Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.
And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.
I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.
Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.
Well they have to. Boeing showed what happens if they are not experts and they leave everything to the manufacturer. They'll just lie and scheme and even get away with it.
If the airline doesn't comply afterward, it would be on them.
But they didn't issue a recall, so they wouldn't have to pay for the fix, an over 200 people paid the price instead.
At least, that's how I read the blame distribution.
This premise implies that if you could prevent one plane crash for $10 trillion dollars then you should do it, but then ordinary people wouldn't be able to afford air travel. In reality they do have to consider the cost and then do the things that are justified based on the cost and the risk. Which means that high regulatory costs compromise safety because the more it costs to make a change that improves safety, the fewer of those changes can be implemented for an amount of money that can be justified by the risk.
Means nobody can fly. The FAA does understand this, but the mass media does not.
A 100% safe airplane won't move an inch, let alone fly at 30,000 feet.
Yes there were UX factors. Yes training could be better. Yes distractions happen
But if I'm going to blame the companies I'm going to blame them on putting someone inexperienced and probably who did not have the right mindset in navigating the profession. And meanwhile companies waste time in making automations on top of manual processes that make things even more complicated
Could you be more specific here? The article doesn't even say which problem Airbus are considered to be criminally liable for.
How do you get this "sense" of writing code and building systems by yourself if all you do is instruct some agent to do it? Are we all going to be like Bonin in the future where we just don't understand anything outside of the agent box?
This is both terrifying and sad.
The other piece of the picture is that pilots acknowledge that their skills are perishable, and they have to commit to ongoing training. This would be analogous to writing code by hand and getting a licensed engineer to sign off on your currency periodically even if you use LLMs for work.
I put it this way:
Commercial aviation pilots don’t really fly the plane as such. It’s more like a 1:1 real-time flight sim. They’re sort of up there having a LARP.
They’re flying in a similar sense that a DJ creates music.
Point being it reads like following the sensors but ignoring what you can actually feel is happening, which is back to fundamentals.
I don't think people are saying a Cessna translates to flying an Airbus, more that NOT knowing the basics or forgetting them translates to dangerous gaps when flying the Airbus.
However what I do think they should have realised is that whatever they were doing (pulling up) did not work and maybe they should stop for a moment and think about their assumptions. It's in fact hard to understand what situation the plane could be in for a hard constant pull up to be the right answer. The only thing I can think of is a loss of vertical stabiliser trim, a bit akin to what happened to that Alaska airlines crash off the coast of LA. Or a sudden extreme shift of cargo forward. But then that assumption could be checked.
But the mind can also get into a state of panic that makes such reasoning very difficult. That also is being trained for. But it is still very hard to overcome.
Setting a Cessna down on the runway is fairly strait forward. A jetliner, on the other hand, is quite complex to land.
An A320 might be flying 3 times faster but is generally flying between relatively flat, straight runaways several miles long with approaches typically flown on a stable instrument approach from several nautical miles away. It's control laws mean flying straight or maintaining a particular bank is as simple as letting go of the control stick. If anything the stick and rudder skills in normal circumstances are much less involved. Systems management, obviously the autopilot, but also environmental, hydraulic, navigation an the operational concerns are obviously vastly more complex.
Why? Not as a regular thing I hope, that's about 90m short of "tight".
If you're intent on proselytizing PNG at least get a PAC STOL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAC_P-750_XSTOL )
PAC STOL's were driven by demands for work horse grunt power at NZ / PNG altitudes. (eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks )
A Cessna an a big jet fly by the exact same principles and they stop flying due to the exact same principles as well
Sure the procedures and parameters and automations are different (as well as things like wing positioning, engine positioning, swept wings, number of engines, sure)
But you raise the nose of both of them enough they will both stall. If you lose speed they will both stall. They will behave similarly (or maybe weirdly) enough in curves.
And I think this is what was forgotten here. Having a fancy cockpit does not make it less than a dual-engine swept-wing fixed-wing aircraft. The principles are the same
A fair amount of effort goes into designing the cockpit so it feels to the pilot like a low and slow aircraft, but it is not the reality.
For example, jetliners are unstable and require a yaw damper.
We can argue semantics but the reason AF stalled is the same reason a Cessna would stall (too high of an AoA)
And fair enough the comparison with the Cessna might be bad, but compare it with a 737-200 or even an A300 and the comparison will be much closer even though the 737 doesn't have the fancy cockpit
> things like overspeeding it will cause it to go out of control.
Well that would be the case of the Cessna as well, if it has enough power
Jetliners do have the power to overspeed, and the efficient place to be in the flight envelope is quite near it. A Cessna cannot.
There's a rather small envelope a jetliner operates in at altitude. A Cessna is far more forgiving, though you can get into deep doo-doo with that if you try.
You are correct that stall recovery is the same for both airplanes.
Although I know a lot about airplanes as an engineer, I am not a pilot and have not had pilot training.
My dad would attack artillery (Korean War) by diving straight down on it. I'm pretty sure his jet was fitted with dive brakes.
And yes dive bombers sure featured dive brakes! I think they caused the typical sound the German Stuka was known for too.
It makes Air France look worse that all three pilots didn't react properly (or weren't trained or experienced), than just faulting Bonin. And at least two of them were sleep-deprived. But there were multiple systemic failures, not just the pilots.
Also unlike LLMs, traditional code generation techniques are deterministic.
So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.
Then it’s a good thing they didn’t. Both Airbus and Air France were found guilty, and poor pilot training was specifically called out as a reason why Air France was considered guilty. It’s in the article.
--dangerously-skip-reading-the-articleno wonder airbus was found guilty
Boeing, in similar situations "in the past" would just sound a "computer is giving the fuck up, fly this pig dog" bell and leave it to the pilots to figure it out.
As another computer person, I'd trust aviation more than any other field, especially when it doesn't involve the modern US. Computers can't be perfect, but they can be almost always good at integrating and helping humans that remain in control. Advocates against including any fly-by-wire or computerization in aircraft at all fail to consider all the accidents that said computerization has helped avoid. Putting a billion steam gauges and blinking lights in front of pilots and asking them to correlate and understand everything themselves is actually not simpler, easier or safer.
The most jaw dropping one is the stick input averaging.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/10w54e4/...
Older Boeing planes also have a mechanism to unlink the controls if too much opposite force is applied. The left yoke would control the left side of the plane, the right yoke would control the right side.
Interestingly, the dual-input rate is roughly the same on Airbus and Boeing planes: 0.44 per 1000 flights and 0.4 per 1000 flights, respectively: https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/F-GSQJ_finalreport_EN... pages 45 and 47.
Really seems to violate the "principle of least astonishment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-stick#Handling_of_dual_in....
Once there were multiple alarms that made no sense at all (petty early in the event), the pilots should have ignored them as per the checklist.
But the most damning thing is the one pilot pulling the stick back and holding it back for almost the entire event. There aren’t any flying conditions where that’s an appropriate input. Not to mention being told to give up control and ignoring that request.
I agree Airbus has some blame in terms of the computer system not adequately communicating when it drops out of normal mode.
It's the procedure for various GPWS cautions and warnings on Airbus planes, and can also be done in a windshear.
I read the Admiral Cloudberg article again and saw that it was procedure for other scenarios as well.
It seem like the normal mode (protected flight envelope) is just encouraging bad habits? “Just go full stick back and hold it, don’t worry the computer won’t let you stall the plane…most of the time”
Maybe, but at the same time it helps avoiding crashes like Sriwijaya 182 or Flydubai 981. Airbus has shown that planes with fly-by-wire and any kind of flight envelope protection (A320 and newer, A220, B777 and 787, etc.) experience less fatal accidents and less hull losses than planes with traditional controls (A300, A310, B737, etc.), even today: https://accidentstats.airbus.com/fatal-accidents/
Unfortunately, these safety improvements mean that we only hear about cases where automation fail to help, like in the case of AF447, but not cases where it prevented an accident.
AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.
> By now the airspeed indications had returned to normal, but the pilots had already set in motion a sequence of events which could not be undone.
That was before the prolonged stall warnings. But maybe this phrasing is just an embellishment?
But further down, the article is pretty clear that the training was inadequate for this type of unreliable airspeed indication:
> Although procedures for other phases of flight could be found in the manual, the training conditioned pilots to expect unreliable airspeed events during climb, to which they would respond with a steady nose-up pitch and high power setting that would ensure a shallow ascent. Such a response would be completely inappropriate in cruise.
At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.
> Only an extremely purposeful crew with a good comprehension of the situation could have carried out a manoeuvre that would have made it possible to perhaps recover control of the aeroplane. In fact, the crew had almost completely lost control of the situation.
I had no idea that things could go wrong so quickly, even at that altitude.
For this incident, they were flying at FL350 (35,000 feet) and had a service ceiling of FL370 at their current weight -- that's a difference of only 2,000 feet. Within 30 seconds of the autopilot disconnecting, Bonin put the aircraft into a 7,000 feet/minute climb! So that margin was eaten up very very quickly.
If you're interested in aircraft incidents and accidents I recommend Petter Hörnfeldt's excellent YouTube channel Mentour Pilot[1]. He goes into deep technical detail and has covered not just AF447 but many other incidents where the pilot lost situational awareness and put a perfectly working plane into the ground.
[0] https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/aerodynamics/coffin-...
Edit -- to wit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253931
Error is not binary, it's a statistic. Even perfectly trained pilots/programmers do make errors depending on the situation. What you should ask is what the error chance is, and if it acceptable.
As the accident report shows, the exact same pitot tube failure happened at least 15 times and recovered by the pilots. The 16th time, it killed more than two hundred people. Do you think a 1/16 chance of dying is appropriate in modern aviation safety?
Out of the X% times this error occurs, are you okay with 1/16% failure? Can you avoid the failure-mode?
What if mode 2 fails 2x of the time and it can't be averted by switching to the Y language.
Vs
Fraud for two crashes caused by knowingly having unsafe planes (and two whistleblowers conveniently die)
Investigators concluded the co-pilots did not have the training to deal with the situation
Blame.
"At 32 years old, Bonin was the least experienced pilot on the flight crew. When the aircraft's pitot tubes froze and iced over in a storm, the automated systems temporarily failed and disabled the autopilot. This forced the crew into manual flight. Because the Airbus A330 features independent, non-linked sidesticks, the other co-pilot in the cockpit, David Robert, could not physically feel that Bonin was holding his stick back. The aircraft's computer simply averaged their opposing inputs."
The experience of pilots has been dropping like a stone. This is hidden due to new technology, but when unusual situations arise many current pilots have no situational awareness.
--
"A vote to reduce the 1,500-hour rule for pilot training will mean blood on your hands when the inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew."
-- Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/airbus-agrees-pay-ov...
How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots? That's the blame component for AF.
Your response is very human, but also deeply irrational. In practical terms of safety it is irrelevant if the pilot is to blame or not or to what degree.
All we should want to do is analyze the reasons why the crash happened and adjust the aviation safety system such that it never happens again.
If pilot actions contributed, then we must ask why and how exactly, then fix those factors through better airplane design and pilot training.
Just blaming someone, then moving on may make you feel good inside, but does nothing to improve safety.
> This is flying 101.
>
> How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots?
Thoughts like these about three experienced professional pilots should make you do at least a double take. It is far more likely that you're dead wrong than that those pilots were so incompetent they didn't even know the basics.
At no point in time would the correct response to a stall warning be to pull the nose up. This is something taught well before you enter the cockpit of a commercial airliner. If you continue to pitch the nose up excessively, you will stall the aircraft. This is also something you learn on day 2 or 3 of flight school.
If the first officer had done literally nothing at all, 228 people would be alive.
I also fault Airbus’s philosophy on countermanding inputs, though that warning is unambiguous and the pilots should have communicated about that. But when the damn “un-stallable” aircraft is yelling at you for putting the nose down, while also yelling at you for opposing inputs, you can’t not fault the plane.
Too many years as Quality Assurance grinds into you that when engineers claim perfection, you start questioning their assumptions, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down shortly thereafter.
Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Bravado and macho mindset are explicitly frowned upon in aviation for a reason.
Reminds me of "aviation experts" claiming Sulley didn't have to ditch in the Hudson at all, since some pilots in the simulator were later able to turn around and land back at the airport.
Sure they were! I'd be able to do so too, and I'm no pilot — I'm safe in a simulator, I already know I'm going to have a double engine failure x seconds after takeoff, and I get to try to land an infinite amount of times until I get it right. Easy peasy.
Things look a bit different when it's your ass in the seat and you lose both engines on a random takeoff.
They also look different when you're subjected to massive G forces, your plane isn't listening to your inputs, the computer is shouting erratic warnings at you, you're rapidly losing altitude, and your training didn't cover this scenario.
What about the Boeing crashes?
But IIRC, it happened by night, over the ocean. If the instruments fail you, this is really hard to “perceive” your speed and orientation.
2) Flight recorders weren't recovered until 2011
3) Manslaughter charges initially recommended in 2011
4) Accident report released in 2012
5) A long time with a lot of lawyers arguing about whether or not the charges should be heard in court
6) Charges dropped in 2019
7) However, public prosecutor announced proceeding with prosecution in 2021
8) Trial began in 2022
9) Both Airbus and AF acquitted in 2023
10) Prosecutor lodges an appeal in 2023
11) Trial begins in appeals court in 2025
12) Appeals court finds both companies guilty in 2026
Basically - these are two huge companies in France, they have a _lot_ of well paid lawyers, and a lot of political heft, but then there was a large amount of public outrage - and so the debate about whether or not to actually prosecute the case continued 2012 through to 2021 - the prosecutor reopening the charges in 2021 was due to intense public pressure.
Cruically once it actually went to trial, it only took 4 years to reach a conclusion including with appeals, which is quicker than I'd expect - and something I noticed is that the appeals court was able to find them guilty, I'm not sure how it goes in other common law country judiciaries, but in my country, if this had gone to an appeals court, they don't have the power to find you guilty, but they could overturn the previous ruling, and direct the lower court to begin the trial again - so it would have been even slower.
I guess that's an aspect of civil law judicial systems that might be considered an advantage.
That seems a bit far fetched.
Or, you know, just hit someone with a car. Criminal charges are often not filed even if the driver is clearly at fault.
I agree airbus shares the blame but it's not the only one. The pilots should have realised the situation they were in, their training should have been better, there were a lot of factors.
Admiral cloudberg has a good deep dive on it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...