Air France airliner with 228 aboard disappears over the Atlantic

[alfred russel]

[The captain of the flight makes no attempt to physically take control of the airplane... But instead, he takes a seat behind the other two pilots.

You have to admire the captain's dedication to the career development of the younger pilots.

[Zanza]

And yet the copilots career went only downward from there.

[alfred russel]

And yet the copilots career went only downward from there.

The pilot let them sink or swim on their own merits.

[jimmy olsen]

This job sounds creepy as hell

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/germanwings-4u9525-whats-it-like-to-listen-to-black-box-recording

Germanwings flight 4U9525: what's it like to listen to a black box recording?

After every air disaster, finding the black box recorder becomes the first priority – but for the crash investigators who have to listen to the tapes of people's final moments, the experience can be incredibly harrowing.


Archie Bland

Saturday 28 March 2015 08.00 GMT  Last modified on Saturday 28 March 2015 08.03 GMT 

For Tony Cable, the hardest job was in 1980: Dan-Air Flight 1008, which crashed into a mountain in Tenerife, killing all 146 people on board. Thirty-five years on, the air crash investigator still remembers listening to the black box recorder, hearing the increasingly desperate crew trying to figure out what was going wrong, flying in heavy cloud, and all the while knowing that the mountain was close by. "Who knows how the mind works?" he asks, wondering why it stuck more than any other. "I suppose it's because that one is still impossible, really, to understand."

Black box recorders aren't quite how we imagine. We think they're black, but they're orange. We think they're indestructible, but they're not. We think they hold all the answers, but all too often, they don't. Even so, when we consider the tragedy of air disasters such as the one that befell Germanwings flight 4U9525, black box recorders are still almost always our best hope of finding an explanation that makes sense.

In this case, it is only a very limited sort of sense. The black box recorder is actually two separate components: a flight data recorder, which stores technical information – some 2,500 different measurements on a modern device – and a cockpit voice recorder, which keeps a tape of every word the pilots say. They are stored in the back of the aircraft, which has the best chance of surviving a crash, and are wrapped in titanium or stainless steel. They can survive an hour of 1,100-degree Celsius fire, or a weight of 227kg.

But they can still be damaged, and they can still go wrong. "It's a big mistake to assume you're going to get readouts from either recorder," says Cable, who spent 32 years working for the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). "They may not work, or they may not have the parameters you need. And they are very good at telling you what happened, but often not very good at telling you why."

And yet sometimes they are all we have – and so they are worth accessing. "You're trying to put a data jigsaw puzzle together," says Anne Evans, a 23-year veteran of the AAIB who spent a decade analysing both varieties of recording. "Sometimes the damage means you can't reach it the normal way. Just recovering it from damaged units is a skill – undressing it from the box."

In this case, even that is impossible: the flight data recorder is reportedly yet to be found. Investigators have therefore had to rely on the voice recording alone, taken from two microphones in the crew's headsets and one general microphone positioned on the instrument panel. As it turns out, the cause of the accident appears to have been so appallingly simple that the 30-minute recording it holds is more than enough: the sounds tell the whole story.

According to French prosecutor Brice Robin, "you can hear the commanding pilot ask for access to the cockpit several times. He identifies himself, but the co-pilot does not provide any answer." The knocking becomes more insistent, and louder. Increasingly anxious messages from air traffic control go unanswered. Alarms from the cabin are audible through the reinforced door, as are increasingly frantic efforts to break it down, and then the screams of the passengers outside. One other sound persists: the breath of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot, steady and controlled until the end.

Even second-hand, it is a chilling account. And to think of listening to it is nearly unbearable. The last communication from a dead man is bound to be ghoulish, and all the more so when the message is silence. Disasters are always described as tragedies, but that falls short of the proper definition of tragedy, which requires that the catastrophe is pre-ordained; to listen to such a tape returns the word to its proper meaning, the awful conclusion written into it from the start, no matter how mundane things might initially seem. So what is it like for the people who hear such tapes for themselves?




The club of those who are allowed to do so is tiny. In Farnborough, at the AAIB's base, there's a soundproofed room with a magnetic seal – to prevent electronic eavesdropping – where investigators gather to listen. There are only three such rooms in Europe, and not many more people who understand what it's like to hear a plane's last moments. "There's a very large number who call themselves investigators," says Graham Braithwaite, professor of safety and accident investigation at Cranfield University (who, he points out, has never listened to such a tape himself). "There's a smaller number who I would say actually are investigators. Fifty working for the AAIB, and maybe a couple of hundred in total in this country. They try to restrict who hears something like that – unless you need to, you don't. It is a very tightly controlled thing. And you can be an experienced investigator with many years behind you, and you can be affected more by one than another."

Anne Evans remembers the Kegworth air disaster in 1989, when a British Midland flight crashed into the M1, killing 47 people. "They shut down the wrong engine," she says. "They're going through a series of checks, doing what they think are the correct actions, but it's not working. And when you compare it to the data, you can see exactly why." There's the same tragic irony in the recording of Air France 447 – which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 aboard – where the error is, likewise, obvious to the investigators, but invisible to the crew. On that occasion, the co-pilot pulled back on the controls when he should have pushed forwards – information that the captain lacked because he had been asleep. "Give me the controls!" he cried, when he finally realised. "Give me the controls!" But it was too late.

David Gleave, a former chief investigator for Aviation Security Investigations, remembers listening to the cockpit recording from a plane that collided with another midair. "The first time I listened to it all the way through," he says, "I think I went into shock. I blanked it all out. And then you go through and say: OK. I know it's going to happen. You force yourself." He pauses. "It's a strange thing, though, to relive the last two minutes of someone else's life. If you can't forget about it, maybe it's not the job for you."

Most investigators seem to take a similarly hard-headed view – by necessity, of course. "You have colleagues to talk to," says Evans. "You can't become overwhelmed by the human tragedy. I don't think it ever gets easier, but you have to divorce yourself from it and concentrate on the technical challenge."

Once investigators do so, they can find vital clues in the tapes – even in the unconscious sounds emitted by the pilots. "You can listen for things like breathing rates," says David Gleave. "You can judge stress levels, whether there's been a heart attack. Maybe you turn up the pilot's mic, or maybe you try to detect stress in the voice of an individual. You listen and try to work out if, when they're silent, is it because they're getting on with it? Or is it because there's tension between them, and maybe that's going to lead to a misunderstanding?"

Sometimes, though, the greatest insights can be held in what might seem to the rest of us like background noise. Evans remembers a case in China in which the flight data recorder suggested that the flaps on the wings had moved when they shouldn't have, and she had to work out whether it was a pilot error (a lever pushed at the wrong moment) or a technical error (the flaps adjusting on their own). She listened to the tape again and again, isolating a sound that seemed like it could have been the lever in question. Then, she went to another identical aircraft, with an identical recording system. She switched the recorder on, she pulled the lever, and then she listened back. The problem, as it turned out, was the pilot's fault.

In such cases, the value of the tape, and the work that's done to understand it, becomes obvious. But sometimes, as on a flight such as 4U9525, there's a crucial gap that no amount of expertise can fill. Perhaps it's the pilot who never says a word. Or perhaps it's the one who sends one last message from beyond the grave, but cannot quite be understood. In 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed in Washington DC, killing 74 of the 79 people aboard, and the question of what went wrong revolved partly around whether or not an anti-icing system was on or off. "They listened to it many, many times," says Braithwaite. "It's an exhausting process. And when they get to that item on the checklist, he doesn't say 'on', or 'off'. He says 'onf'." He pauses, and gives a helpless sigh. "Sometimes," he concludes, "it doesn't matter how many times you listen to it."

[Berkut]

I've re-read that transcript like 20 times. I just cannot get over that something this...incompetent? is possible with a modern, presumably mature and professional airline. These guys are not chumps, right? And there are three of them.

In a little over ten minutes three men flew an airplane into the ocean while at any time any one of them should have been perfectly capable of correcting the problem. Indeed, had there only been one pilot, it is almost certain the disaster would never have occurred.

But even so, what happened was not something difficult to anticipate, or hard to understand. Twelve minutes is not a long time, but on the other hand in terms of emergencies, it is kind of an eternity.

It is simply baffling, and kind of scary. I don't even know how you train for something like this, although I am sure every pilot in the world has read this transcript and gone through steps to make sure it cannot possibly be repeated  - but I would bet that if you described this scenario to 100 pilots and trainers before it happened, they would categorically state that something like this simply could not happen....right?

[Martinus]

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.

[jimmy olsen]

How do they test these guys at pilot school? It's mostly simulations right?

[grumbler]

I've re-read that transcript like 20 times. I just cannot get over that something this...incompetent? is possible with a modern, presumably mature and professional airline. These guys are not chumps, right? And there are three of them.

In a little over ten minutes three men flew an airplane into the ocean while at any time any one of them should have been perfectly capable of correcting the problem. Indeed, had there only been one pilot, it is almost certain the disaster would never have occurred.

But even so, what happened was not something difficult to anticipate, or hard to understand. Twelve minutes is not a long time, but on the other hand in terms of emergencies, it is kind of an eternity.

It is simply baffling, and kind of scary. I don't even know how you train for something like this, although I am sure every pilot in the world has read this transcript and gone through steps to make sure it cannot possibly be repeated  - but I would bet that if you described this scenario to 100 pilots and trainers before it happened, they would categorically state that something like this simply could not happen....right?

Yes.  i cannot understand why the captain was so passive.  The aircraft is in an emergency, and he doesn't take the controls?  What kind of a captain is so passive with the lives of hundreds, including himself, on the line?  I can only think that he didn't understand that they were actually in trouble.  How he could ignore the fact that Bonin had completely lost control of the situation - was, in fact, hauling back on the stick in order to stall the plane - is a mystery.  I simply cannot imagine a pilot with his experience allowing a rookie to kill him, without making any attempt to save his own life.

[Tamas]

I've re-read that transcript like 20 times. I just cannot get over that something this...incompetent? is possible with a modern, presumably mature and professional airline. These guys are not chumps, right? And there are three of them.

In a little over ten minutes three men flew an airplane into the ocean while at any time any one of them should have been perfectly capable of correcting the problem. Indeed, had there only been one pilot, it is almost certain the disaster would never have occurred.

But even so, what happened was not something difficult to anticipate, or hard to understand. Twelve minutes is not a long time, but on the other hand in terms of emergencies, it is kind of an eternity.

It is simply baffling, and kind of scary. I don't even know how you train for something like this, although I am sure every pilot in the world has read this transcript and gone through steps to make sure it cannot possibly be repeated  - but I would bet that if you described this scenario to 100 pilots and trainers before it happened, they would categorically state that something like this simply could not happen....right?

Yes.  i cannot understand why the captain was so passive.  The aircraft is in an emergency, and he doesn't take the controls?  What kind of a captain is so passive with the lives of hundreds, including himself, on the line?  I can only think that he didn't understand that they were actually in trouble.  How he could ignore the fact that Bonin had completely lost control of the situation - was, in fact, hauling back on the stick in order to stall the plane - is a mystery.  I simply cannot imagine a pilot with his experience allowing a rookie to kill him, without making any attempt to save his own life.

??

[alfred russel]

Yes.  i cannot understand why the captain was so passive.  The aircraft is in an emergency, and he doesn't take the controls?  What kind of a captain is so passive with the lives of hundreds, including himself, on the line?  I can only think that he didn't understand that they were actually in trouble.  How he could ignore the fact that Bonin had completely lost control of the situation - was, in fact, hauling back on the stick in order to stall the plane - is a mystery.  I simply cannot imagine a pilot with his experience allowing a rookie to kill him, without making any attempt to save his own life.

It is the aviation equivalent of the butt fumble, coincidentally performed by a team named the "Jets". Perhaps the butt fumble was their homage to flight 447?

[dps]

@ Berk... Jesus Christ, I know better than that co-pilot how to handle a commercial jet in that situation and I'm just a flightsim enthusiast.  Makes you almost wonder if he's another kamikaze pilot who just was more clever at covering up his intentions.

Yeah, they were in a stall.  Even I know that in a stall, you have to gain airspeed to recover, and you DON'T pull back on the stick to gain airspeed. 

Now, granted, the airspeed indicator wasn't working, but still, they had the stall warning going off.  And you can't really even put it down to panic in a crisis, because they didn't seem to have realized until the last moments that they were in a crisis, as shown by how the captain didn't take the control right away when he got back to the cockpit.

[Berkut]

The airspeed indicator wasn't working initially, but for the last several minutes of the crisis, the instrumentation was actually working perfectly fine. Granted, the actions of the pilots had put the aircraft into a state where it was difficult to properly interpret that instrumentation, but knowing how your instruments respond to various flight configurations is part of training as well.

Hell, even the "malfunction" of the airspeed indicators initially wasn't really a malfunction per se, but rather a known possible result of icing conditions.

Nothing happened on that plane that was anything that the pilots should not have been prepared for, there was no unexpected malfunction or unusual weather (there was extreme weather, but even that is not really unanticipated) or anything!

The last words in that last minute are just very sad, as the more senior co-pilot and captain realize what Bonin had been doing, and you can imagine it just sinking in with them that he had killed them...

02:13:40 (Robert)   Climb... climb... climb... climb...
02:13:40 (Bonin) But I've had the stick back the whole time!    [At last, Bonin tells the others the crucial fact whose import he has so grievously failed to understand himself.]
02:13:42 (Captain)   No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no.
02:13:43 (Robert) Descend, then... Give me the controls... Give me the controls! [Bonin yields the controls, and Robert finally puts the nose down.]
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...

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?

[grumbler]

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.

[Caliga]

It seems to me that the captain, despite his experience, was someone grossly unfit for a leadership position... at least on that particular night, anyway.

[dps]

It seems to me that the captain, despite his experience, was someone grossly unfit for a leadership position... at least on that particular night, anyway.

Well, everyone can have an off night, but if it happens at the wrong time, it can be a real career killer.