I saw a documentary on channel 4 which included the cock pit voice recorder and the official report ,all I said above is true not some crap off the Internet
It's really sad in cases like this that it very often gets pinned on the chest of the pilot when the reality is very often different. The keg worth crash was blamed on the pilot for turning off the wrong engine for example... We test and validate aircraft parts, engines, wing and fuselage, landing gear etc. not the whole structures (yet) but representative pieces. We also test parts which have been in service, and those which have failed in service. We're bound by NDA's that we're forbidden to speak about specific details. We would help a company, for example, determine why a certain part has failed through conducting metallurgical failure investigations. We'll then help them reach a conclusion, such as a redesign of a part or selection of a more suitable material. Incidents such as this also lead to companies like mine being 'investigated'. If aircrash investigators suspect a certain part has failed in service they trace its history and everything about it, right back as far as the raw materials which were dug up out of the ground! Every company and every individual who has touched the part is recorded and is traceable. So all if the processes it's gone through, calibration details, temperature logs, literally every minute detail is kept. For aircraft it's now life of aircraft + 30 years. We keep all of our physical hard copies in secure storage and then everything is now stored electronically. I must have personally validated 10's of thousands of engine disc and turbine components when I was actually testing myself so its scary stuff. You've seen what I do to engines
He's right, y'know. Two relatively inexperienced pilots in charge, one of whom had his sidestick pulled right back all the time, unknown to the other pilot. Kept it pulled back even though the stall warning had gone off countless times. Ironically, it's probably only because of the flight management systems that the thing stayed in the air as long as it did. A situation that was easily recoverable after the pitot tubes iced up. Clearly, pilot error. Thankfully, Boeing still use mechanically-linked yokes, so any such craziness is easily detected.
I have the full report at work. It's too big to display on here; A major new finding in the final report concerned the flight director, which normally displays symbology on the pilots’ primary flying displays that give guidance on control inputs to reach a desired steady-state flightpath. After the autopilot and autothrottle disengaged, as the flight control law switched from normal to alternate, the flight director’s crossbars disappeared. But they then reappeared several times. Every time they were visible, they prompted pitch-up inputs by the PF, investigators determined. It took them a long time to “rebuild” what the flight director displayed since this is not part of the data recorded by the flight data recorder. The BEA acknowledged that the PF might have followed flight director indications. This was not the right thing to do in a stall but it seems that the crew never realized that the aircraft was in a stall. Moreover, the successive disappearance and reappearance of the crossbars reinforced this false impression, the investigators suggested. For the crew, this could have suggested their information was valid. None of the pilots recognized that the flight director was changing from one mode to another because they were just too busy. The PF may have trusted the flight director so much that he was verbally agreeing to the other pilot’s pitch-down instructions, while still actually pitching up. The BEA’s report includes significant recommendations about the flight director. One of them calls for European Aviation Safety Agency to review its “display logic.” The flight director should disappear or present “appropriate orders” in a stall. The investigators made it clear that from the start the crew should have followed a procedure called “unreliable indicated airspeed,” which involves disconnecting the flight director. They also concluded that the still-connected flight director behaved in a way that is not specific to the A330. However, Leopold Sartorius, head of the investigation’s avionics systems working group, said he did not conduct an exhaustive study on other airliners to determine whether the flight director would have behaved in the same way. The BEA investigation has explained why the PF pulled his stick after the autopilot disengaged. But he also pulled the stick back at the beginning of the fatal sequence. This was probably to correct what was later determined to be an altimeter error. The only remaining question concerns the period between autopilot disengagement and the first stall warning. During these five seconds, the PF kept giving nose-up inputs to the controls, but the BEA can’t say why. The crew (or part of it) trusted the flight director but seemed to ignore the stall alarm even though it sounded more than 70 times. While this fact amazed many industry experts when it was revealed a year ago, the BEA has found possible explanations. First, the crew was not familiar with this audio alarm, due to a lack of training. More generally, the BEA refers to shortcomings in their “knowledge of the aircraft and its protection modes.” A review of pilot training “did not provide convincing evidence that the associated skills had been correctly developed and maintained.” Also, the crew may have thought the buffeting, aerodynamic noise and even an acceleration cue on the primary flight display were symptoms of excessive speed. The aircraft, in fact, was in completely the opposite situation in that it was flying far too slowly. Another reason for having ignored the stall alarm could have been a matter of sheer perception, Troadec said. “Audio alarms are no longer heard in some situations,” he admitted. This has prompted the BEA to recommend the addition of a visual stall warning. Among the new recommendations are some relatively surprising ones, about problems with the safety oversight of Air France. The BEA refers to failures in inspections conducted by the French civil aviation authority (DGAC), which it said, “did not bring to light the fragile nature of the crew resource management.” Nor did DGAC officials identify the weaknesses of the two copilots in manual airplane handling. BEA concluded that the DGAC needs to be reorganized to make its safety oversight function more effective. Another recommendation is that there needs to be better recruitment and training of safety inspectors. Troadec labeled the crew’s work during the fatal few minutes as “destructured.” One difficulty was the lack of a clear display of the airspeed inconsistencies even though the computers identified them. Some systems generated failure messages only about the consequences but never mentioned the origin of the problem. This prompted a recommendation that a blocked pitot tube should be clearly indicated to the crew on the flight displays. Investigators determined that the A330 pilots being startled by the chain of events played a major role in the destabilization of the flight path and the BEA report recommended more training for dealing with unexpected situations. Ultimately, safety comes from both the pilots’ cognitive abilities and the signals they receive, Troadec concluded.
We didn't do anything for Airbus or Rolls Royce, it was another manufacturer who we was contracted to Our Richard was Navving a Nimrod at 36000 ft and they suffered a computer fire close to his Navigators station, the fire alarms went off to which a voice from the rear of the plane shouts "I've got 4" of fuel round my feet, do you want a bucketful". He did say the crew was quite shook up from the little event! Didn't it take a couple of years to find the black boxes?
Following on from what Niall said about their Labs, ours doesn't go into as much depth into investigations as theirs, we do the mechanical testing side of things and not metallography, we leave this to others who are better equipped. We tend to test samples extracted from landing gear components, wing skin and wing spar components - either from pre manufactured forged billets or test pieces extracted from stressed areas of the actual component. The biggest component we was asked to test was a 700 tonne oil rig anchor weight, it's associated clevis pin and the anchoring ropes. It was sat on Dundee docks, nobody knew what to do with it!
Michael Crichton wrote a book called Airframe that had a lot of the technical stuff in laymans terms....a good read as all his stuff was. Don't confuse it with Tom Clancy's 1994 book Debt Of Honour, that one seems to have given people bad ideas...
Sounds like we do it all wrong Mark, perhaps we should be testing 'novice' pilots. Sad that it gets incorrectly blamed on the crew in the media and online when that WASN'T the finding of the reports authors. The aircraft software, failed pitot tube, poor training and poor over sight from the regulatory body in charge of airworthiness in France were the actual findings. The pilots lost their lives too... Yet C4 or whoever can do their sensationalised 'Seconds From Disaster' or whatever and suddenly its fact.
They were talking about the AirFrance crash on the radio earlier. They gave up looking after 2 years, then in year 3 handed all the search data to mathematicians, who produced probability mapping based on past searches, trajectory, last known position and other variables. They handed the map to the search organisers, they obviously started searching the high probability areas and found the wreckage in 2 weeks. The guy admitted that if the search hadn't lasted 2 years the his map would have included a lot more proposed search areas. All this because some locating beacons/transponders in the black box failed to work.
I didn't know that - its mighty impressive, those mathematicians are very clever guys, hats off to them for knowing how to tackle the problem!
Should the pitot tube issue have been terminal to the plane or could it have been overcome by a different crew on a different day?
Remember the computer stall alert giving up after Over 100 repetitions as it had gone into unknown parameters ,ie point the nose down ....
I've been interested in this as part of my job is linked with the cospas-sarsat satellite emergency beacon locating system. As far as I can tell these are all the facts we know: -The aircraft was outside normal ATC ground radar range -The aircraft did have an ACARS satellite reporting system fitted which was transmitting nominal telemetry via satellite up till the point of disappearance -The aircraft most probably was fitted with an ELT emergency beacon which would have started transmitting it's GPS location via satellite but only on contact with water or manual activation -The aircraft most probably was fitted with an older style ELT which activates under high g-force but is not very reliable and does not include GPS location. The mysterious part is the ACARS. It was transmitting nominal data once per minute until it went silent. If the aircraft was in trouble for example multiple engine failure, several minutes of decreasing altitude would most likely have been reported until it made impact with land/water. The fact it stopped completely within the space of a minute gives three possibilities: 1) Someone deliberately switched it off 2) There was a catastrophic mid air power failure 3) There was a catastrophic mid air destruction of the plane Even in the event of 2 or 3 a plane cannot vaporise or vanish, so it should be expected they find something.... in the case of 1, if the plane was hijacked or so forth it could have successfully ditched hundreds of miles out to sea I suppose, but otherwise I assume would have been picked up by ground radar so seems less likely. My thoughts go out to those poor souls that were on the plane. Bless them.
What if the plane was abducted by a UFO..lots of people claim to have been abducted..Im very sceptical on that..but what if?
Pretty certain turning off a transponder does not make a plane invisible to radar. And the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea would be monitored by the military. Air France plane did leave some surface debris but not very much.
I worked on the transistor arrays for hi emission low energy emergency beacons using Galium Arsnide in the early 90's...unsure if they made it outside of military aps. Am guessing the switch rates they developed with silicon means they don't use it now?!
I would imagine high resolution satellite imagery (military and civilian ) is being analysed, but as for other tracking, it is unlikely the US military has the means or the inclination to do it.
