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French Accident Office To Issue Final Report On AF447 In July
By Robert Wall
Source: Aviation Daily

The French air accident investigation office, BEA, will issue the final report on the crash of Air France AF447 on July 5.

The report, to be released at BEA headquarters at Le Bourget outside Paris, comes three years after the Airbus A330 crashed June 1, 2009, on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 on board died.

The final report was delayed in large part by the long time it took to recover cockpit voice and flight data recorders after a painstaking, multi-phase search of the large, deep area in the Atlantic Ocean where the aircraft went down.

The A330 crashed after a prolonged stall from which flight crew failed to recover. One of the main areas of interest are why the pilots failed to recognize the stall condition or take the appropriate steps to recover the aircraft.

Preliminary reports said the incident began when the crew was confronted with conflicting speed information because of a brief period during which pitot tubes apparently were iced over, delivering inaccurate data to the flight controls, which caused the autopilot to disengage.

The accident has intensified focus on accidents involving loss of control.

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.asp ... 463098.xml

I predict:

Not the plane's fault. Pilot error.

Or is that " Erreurs de pilot"?

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I'm sure the final answer will be pilot error, but one has to wonder if this could have happened to any other manufacturer's airliner?

There have been a number of Airbus accidents and incidents that just don't seem to happen to other aircraft. I don't think the flight control system responds as intuitively as a McDonnell Douglas or Boeing aircraft from looking at many years worth of accident and incident reports.

You can train a pilot only to a certain extent. You can't undo human nature and/or simulate every possible combination of factors. When something unexpected happens, do the flight control laws help the pilot solve the problem or confound them? In this instance, there were multiple expereienced pilots in the cockpit that all seemed to be doing the wrong thing. How is that possible given the high level of training these pilots had?

Just my opinion of course...

I remember reading about the one linked below in an incident report at the time it happened:

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forum ... in/270251/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wp-Dbb2 ... r_embedded

While it's been tamed to some extent (remember early in the A-320 program where flushing all the lavs at once locked up the airplanes computers?), the computers on AIRBUS still are the final authority in a pi$$ing match with the carbon based units. Because they are programmed to be foolproof.................foolproof.....................foolproof whereas both MCD and Boeing designed their control systems to take in inputs from the silicone slabs as 'oh, by the way' and suggestive for corrections, but humans are the final determining factor.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9 ... crash.html

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