Commercials pilots: stall warning, and they pull up!

[bongodriver]

Oh and on the subject of replacing pilots with computers........I pray to god it never happens, and that is not because I am frightened to lose my job, if you believe the technology being developed is primarily for safety then think again, it is really designed to save money, automation is saving the airlines huge amounts of money because it fly's the aircraft marginally more efficiently than a real pilot, fly-by-wire's main benefit is to save weight....nothing to do with saving lives....just money....again, computers fail, that is why there are at least 7 in the Airbus but you only need 2 pilots, what if the aircraft is hit by lightning?......trust me, regardless of all the bonding the avionics are not immune.....zap and all 7 shiny computers are a box of junk, do you think that a computer would have had the judgement and skill to put an airbus into the Hudson river after a double flameout?....NOPE!!!

[el0375]

very nice and informative thread, thanks to all

[TomcatViP]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

do you think that a computer would have had the judgement and skill to put an airbus into the Hudson river after a double flameout?....NOPE!!!

I guess it will just send an email to the company lawyers saying : Time to Fire UP !

@Ikus :
Thousands of pilots are saying that it was strange they did this pull up , it might be time to stop arguing it was not. Air France is a great company, Airbus have done some great design in the past but my own butt is and the ones of the hundreds of passengers in back of that plane hve surely been reliable enough to makes them understand how horrific was the situation for those interminable seconds.

That is my point : they should hve know they were stalling. If they didn't then their competencies are questionable. If they did hence the situation was far more complex than false instruments indications or ill designed Pitot with even the some of the flight automation ctrl being questionable.

Last but not least, the fact that the crash site was discovered only days after Airbush loose the Tanker contest is also questionable.

Like all the others here, MadFish, RuggButt, MadDog, Bongo (sry if I forgot some) I think that it is a freaking concerning case of accident just like were the series of strange flame-out a couple of years ago. Also the problem of the "Experteen" as you mentioned it is not that of the ones on the internet community or any stupid bloggers. It's the ones in the real world that have the same financial interests or jobs etc.. (refer to my earlier post)

Personally I don't like experts. I am a Cartesian and like to doubt even of my own thinking.

~S!

Wow - interesting thread.

The black box data has been released and won't change, unless it is determined to be faulty (not likely).

Soooooo

My gut reaction (as a private pilot and airbus mechanic) is that the bad airspeed indication gave them the impression that the ENTIRE pitot/static system (or just the static) was unreliable (airspeed, altitude, rate of climb) but only the pitot system (airspeed) was. They may have remembered the 757 in South America that went down due to blocked static ports. This would explain why they didn't seem to react too adversely to the dropping altitude (125mph straight down, 107mph forward, with the nose up more than 15 degrees). But then, why react (either way, let alone backwards) to the stall warning?

The AoA and ball (attitude indicator) should have been used to keep nose pointed at the horizon at a reasonable speed while they pursued the pitot/static problem. My instrument instructor back in the '70s hammered home a fundamental instrument scan along with instrument cross checking - he was always throwing instrument failure(s) at me as well as discussing how to determine different failures (he was very old school). It just seems like if they had refly and a moment they would have easily gotten it right the second time.

For anyone who is nervous about Airbus fly-by-wire ... the 787 will be be a real eye-opener.

PS. these planes are hit ALL THE TIME by lightning - I helped work 28 individual lightning strikes on a 320 a while back, and we had another one with over 100. (Once we had a 757 lose a radome in flight due to lightning.)