Warbird Information Exchange

French officials have located the FDR from Air France flight 447 in nearly 13,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean after two years. Officials hope the information is recoverable after so much time @ such an extreme depth and pressures.
Hopefully the information, coupled with the satellite info transmitted from the aircraft up until it's loss can answer what happened to the A 330.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

They flew into a build-up and blew the vertical off?
Chris...

Suspected iced up pitot heads, loss of information, exceeded mach or stalled, loss of control, disorientation in very heavy weather in the middle of the night, pitchdown and breakup is the possible scenario based on data transmitted by the on board satellite link information. Now the trick is to keep EADS from wiping the info (or swapping boxes) as they are suspected of doing after the Air Inter A-320 trip to the trees several years ago while doing a low pass @ an air show in France.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

After the nonsense that was displayed at the Flight 800 investigation, I don't rule anything out.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

"Air France Flight 447’s flight recordings show the aircraft slowed to a stall after its speed sensors failed..."

".....as manufacturer Airbus presses for a quick resolution to the matter, apparently confident that no technical problems with the A330 caused the crash."


Airbus has been known to spin but this is fantastic. Having unreliable or non existent speed information at coffin corner altitude/speed is non pilot error.

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Cessna 195

And Renault builds world class luxury automobiles that rival Mercedes too-

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Even though it was started by an aircraft failure, the data of crews response to the stall is a but scary. Sounds a lot like the buffalo crash.



Air France 447 — How Did This Happen?


The pilots of Air France Flight 447 flew the aircraft into deep stall at 38,000 feet, never verbally acknowledged or corrected that condition, and the aircraft fell for more than three minutes at nearly 11,000 feet per minute into the Atlantic, killing all aboard, investigators said Friday. The jet maintained a nose up attitude -- along with an angle of attack greater than 35 degrees -- throughout a descent rate that translates to more than 122 miles per hour of vertical drop. "At no point" on the cockpit voice recorder "is the word stall ever mentioned," Chief Investigator Alain Bouillard said in an interview. The autopilot and auto-throttle disengaged and the pilots recognized failure of the Airbus A330's speed sensors. The pilots took manual control and the aircraft climbed. A stall warning sounded as the jet ascended rapidly from 35,000 to 37,500 feet and by 38,000 feet three stall warnings had activated. Less than two minutes after the autopilot disconnected, the aircraft was at approximately 35,000 feet, with full takeoff thrust selected; the angle of attack had exceeded 40 degrees and jet was falling at about -10,000 ft/min.

The captain was not present in the cockpit as the incident began. The flight deck crew was flying at night over the ocean near storms where they expected turbulence. What they faced was an aircraft that suddenly disengaged both the autopilot and auto-throttles, and cockpit displays that delivered mismatched and rapidly changing airspeed values that ranged from at least 275 to 60 knots. Within seconds, the non-flying pilot stated, "So we've lost the speeds." Then he said, "Alternate law." Those two words mean, among other things, that the aircraft's angle-of-attack protections have been shut down. Before the captain entered the cockpit, the pitch and angle of attack of Flight 447 had both reached 16 degrees as it was hand-flown. The horizontal stabilizer had passed from 3 to about 13 degrees nose-up. The throttles had been set at full takeoff thrust and the aircraft had stalled. It was less than two minutes since the autopilot had disengaged.

As the captain entered the cockpit, the aircraft's systems received airspeed values they deemed invalid, leading the airplane's systems to automatically shut off the stall warnings. The aircraft was still in full stall with the nose up, falling at -10,000 ft/min. Almost one minute into the stall, the pilots reduced engine thrust and temporarily made nose-down inputs that were not enough to break the stall. As the jet continued to fall, it rolled at times up to 40 degrees and turned more than 180 degrees to the right. Data shows that the pilot flying held the sidestick at the full left and nose-up stops for the entirety of one 30-second span, and that the airliner remained stalled until impact.

There were as many as three pilots in the cockpit through the majority of the descent. The pilot flying as the event unfolded was the least experienced of the crew, with 3,000 hours of flight time. He was right-seat at the time. The flight's captain had almost 11,000 hours of experience. He was not in the cockpit as the incident began. The cockpit crew attempted to call him to the flight deck several times during the first minute after the airspeed sensors failed. He joined them less than two minutes after the autopilot disconnected. A second pilot, flying left seat, was given the controls in the flight's final minute. Aside from that information, BEA, the investigating agency, did not publish any cockpit conversation that took place during the last minute of the flight.

The aircraft impacted the water at 16.2 degrees nose-up with a roll angle of 5.3 degrees to the left. The aircraft heading was 270 degrees (nearly opposite the planned route of flight) and the ground speed was 107 knots. The last recorded vertical speed was -10,912 ft/min.

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Cessna 195

There's very little real information in the 4 pages of the May briefing released by the BEA. There is still far too much information missing like what the PFD's were actually showing during the whole accident beyond the fact that the Angle of Attack is not shown on the panels (which would have been essential in this situation with the pitot tube problems to ensure proper aircraft controlability was maintained).

The biggest thing is that no decently trained crew would intentionally climb the aircraft at such a steep angle. So the question is now - why did they climb? Until this is answered, all of the assumptions (and I emphasize that for a reason) being made based on this short 4 page report hold no validity. The report is too sparse to know what really happened.

It's in there:



Unless the AOA sensors failed as well Angle Of Attack information is displayed right on the PFD as pitch info.

This report was the short version but it's enough info to be pretty damning to Airbus and the crew. Next safety study will include how the major airlines are trying to fix the pilot shortage
by using low time cruise pilots. At the controls of an A330 with 3000 hrs is a little low! Also I hear procedurally they have to be on autopilot at a few hundred and then off a few hundred just before landing. These guys never hand fly. Now they are at altitude, in storms with failures and have to fly.....

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Cessna 195

I totally agree with CAPFlyer. I've read the preliminary report by the BEA entirely and it does not have enough data to explain what really happened. Too much information is missing, and any assumption is premature IMHO.

It seems the report was released by the BEA only because they are under a whole lot of pressure from many parties (Airbus, victim's families, Air France, airliner pilot syndicate, media...). They previously had said they would not give a report so soon and it is regrettable that they have...

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Gaëtan Marie's Aviation Profiles
Website: http://www.gaetanmarie.com
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1) There is no mention of what was actually displayed on the PFD's beyond the references to airspeed mismatches. As such, we cannot assume they were getting pitch info that was accurate, we must wait for them to state that it was operating normally. Additionally AoA has absolutely no bearing on pitch. The artificial horizon is solely based on what the Laser-Ring Gyroscopes tell the display to show. The report specifically states that AoA information is purely from the FDR and is *NOT* available to the crew on the Air France A330's.

2) On your issue about safety of having a 3000 hour pilot flying an A330 - You can safely have a 1000 hour pilot at the controls if you train him properly. The issue isn't how many hours you have, it's how you've been trained. I really hate people throwing out these (honestly) arbitrary numbers as to what a "good" pilot should have in hours. There is definitely a basis for the entry level guys flying right seat to have a certain amount of basic experience, but the US airlines used to have a few crew members that they trained from no experience at all up into the right seat and they'd routinely make it with under 1000 hours and there was no appreciable degradation in safety since they were fully and properly trained on their aircraft and emergency situations prior to being certified to operate the aircraft. I can find instances all through the NTSB database of 10,000 hour pilots who didn't have enough experience in an aircraft type and crashed. Hours aren't everything.

3) You also in the same paragraph state that there needs to be an address to the shortage of pilots. This statement is in direct conflict with your opinion that you need more experience before operating a large aircraft. You can't get more pilots if you at the same time make it more expensive for them to be able to get to that point. There are only so many non-mainline pilot jobs out there and very few of them pay enough for a pilot to stay in forever. They need to be able to move up so they can not only pay off the $40,000+ they spent on training, but also be able to have a reasonable living standard. Forcing pilots to stay at $18,000/year jobs for another 3-4 years isn't going to get you more pilots, it's going to get you even fewer willing to take the beating.

If this was in fact all pilot error, I find it strange that three pilots of varying experience continued this error for over 30,000 feet of apparently somewhat stable descent under a recognized emergency situation over a period of minutes. It isn't like the plane just went out of control at the last moment, something caused the pilots to continue a course of action that either seemed quite logical at the time or their training told them to follow.

AOA has a lot of bearing on pitch and vice versa, and the aoa combined with airspeed controls the PLI (pitch limit indicator showing the pitch that will result in a stall). Pitch up and retard power as this crew did, and pitch/AOA increases to stall. They were deep stalled for 6 minutes! I suppose Im having issues conceptualizing the AOA VS Pitch as they were in straight and level flight and not an AOA driven accelerated stall. In this case critical pitch indications would not be the same as AOA but pitch stall angle would almost mirror AOA (-+chord) isnt that correct?




I agree with you on pilot shortage issues. I champion the fact that a properly trained low time pilot is better then a poorly trained high time pilot (My bad on assuming that most of his 3000 hours were as a cruise pilot, while that may actually be) However, in this instance it appears that we had a low time (for a heavy a330) cruise pilot that was not well trained and turned a standard emergency procedure into a major disaster. Colgan was at 2000 feet and had seconds to realize his error, this pilot had several minutes.

Procedure is the maintain pitch and thrust and he made a full nose up pitch to 10000fpm instantly with no thrust change. Cruise pilots are not allowed to be PF under FL200 and only are allowed to do takeoffs and landings in the sim, so it goes without saying that this person had zero recent hand flying experience. Additionally Airbus pilots are trained to realize that the plane is smarter then them and cant be stalled, and has almost no real control feel. They saw and called out "alternate law" meaning no or less stall protections but then held the stick back for several minutes while undoubtedly feeling the 10,000 fpm drop......any pilot on earth should, during a several minute period of straight stalling at least try to vigorously break the stall with full nose down and thrust. We train for it at the regional level. Private pilots do stalls under the hood as well.


The address to the pilot shortage is to make it a job that people want to do and can afford to live on. It currently takes a college degree and $60k+ in training to get a $20k a year job. If the job was attractive people would do it. Taking short cuts like becoming a cruise pilot instead of gaining experience and yes, years of 121 training and re-training......before touching a "heavy" aircraft seems to make a lot more sense. I'm not conflicting, I'm saying that people need to start at the ground level but still making a living wage and work their way up to heavy aircraft. There are waaaaay more jobs at 135 and regional 121 operations then the majors.

No one at the Indy 500 this year got their drivers license in a Formula One car nor do truck drivers get their permits in fully loaded 18 wheelers on Artic roads.

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Cessna 195

Weren't their two pilots at the controls? The co-pilot as well as the cruise pilot? Why blame this all on the cruise pilot?

Because they can't defend themselves any more.
I think the aircrafts computers can recognize who's got their clam clutchers on the controls by where the inputs are coming from.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-