did in a light plane and an airliner stalls are whole different things, though same basic concepts.

[grumbler]

I guess what I don't understand about this cockpit clusterfuck was that, yes, the pilot would have had to look to see if the sitck is pulled back, but there is the BIG FUCKING ARTIFICIAL HORIZON hidden DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF EACH PILOT, and it would have been clearly showing that the plane was nose-up.  Now, a pilot with enough experience to be a captain... hell, one with enough experience to enter the cockpit as a visitor on the ground - knows that the reason a plane is nose-up is the someone is pulling back on the stick.  There are not a huge number of potential suspects here.

Bonin wasn't confused about a stall in cruising flight.  He was confused about what kept the plane in the air, and apparently thought that, so long as the nose wasn't pointed at the ground, the plane couldn't hit the ground.  And the captain let him believe that.

[The Brain]

Yeah I'm sure Languish would have done a better job in that cockpit.

"Define stick. Are we flying a small boat? Muslims are evil."

[Admiral Yi]

Difficult to do worse.

[Malthus]

Well, if we were all stuffed into that cockpit, we probably wouldn't even see the controls. 

"Hey grumbler - that stick by your left foot - please move it, we are stalling ..."

[Berkut]

Yeah, you are right grumbler - at the end of the day, no matter what the instruments are telling you, or what you think might be happening...why in gods name is your answer to just pull back on the stick and continue to pull back on the stick for 6 minutes? I can't think of ANY possible circumstance where that is the right answer. And if nothing else, if what you are doing isn't working, one would think that maybe STOP doing that might be worth a try.

I suspect that it is such a ridiculous thing to do that both the senior CP and the captain didn't even consider that he would be doing something that stupid until he actually said so...seconds before the plane hit the water.

After it is all said and done, it is hard to conclude much beyond Bonin just basically panicking and killing everyone, and the other two pilots simply not grocking that he could be doing so...

knows that the reason a plane is nose-up is the someone is pulling back on the stick.  There are not a huge number of potential suspects here.

Couple things about this part:

1. At some point the airspeed was so low that the AOA indicators where considered by the computer to be no longer valid, and shut down. But the manuals would still work, I would think, right?
2. There are some suspects - could be some kind of mechanical problem, for example, forcing the control surfaces into that configuration.

What, btw, is the difference between the angle of attack of the aircraft, and the pitch attitude? I would guess they are the same thing, but the article on the aviation site said at one point that the planes AOA was over 40 degrees, but the pitch attitude weas 16 degress?

[Caliga]

Shoulda ordered Boneless instead of Bonin.