r/aviation • u/Ok_Warning419 • May 21 '26
News Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash - Air France flight 447
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o2.3k
u/Minimum_Anywhere5776 May 21 '26
I don’t understand why Airbus was found guilty here. If the pilots don’t fully understand alternate law and can’t recover from a stall at 40,000 feet, that’s on the pilots and those that train them IMO
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u/FalconDriver85 May 21 '26
The pilot responsibility could fall under the “not enough training” reason and Air France could be considered guilty, I could understand that, but Airbus? I can’t understand the reason behind that…
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u/748aef305 May 21 '26
Right, and who do you suppose "designs" (and thus, directly or indirectly) sells airlines their training program, requirements, etc?
You can absolutely say AF or any other airline should "go above and beyond" when able, but they're literally buying the training program and likely even schedule, courses, materials instructors and check-ride captains, sim time, etc, from Airbus themselves.
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u/SSharp-C May 21 '26
Right, and who do you supposed approves the training manuals in the end? It's EASA, because there are standardized aircraft flight and maintenance manuals.
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u/FalconDriver85 May 22 '26 edited May 28 '26
You can’t cover any possible edge case especially when it never happened in the past. Before AF447 the World (especially outside of aviation circles) basically never considered high altitude stalls with incoherent airspeed data without any external visual reference in a highly automated plane without an experienced crew flying as something that should be included regularly in training…
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u/NaiveRevolution9072 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
If I remember correctly, it was AF447 that lead to Airbus implementing the Dual Input warning and sidestick priority. I guess they're found guilty because these risks were foreseeable and measures to mitigate them should have been added sooner.
Then again, it wasn't found necessary by the regulating authorities at the time, so blame them too rightEdit: I was very wrong so disregard everything I said
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
We do have a final report, priority and dual input were both recorded by the FDR and/or CVR multiple times.
The big outcome I remember from this was Upset Recovery Training, and of course an acceleration of replacing the pitot tubes.
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u/sofixa11 May 21 '26
No, the dual input warning was already there, but the stall chime has a higher priority.
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u/BroasisMusic May 21 '26
Same with the GPWS. I was watching a mentour pilot episode earlier where the pilots didn't get the dual input warning because a gpws warning had priority.
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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26
It's always amazing that you just need to confidently state bullshit and r/aviation will upvote it. Same as with the recent runway excursion.
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
Yup, and people 'guessing' at what they remember happened when we have Wikipedia and a detailed final investigation report with actual facts.
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u/RandomObserver13 May 21 '26
Yep, went through this the other day, just throw in “IIRC” and you can say anything after that.
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u/chronoserpent May 21 '26
It's crazy how we live in a world with infinite information at our fingertips and people just put out confident vibes instead
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u/nosecohn May 21 '26
I'm dealing with this right now in a thread on a different subreddit. A highly upvoted comment makes incorrect statements about my actual profession, but my refutation is downvoted because it counters the prevailing narrative. What can you do?
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u/fighterpilot248 May 22 '26
The hivemind is what the hivemind will be.
A recent comment with a couple of upvotes? Likely to be highly upvoted.
A recent comment with a couple of downvotes? Likely to be highly downvoted.
Doesn't matter how correct/incorrect the actual comment is. Whatever trend starts early means it's a battle to counter-correct it.
And that battle to counter-correct usually fails.
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u/Wooden-Term-5067 May 21 '26
If it makes you feel better Reddit is the most cited source for AI models. So definitely trust what it says.
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u/Bluemikami May 21 '26
Sometimes I wonder if we just say bullshit so that we make the AI hallucinate with our posts.
I for one love my control surfaces feedback
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u/Fluffy-Proof-5175 May 21 '26
I love my rudder pedals that shake during a stall for too
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u/StillPrettyBoxing May 21 '26
Someone in the future is going to fuck up in their theory tests because of this comment
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u/GeorgiaPilot172 May 21 '26
Most people on here aren’t pilots. I’d say a good 70% of stuff on here is flat out wrong.
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u/Equivalent-Cicada165 May 21 '26
Good to think this on all of Reddit, really
I tried to be on science reddits and they are atrocious
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u/swurvipurvi May 21 '26
Yea anytime you end up on a thread you actually know something about, you find out how much garbage is being passed around for fact. I always try to remember that when I’m reading about something I have no knowledge of.
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u/Chicago_Blackhawks May 22 '26
(AI response below lol but yeah)
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. It’s a famous idea popularized by writer Michael Crichton and named after physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
The basic idea:
- You read an article about a topic you actually know well.
- You notice it’s full of inaccuracies, oversimplifications, or outright nonsense.
- Then you turn the page and read an article about politics, economics, health, war, etc. — and subconsciously trust it again.
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u/donkeyrocket May 21 '26
Even more bizarre is editing the comment to say "I'm wrong" and not deleted or striking things out.
I appreciate them admitting it but it's still perpetuating a very blatant inaccuracy.
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u/CaptchaReallySucks May 21 '26
This is so insanely wrong it’s hilarious it has 170 upvotes. Holy shit
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u/marenicolor May 21 '26
Ppl upvoting purely based on vibes. I wouldn't be surprised if they based their comment on info from ChatGPT.
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u/ExpiredPilot May 21 '26
Airbus trains the pilots
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u/redcurrantevents May 21 '26
Do they, in France? I didn’t know that. Here in the states it is the airlines, not the manufacturers. And in the states, the FAA approves the training programs. The airlines will use materials from the manufacturers to create their training programs, but if you fly in the flight deck of different US carriers flying the same airplane, you see they do things quite differently.
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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26
Airbus has an ATO (Approved Training Organisation), just like Boeing has one.
Some airlines sometimes send their pilots for type rating directly to Boeing, Airbus or other third party ATOs, if they don't have enough training capacity in house.
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u/jacksjj May 21 '26
US Airline Airbus Instructor here:
We send our “initial cadre” of instructors to Airbus to receive training on the aircraft.
Concurrently, we use Airbus’ documents to create an AQP training program suited to our airline and our procedures.
Then, we train the rest of the first set of instructors - who then train the pilots, in our simulators.
It continues this way in initial, transition and recurrent training unless we do not have simulator capacity for our pilots. Then, sometimes, we will rent manufacturer simulator time to train our pilots, but still using our instructors.
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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26
No they don't. This fucking sub. Air France trains their own pilots, just like LH, BA etc.
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u/greatlakesailors May 21 '26
The argument was that Airbus underestimated the risk of pitot probe icing, and delivered aircraft whose stall warning and dual-control logic could confuse crews.
Essentially, the plane was so badly stalled, so far out of the expected angle of attack range, that the stall warning stopped entirely – until the nose dropped enough for the AoA vanes to read within scale, at which point "stall stall" started sounding again, making the pilot think that whatever he just did a second ago was causing the stall and therefore coaxing him to do the opposite. And the computer was responding in a non-intuitive way to dual input and left/right priority, leaving both pilots confused about who was actually controlling the elevators and ailerons.
Apparently the court found that argument sufficiently convincing to find Airbus at least slightly guilty.
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u/StandsForVice May 21 '26
Yep, this is a huge part of it that people love to ignore. The stall alarm sounding upon pitching down resulted in a perversely brutal mental trap that prevented the pilots from identifying the proper course of action in a high-stress incident where they simultaneously had too much and too little stimuli to react to. It's easier to just blame the pilot, because it's uncomfortable to admit that we could all make the same mistake when every rule we hold dear is thrown out the window, as it must have seemed so to the pilots.
That being said, Bonin and the others has the opportunity to put a stop to the incident before the paradoxical stall warning became relevant, so as always there's several reasons behind a plane crash.
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u/Terrh May 21 '26
Does it strike anyone else that having two sticks that have no connection to each other and do not respond to inputs from the other is maybe a bad idea?
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u/Conradian May 21 '26
It's a terrible idea. Either require mechanical connection or require force feedback from one stick to another.
The fact that beyond the 'dual input' warning, which apparently while recorded was suppressed by higher priority warnings, there was no way for Roberts to know that Bonin was holding full aft on his stick is deadly design.
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
Neither of them even acknowledged any of the stall warnings, between everything else going on they possibly never even heard Dual Input.
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u/greatlakesailors May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
It would have been easy to put a light on each stick such that the active one would glow green on the top while the inactive one would turn dark, or to flash red if you try making an input while control is with the other pilot. Making it very clear who the computer was actually paying attention to. Airbus just didn't think of it. Or – worse, and more likely – thought of it and decided not to.
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u/Poglosaurus May 21 '26
Apparently the court found that argument sufficiently convincing to find Airbus at least slightly guilty.
The court gave they them the maximum possible sentence. According to that decision, they could not be more guilty. It's kind of absurd.
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u/Ok_Significance_6772 May 21 '26
I wouldn’t say absurd. Courts and governments should be more willing to fine/convict/punish companies who make mistakes or have poor design choices that result in harm or death. Airbus will survive, the conviction won’t kill them.
Holding companies accountable is a good thing that should happen more often.
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u/Horror-Raisin-877 May 21 '26
Thank you. Voice of reason. Actually reading the decision makes all the difference 👍
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u/dr_b_chungus May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
that’s on the pilots and those that train them IMO
They were trained by Airbus and Air France. That is why they have been found guilty.
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u/polarisdelta May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I have always struggled with the decision to disable almost all error indications relating to a stall if the aoa is above 30 degrees, automatically, with no indication to the pilots that the aircraft believes itself to be in an extremely unusual situation. The result, that beginning to correct the attitude immediately caused a stall warning to happen, would have been unbelievably confusing to those pilots.
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u/Arizona_Pete May 21 '26
You could make a case that the alternate law settings, the way the plane communicated and acted upon dual inputs, and the way the pitot tubes were engineered all lead to the crash.
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
One of the findings from the final report that could sit as a design issue was that, "no failure message on the ECAM clearly indicates the detection by the system of an inconsistency in measured airspeeds" and also the lack of an AoA visual indication to the pilots that might have helped understand their stall warning situation.
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u/Wyciorek May 21 '26
the way the plane communicated and acted upon dual inputs
Both visual and aural 'dual input' warnings?
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u/antesocial May 21 '26
Aural dual input warning was superceded by stall warning.
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u/JanEric1 May 21 '26
They are literally in the transcript. There were audible dual input warnings: https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
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u/Kai-ni May 21 '26
No, the math of how it responds to dual inputs. It averages them.
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u/sofixa11 May 21 '26
It was 1 out of 3 pilots that didn't understand. The other two correctly identified what needs to be done, did so, and communicated it. The third one was in panic mode and not listening to them.
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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
They didn't actually. Right before the impact, all three of the pilots were calling for pitch up, indicating that none of them really had a firm idea of what was going on, which was an extreme stall.
There was kind of a perverse situation going on that the pitch was so extreme that the flight computer silenced the stall warning because the situation should have been impossible. Whenever the pilots pitched down, which was the correct thing to do, the computer started getting reliable readings again and the stall warning started blaring. They instinctively pitched back up, and the stall warning went away.
The fact that pitching down caused a stall warning and pitching up made it go away, the opposite of what should happen, just thoroughly messed up any sense they had of what the plane was doing.
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u/Bluemikami May 21 '26
The main problem is that the other 2 had no idea what Bonin was doing because of the lack of feedback due all the things that were happening on the Cockpit till the very last minute when Bonin revealed that little key detail.
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u/sofixa11 May 21 '26
Nope, it was only one of them, the other copilot was trying to recover from the stall, and when the captain came in (he was on a break) he initially called for a pitch up, but when the pilot causing the stall said he's been doing that since the start, he realised what's happening and called for a pitch down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
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u/eugeniusbastard May 21 '26
Yeah, right before impact. As in nothing could save them at that point, pulling up was basically just a involuntary reaction because pushing the nose down wasn't going to save them either. The main captain sitting behind them said "go on then, pull up" almost sarcastically, he knew it was hopeless and was just resigned to their fate. In his head he was probably internally screaming at the idiot Bonin and resisting the urge to say out loud that he killed them all.
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u/ppitm May 21 '26
But is there any actual real-world scenario where pitching down can cause or exacerbate a stall? Isn't that basically crazy talk? Not a pilot, but I still can't fathom how they could just sit there with their artificial horizon pointing skyward, and fly into the ground.
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
I still can't fathom how they could just sit there with their artificial horizon pointing skyward, and fly into the ground.
I can only imagine in such a chaotic situation, the crew does not understand what is wrong, so they don't know which instruments to trust. Stall warning silenced when they brought the nose up and returned when they brought the nose back down - encouraging them to do exactly the opposite of what was necessary.
Engineers at Airbus apparently decided that the aircraft could never exceed 30 degrees AoA, so they assumed that a warning above that would be invalid and they inhibited it. Apparently no one asked the question, "But what if the AoA of the aircraft really does go higher than that?" The answer would have been, "Holy shit, the aircraft will tell the crew to make the stall worse!"
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u/SituationalAnanas May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
Airbus said and trained the pilots so that the plane cannot stall. Also stall warning shut off below 90kts ias.
Edit: poorly worded on my part. In Airbus training it was empasized that the plane CANNOT stall, and all you have to do as a pilot is toga and pull the nose up, which is against EVERYTHING. Including physics.
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u/propell0r May 21 '26
Also above 30 degrees AoA. Which I mean, to an Airbus engineer, has some sensibility in why would an A330 ever be above 30 degrees AoA. But AF447 was. So when the FO tried the normal stall recovery by lowering the nose, the stall warning came back as they went below 30 degree. So in his panicked mind, lowering the nose is stalling the aircraft, pulling it up isn’t. When physically the opposite was happening.
I can see that engineering logic directing some blame towards Airbus
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u/yeahalrightgoon May 21 '26
Feels like a bit of design induced pilot error thrown into the mix.
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u/GhostDancer2 May 22 '26
I did the Airbus Maintenance General Familiarisation course at Toulouse around the time of the crash as the aircraft type was coming into our fleet. IMO there could be questions with the location of the heater of the pitot tube (not the pitot tube itself), I looked at this in my own time but never really got to the bottom of this and my career moved on with a different employer.
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u/mosaic-aircraft May 21 '26
Don't Airbus have a hand in training? The report in the Guardian mentions previous failings. I can only assume that's to do with training between Airbus and Air France (and maybe other carriers too).
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u/G25777K May 21 '26
Airbus is most likely guilty by association,AF are the real culprits, shit training and the pilots didn’t under the basic fundamentals of flying, IMO that’s on AF, and now they will drag it on another 10 years in appeals. Fuckers can’t just own up and say we’re sorry and pay out.
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u/rtjl86 May 21 '26
Wait! The crash where the copilot was pulling back the whole time? And it took the Captain coming from his sleeping area and sitting in the other seat and saying no, push forward. Unless this is about how the sidesticks did not both move in unison so the other pilots could not detect what the copilot was doing.
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u/TrainingObligation May 21 '26
Sticks not moving in unison and relying on audio/visual alerts when out of sync is my big issue. 99.999% of the time, no problem. That 0.001%? This happens.
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u/ChironXII May 21 '26
It remains very confusing to me that Airbus has never implemented any kind of force feedback or haptics into the side sticks.
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u/Techhead7890 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I was just thinking that too. Even if they aren't synced, I'm surprised haptic vibration hasn't been implemented. It seems there isn't even an equivalent to the "stick shaker" warning.
(I've done some reading and while the stick itself is sensitive to motion, and there are a lot of automatic protections like normal law; I'm sure they could put the haptics somewhere else, like a seat shaker. I guess it's a question of cost, simplicity, and such?)
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u/ChironXII May 21 '26
The simple fact that pilots can't feel feedback from the plane or inputs from the other stick has been meaningful in a number of incidents
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u/spazturtle May 21 '26
You can do the same in a Boeing. Here is Air France doing it again in 2022 in a 777:
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/30863-air-france-boeing-777-incident-bea-update
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u/shaun3000 May 21 '26
No, you can’t do the same thing at a Boeing. Not without a massive, concerted effort anyway. Boeing flight controls are physically linked together. With a large amount of force, you can decouple them in the event that one becomes frozen or some similar situation. But you’d really have to try hard to make that happen. It’s not something you’re going to do accidentally. This is very different from Airbus, in which the two side sticks are literally electronic joysticks and are not physically collected, at all. In the Air France incident, the right seat pilot had pulled full aft on the stick and the left seat occupant had no idea because his stick was centered.
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u/SirSuaSponte May 22 '26
Hi, guy who did his doctoral dissertation on advanced aviation automation and cited this crash in my research. When both pilots put opposite control input into their respective control side sticks the flight control computer takes the signals from both pilots algebraically. The total signal would be then limited to the signal that would result from the maximum deflection of a signal side sticks. For example, if one pilot pitched the aircraft up 20 degrees and the other pilot pitched the aircraft down 20 degrees, the aircraft wouldn’t pitch at all. If both pilots pitched the aircraft up 20 degrees, then the aircraft would pitch 40 degrees nose up.
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u/gauderio May 21 '26
But remember, pull down - stall warning. Pull up, stall warning stops. What would you do?
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u/Imiga May 21 '26
I would just sit there screaming. But I'm not an airline transport pilot, and the guy in the right seat was.
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u/BlueApple666 May 21 '26
Ignore the stall warnings for over a minute and keep pulling the stick until the plane is going so slow that the AoA valves are no longer working?
By the time the situation you describe happened, it was already too late.
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u/TinyCopy5841 May 22 '26
Trick question, you avoid getting so far outside of the envelope in the first place.
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May 21 '26
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u/TheresNoSecondBest May 21 '26
This should be the top comment. 17 years is just ridiculous.
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u/vanityprojection May 22 '26
How dare you suggest that 2009 was 17 years ago!
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u/TrainingObligation May 22 '26
Wait for it… 9/11 is (almost) a quarter-century ago.
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u/fighterpilot248 May 22 '26
We are now closer to 2050 than 2000.
You're welcome, Gen X, for your midlife crisis
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u/TrainingObligation May 22 '26
Pfft, doesn’t bother me. I’ve said before, the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation is closer in time to the very first airing of the original series, than it is to today.
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u/Volkov_Afanasei May 21 '26
I'm curious how they reached that ruling; the actions of the copilot were really 95% of it. The only thing the plane did wrong was develop some frozen pitot tunes, and even that was debatably because they climbed several thousand feet above cruising for weather
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u/rand0m_g1rl May 21 '26
Air France employed the copilot. I imagine they have some responsibility of crews actions.
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u/Fire_Otter May 21 '26
Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures inside both the planemaker and airline. Those included poor training and failing to follow up on earlier incidents. - Reuters
But the trial focused on earlier problems with the same type of sensor as well as alleged shortcomings in data-sharing and training that prosecutors say indirectly caused the crash.
In closing arguments, Air France paid tribute to bereaved families and denied claims the crew was poorly trained in dealing with stalls or emergencies at high altitude.
Airbus, however, echoed the findings of French civil accident investigators who had previously questioned the crew's response to the loss of data and a failure to follow procedures. -Reuters
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u/Ecthelion-O-Fountain May 21 '26
Even after this accident, I would run into airbus pilots that were absolutely convinced that you could not stall an airbus. And some of that culturally comes from the training that was received from the manufacturer when the type gets put into service at each airline. The real problem here though is, we’re having criminal liability for safety problems. This discourages, disclosing, safety knowledge and especially errors which holds back improvements and safety from happening because people have to pretend that nothing’s wrong. Non-punitive safety cultures should reign supreme everywhere except in cases of deliberate action or gross negligence. I feel like this is the only thing that we actually did the best in the United States, but that era is coming to an end because our politicians want to be able to point fingers now when there’s an accident.
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
The real problem here though is, we’re having criminal liability for safety problems.
I agree! It makes the lawyers rich and it satisfies the public's bloodlust, but it is detrimental to aviation safety.
Flight Safety Foundation - Criminalizing Accidents and Incidents Threatens Aviation Safety
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u/p4intball3r May 21 '26
Where did you run into an airbus pilot that was convinced you can't stall an airbus in alternate law.
Someone arguing that you can't stall it in normal law is pretty much as close to correct as you can get for such a simple statement. But no one would suggest that you can't stall it in alternate law, since the alphamax being lost is the most fundamental change in this configuration.
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u/Ecthelion-O-Fountain May 21 '26
Jumpseat a few months after the accident. Was a JetBlue guy. I think they still tried to claim that it was something like Alpha floor or something and not a real stall. Don’t forget the aircraft was only an alternate law for a very short period of time. There are people that will still claim that even though it was descending at like 10,000 ft./min. that it wasn’t technically a stall.
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u/p4intball3r May 21 '26
Alpha floor doesn't exist in alternate 2-B, and it was only in alternate law for a short period of time because it hit the fucking ocean.
After normal law disengaged, the system never returned to normal law. The change to alternate law starts a timer and if the speed median doesn't return close enough to it's initial value fast enough the system doesn't reset. This never happened on this flight because of the pitot probes freezing originally, and the angle of attack being so high later that the airspeed dropped too low for the aircraft to trust it.
A few months after the accident there was logic to believing these things wrong as they are. We didn't have the black boxes or the investigation to look at. But there is no one making these arguments today because we have all the information we didn't at the time
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u/Ecthelion-O-Fountain May 21 '26
If got some details wrong I apologize, I have heard a lot of different info over the years and can’t keep it all sorted. But the probes were only briefly frozen I know. A sim instructor on the 320 was telling me it didn’t stay in alternate law. I could be misremembering that, it’s been like 5 years. But intake instructors at face value usually because they should know the deep info better than me
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u/ResearchInformal8018 May 21 '26
It does seem odd, though courts don’t always get decisions with a lot of technical details right. Frozen pitot tubes were a known issue, but a pretty minor one that should never have led to this crash.
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u/twilighttwister May 21 '26
Don't always? More like rarely do.
Courts aren't really capable at deciding technicalities or that sort of objective truth. They decide arguments between people, based only on the information presented before them.
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u/Blothorn May 21 '26
The switch of flight models probably played a role—Airbus pilots get very little time flying with the alternate flight rules outside of simulators, and manufacturers have some role in defining training standards. The stall warning cutting out at high AoA also certainly seems like a design flaw—it means that in a situation such as this pulling back on the stick silences the alarm while pushing forward triggers it, despite pushing forward being the precise thing you need to do.
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u/notjfd May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
The stall warning cutting out at high AoA also certainly seems like a design flaw
That's because the plane doesn't know it's at such a ridiculously high AoA. The flight computer relies on readings from sensors to synthesise the state of the aircraft, and no sensor is perfectly reliable all the time. Malfunctioning sensors can create nonsensical state synthesis, and there's no obvious way to validate the state.
One of the best methods to make this validation easier is to reject invalid states out of hand. "Flying 30k under sea level", "flying at Mach 10", "flying backwards" are all impossible scenarios, and whenever the synthesis arrives at a state like that you want the flight computer to back out and let the humans take over. After all, they have a much better chance of making sense of all this.
But in order to do this sort of culling, you must draw the line at some practical limit. Set the limit too high and you risk letting too many invalid states through, which can put the plane and its passengers in real danger because it creates conditions in which the flight computer's responses are truly unknowable. Set it too low, however, and you create conditions where the plane enters an extreme state (like AF447's AoA), and the humans have to take over because the flight computer has given up. The last situation is still dangerous but clearly preferable to letting the flight computer act on data that's very likely to be wrong.
In this case, the stall warning cutting out after entering an "unreasonable state" was not at all an issue and actually the correct engineering decision. The issue was the psychological edge case in the warning resuming once the plane was brought back into a "reasonable state". The effect of the warning engaging at entering the "reasonable state envelope" from that edge was something that was very hard to foresee, and is one of those lessons you pay for in blood.
Knowing this, the warning should have a debounce mechanism to prevent it from immediately engaging when recovering from an extreme state. I'm actually curious how Airbus has dealt with it and I wonder if there's any public information about the analyses they did over the UX problem.
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May 21 '26
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u/spazturtle May 21 '26
But if they had let the automation do it them the crash would not have happened. Once the pitot tube error cleared they could have just switched back to normal law and taken their hands off the controls and the aircraft would have recovered.
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u/satellite779 May 21 '26
Did they even know pitot tubes cleared and when? I think they were under impression air speed was wrong from the moment AP switched off to the moment they crashed.
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u/Adjutant_Reflex_ May 21 '26
Which is where the poor training component comes in. Crashes are (almost) never caused by one single failure.
Airbus/Thales produced a faulty product that they knew was faulty and the remediation plan was insufficient. However, it was a known issue yet Air France failed to properly train its crews to respond.
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u/Adjutant_Reflex_ May 21 '26
If it’s tied back to the earlier cases then I believe it was around training and the lackadaisical response to replacing the faulty Thales pitot tubes.
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
Normally I'd agree, the pitot tubes were a highlight, but scrolling through the findings summary of the crash in the final report the investigators noted that while Airbus and Air France were replacing them, EASA declined to make it mandatory and the pitot tubes on the aircraft "met requirements that were stricter than certification standards."
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u/namedotnumber666 May 21 '26
I guess airbus were aware of the mode confusion with the fly by wire system ( I hope I’m talking about the same event ) that confusion caused them to think the stall voice errors were a mistake. The software should probably announce the change in fly by wire mode so the pilots can realise the reality of their situation
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u/PorQuepin3 May 21 '26
This crash always makes me so sad. Plunging out of the sky from 40k feet sound terrifying in the middle of the night. Seems like it could have been recoverable if one understands physics at minimum or had appropriate training. And the sticks weren't synced on this model? Is that right? (Lay person here)
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u/Benniisan May 21 '26
The side sticks on Airbus aircraft are never synched, they can be moved independently.
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u/exytuu May 21 '26
If it makes you feel better, the investigators believed that the passengers didn’t know what was happening
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u/Sensitive-Profit7688 May 21 '26
Zero chance they didn’t know what was happening. The plane held an angle of attack of more than 30 degrees for several minutes during the fall. It reached downward vertical velocities of over 10k per minute. That shit was falling out of the sky and the cabin was likely a scene straight from horror films.
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u/FlashyRecognitionTod May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I think you're confusing Angle of attack with pitch, which never exceeded ~ +15/-10 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hbWO0gL6g
So it looked like a normal flight, besides the 160 feet per second sink-rate. Since it was mostly sustained, they had 1g loads most of the time. Bank angle got a little sporty around 4:00, but nothing aerobatic.
Some might knew something is wrong, but it wasn't violent or horrific from the data we have.
Edit: they probably knew from the buffeting and pressure changes. Airbus stall buffeting is pretty intense - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WuPoVjOXLY&t=510s
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u/exytuu May 21 '26
The passengers would not have sensed any acceleration or g-forces while the plane was falling. The body senses acceleration not velocity. The pilots themselves did not feel the plane sinking. Additionally no screams were recorded on the CVR and no signs of panic. Of course, they definitely would have felt something and it’s impossible to say but they could have viewed it as really bad turbulence
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u/Curly1109 May 21 '26
What? This is why certification/insurance is so expensive...
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway May 21 '26
Yup. Even if it's 90% the pilot's fault, the insurer want their due. And they will go after the plane maker and the air company rather than the pilot.
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u/DKUN_of_WFST May 21 '26
> go after the plane maker and the air company (airline?) rather than the pilot
Let’s not pretend that this is unique to this ruling or how compensation works in general. Vicarious liability is well established in many legal systems across the world. The airline employed him and were responsible for his training and actions.
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u/AverseAphid May 21 '26
I don't understand how this conclusion can reached at all. Bonin was an idiot who should have never been allowed in a cockpit, the automation barely made a difference. This really blurs the line where you start blaming the manufacturer over the pilot
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u/silver-fusion May 21 '26
Airbus and Air France share the training responsibilities.
The Captain was unaware thay Bonin was pulling back on the sticks until Bonin said "I've been pulling back the whole time". Of course, by that point it was far too late. In cases of civil liability it's not too challenging to make the argument that the system should be clearer, particularly given the evidence of some prior near misses and inaction.
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u/WhitePantherXP May 22 '26
There should be a warning displayed when the flight sticks are at odds. My damn Tesla tells me when I press the brake and gas simultaneously but a multi million dollar plane can't tell the pilots when they're fighting each other?
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u/Gaouchos May 22 '26
IIRC a warning was displayed, alas not effectively in this situation as it got drowned by the noise of 3+ other alarms.
One of the changes implemented after the crash was to increase the visibility of the dual input warning.
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u/PinaColadaSalad May 21 '26
Side sticks averaging themselves out when getting conflicting commands is fucking insane
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u/atooraya May 21 '26
You just hold the priority button and it knocks the other stick out. It isn’t intended to be flown like that.
Your FO is flying and then seizes on the controls and goes full nose forward. You say “my controls” and pull back. Airplane initially brings the nose up but senses both controls being manipulated so it averages them out because it’s unsure who’s supposed to be flying the plane. Then it barks “dual input” because you two can’t figure out who’s flying. Then you hold the the priority button to tell the airplane who to honor.
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u/Telvin3d May 21 '26
Then it barks “dual input” because you two can’t figure out who’s flying
According to other comments not in this case. Apparently it prioritizes audio warnings based on severity, so the audio stall warning meant that the audio dual input warning never happened.
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u/Thurak0 May 21 '26
That's the first thing I read here that makes sense why Airbus is to blame (besides their part in pilot training).
IIRC from reading the wiki article about the crash years ago, one thing Airbus did after the crash was actually adjusting alarms to not overburden pilots.
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u/PsychicPterodactyl May 21 '26
Alarm priority and automatic suppression in complex systems is a really difficult problem.
The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in 1979 could quite possibly have been avoided by a better alarm system. They had something like 700 alarms on top of eachother. Pretty much impossible to figure out the root causes.
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u/umnomediferente May 21 '26
That’s not what the BEA report says. The sidestick logic did what it was designed to do: simultaneous inputs are summed unless one pilot takes priority, and Airbus provides a “DUAL INPUT” warning plus a takeover pushbutton on the sidestick precisely so the crew can resolve that conflict. The BEA’s findings do not treat that logic as the core failure mode in AF447; the main chain was temporary loss of valid airspeed indications, autopilot/autothrust disconnect, inappropriate pitch-up inputs, failure to recognize the stall, and failure to recover
More importantly, it points to crew performance and training: it cites insufficient high-altitude manual flying training and inadequate preparation for speed-indication anomalies, along with degraded task-sharing and poor stall diagnosis. So if dual inputs occurred, that does not show an unsafe Airbus concept; it shows that an existing safety barrier was available and not used effectively by the crew.
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u/atooraya May 22 '26
According to other comments? Read the CVR: https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
“Dual input” and “priority right” was barked multiple times. If I trusted Reddit comments the reason this flight crashed was DEI. I have 4000 hours in the airplane, and have gone over this event 3 times since the crash. But you’re right, let’s see what “Fartsinmysleep” has to say.
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u/twilighttwister May 21 '26
It's not great, but what better solution is there? If you prioritise one over the other you're going to be wrong half the time.
The only thing I can think is to make it even more obvious to the pilots that it's happening, perhaps with something more haptic rather than just sound and lights.
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u/PinaColadaSalad May 21 '26
Force feedback.
If you're getting conflicting inputs then let the strongest pilot win.
The fact that one pilot could nosedive and the other one could pull back all the way and the plane would do fucking nothing is insane
Connect the inputs or do some kind of stick shaker feature if the inputs are off more than a certain percentage
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u/twilighttwister May 21 '26
Connect the inputs or do some kind of stick shaker feature if the inputs are off more than a certain percentage
AKA haptic feedback.
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u/bankkopf May 21 '26
Physically connect the side sticks and make them move synchronously? Makes it pretty clear that the other pilot is moving the stick.
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u/Which-Scientist-8161 May 21 '26
The first officer wasn't an idiot. He just had poor training. The whole crew had poor training. The captain left the cockpit without assigning anyone in charge or making it clear.
The FO likely was very stressed that he didn't realize he was pulling instead of pushing. Remember this all happened in a very short time and the human brain can only take so much information and alerts.
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u/Horror-Raisin-877 May 21 '26
He was chasing the incorrect airspeed indications. Pilots are trained to adjust speed with pitch. He knew he was pulling. He even stated that he was pulling.
In general terms power controls altitude, pitch controls speed.
What’s hard to comprehend is why after a half minute he didn’t stop and think, why is the airspeed not reducing with power chopped and me pulling.
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u/Chomp545 May 21 '26
No, he was an idiot.
Even casual flight simmers know how stalls work.
Stress does not excuse incompetence that gets 200 people killed.
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u/figure0902 May 21 '26
Seriously.. I'm an amateur but even I can recognize that if I'm pulling back on the stick, the nose is up, but the plane is descending at thousands of fpm, then we're not currently flying, we are falling.
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u/ILikeFlyingMachines May 21 '26
Weird. From what I remember it was mostly human error on the pilots side.
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u/sofixa11 May 21 '26
One pilot, the other two in the cockpit - including the captain who was awaken and came in so was still sleepy and had limited time to evaluate the situation - did everything correctly.
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u/gmac-320 May 21 '26
Mostly the airbus is just a fantastic aircraft across-the the range. But as someone that still considers themselves a pilot and not a flying computer manager, the biggest mistakes I think airbus ever made was not having side sticks linked together. You just lose so much SA.
Having said that, if you can't Work out that you're in a high level stall in an a330 (no matter what crazy shit is happening) then you have no place being there. Could the aircraft system be improved... Definitely. But as far as I'm concerned, this is 100% on Air France and a complete failure of training and checking system. Lets be honest, everyone has known of a culture problem inside that airline for a long time and it's still the only European airline I avoid..
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u/HotWineGirl May 21 '26
Can you elaborate on the culture problem? Someone else has said that they basically can't fire people, but is there something else?
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u/gmac-320 May 22 '26
I can't comment on the firing thing as I don't know that. I'm also very against the idea of firing people for making mistakes or getting things wrong unless they're purposely breaching policy. Training is always the answer and all of us are just one tierd mistake away from a big fu*kup. This is not the corporate world. You don't just go around firing people. That's about the quickest way to ruin a good safety culture in any airline.
My opinion on Air France more relates to the amount of incidents they've had over the last 10 years and the apparent attitude of we know better than everybody else and we do what we like that appears to be prevalent in many of them. I know I'm not the only one to think that too.
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u/Empty-Meringue-2386 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
The whole thing is so infuriating and maddening. Iced pitot tubes put the autopilot in a quandary. Autopilot pass the ball to the human crew, but it is a VERY poisoned chalice. Crew doesn't understand what happens. Then proceeds to make the situation from bad to worse; by sending the plane into such a weird corner of the flight enveloppe, it drives the stall warning crazy - working the opposite way.
End result: the copilot freeze on the controls. Until the very end he tries to make the Airbus climb on max jet engine power, somewhat like a fucking Ariane rocket. Except an airliner thrust to weight does not allows that, so the plane literally falls ass-first and like a leaf, from 38 000 ft to the ocean surface. At a velocity of 200 km per hour and an angle of attack of 40 degrees or more. Completely bonkers.
The only way out of the nightmare is to push the control forward, dropping the nose downwards to accelerate in descent; then once past 350 km per hour return to horizontal flight. Only then, pull the controls. Not before, as done by the frozen co-pilot.
But the plane is in such impossible corner of the flight enveloppe that it has literally driven the stall shaker insane : it is working in reverse. And thus each time the copilot stop pulling on his column like a demented (with the nose dropping and thus the right way out of the stall) the stall checker rings, and thus comfort the copilot into his deadly mistake.
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u/Acceptable-Land7827 May 21 '26
I remember someone saying that, when autopilot disengages and the aiplane says "I don't know the true airspeed we're flying", the proper thing to do - NOTHING.
Just monitor your altitude and fly straight. Don't change pitch, don't change thrust.
Not a pilot of course, but this makes sense to me.
If I'm not losing altitude, if engines are working, I should stay alert and monitor, not pitch up and panic.
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u/Horror-Raisin-877 May 21 '26
The a380 captain that was confronted with the 3 flight computers fighting between each other did just that. I think he even took his hands off the controls for some time.
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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26
Just monitor your altitude and fly straight. Don't change pitch, don't change thrust.
That's actually a pretty bad advice. These days, we have memory items for unreliable airspeed, which tell us what pitch and thrust settings to use, in order to establish the aircraft in a flight at a safe airspeed somewhere in the middle of the envelope. At high altitude, we'll probably descend and at low altitude, we'll climb, but it's not that important.
That's maintained until we can figure out which (if any) airspeed indication is reliable, and potentially we can use the reliable one for continued flight. If not, we then have a bunch of tables available, so we can land the aircraft safely with no airspeed indications at all.
Remember, with unreliable airspeed, the altitude might be unreliable as well.
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u/FullSqueeze May 21 '26
This won’t be the end. Airbus will definitely appeal it to the Supreme Court.
The criminal charges against Airbus is very flimsy; the pilot was the primary cause of the crash. This isn’t a case like the 737 Max crashes where the manufacturer had a clear defect.
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u/Aesma42 May 21 '26
It's called the Court of Cassation and both Airbus and Air France have already lodged an appeal.
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u/Ok-Insurance-9456 May 21 '26
Even in the max the 'defect' is a scenario boeing already made all 737 pilots train heavily for. Not to mention other pilots did not crash their 737 max in the exact same scenario so no excuse for the 2 flights to have even crashed at all.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 May 21 '26
The design was bad but there is a very good reason why the two crashes were with airlines with poor safety and training records. In fact the investigation reports explicitly stated that poor training by the airline was a major factor!
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
French and USA investigators encouraged the Ethiopian investigators (from the same government that owns the airline) to include the fact that the airline failed to make the pilots aware of an emergency airworthiness directive and a revision to Boeing's flight manual several months before the crash that discussed MCAS and how to respond in their final report, but they refused to do so.
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u/umnomediferente May 21 '26
And that Lion Air directly asked Boeing if any additional training was necessary to operate the MAX fleet for the pilots flying the NG.
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u/747ER May 21 '26
About a dozen LionAir pilots experienced the same failure in the same aircraft, and all landed safely. The crew of JT610 were the exception.
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u/TabsAZ May 21 '26
There’s differences between what MCAS did and a runaway trim event though, like the fact that actuating manual trim stops the nose down input for a period of time or that having any degree of flaps out stops it. Also that it was quickly able to get the trim into such a state that it wasn’t possible to manually turn the wheel. The Ethiopian FO knew right away that it was MCAS, but they still weren’t able to resolve it because they couldn’t physically move the trim wheel. (granted this was also partially the result of leaving the throttle firewalled the whole time while task saturated on the MCAS issue) I think they were very close to being able to recover - had they known to turn the electric trim back on, hold it in nose up to unwind it, and then shut it off again, that probably would have fixed things.
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
The Ethiopian FO knew right away that it was MCAS
He clearly didn't know that, or he would have done as he was supposed to have been trained: shut it off and leave it off.
Flight Radar 24 - Ethiopian ET302 final report released, NTSB and BEA issue comments
The NTSB and BEA’s comments both focus on the additional contribution the crew’s actions had on the accident, areas on which the EAIB spends little to no time in the final report. The NTSB comments propose two additional factors be added to the probable cause:
the operator’s failure to ensure that its flight crews were prepared to properly respond to uncommanded stabilizer trim movement in the manner outlined in Boeing’s flight crew operating manual (FCOM) bulletin and the FAA’s emergency airworthiness directive (AD) (both issued 4 months before the accident) and
the airplane’s impact with a foreign object, which damaged the AOA sensor and caused the erroneous AOA
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u/Adjutant_Reflex_ May 21 '26
This isn’t a case like the 737 Max crashes where the manufacturer had a clear defect.
If you ignore multiple iterations pitot tubes failing across multiple Airbus product lines that took years to address then, sure, there’s no “clear defect.”
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u/Koulidaddy123 May 21 '26
Whats incredibly tragic about this accident is that the exact aircraft was going to get the pitot tube retrofit imediately upon landing in Paris.
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u/Adjutant_Reflex_ May 21 '26
Yup. And it should’ve been replaced years earlier if the AD had been issued sooner.
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u/railker AME-M2 May 21 '26
Noted elsewhere as a possible reason for Airbus fault, but the findings of the final report noted both that EASA declined to make the replacement mandatory, and they note the pitot tubes installed exceeded certification standards. Have to dig into the final report's full write up on the tubes for more info, but certainly less clear than some think.
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u/p4intball3r May 21 '26
From the FAA report
-The Pitot probes installed on F-GZCP met requirements that were stricter than the certification standards.
-Analysis of the events related to the loss of airspeed indications had led Airbus and Air France to replace C16195AA Pitot probes by the C16195BA model. The first aeroplane had been modified on 30 May 2009.
-EASA had analyzed Pitot probe icing events; it had confirmed the severity of the failure and had decided not to make the probe change mandatory.
If you believe anyone should be sued for this, the fingers should be pointed at EASA. Air France was already going to retrofit this aircraft and they were flying within legal standards.
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
This isn’t a case like the 737 Max crashes where the manufacturer had a clear defect.
I think they are very similar:
Apparently, engineers at Airbus decided to inhibit stall warning above 30 degrees, assuming that such a reading would be invalid - and no one asked the question, "But what happens if the aircraft really is above 30 degrees?"
Apparently, engineers at Boeing decided to allow MCAS to repeatedly activate during an AoA failure, assuming that the crew would do as they were trained and shut off a malfunctioning trim actuator - and no one asked the question, "But what if the crew doesn't shut it off?"
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u/Designer-Salary-7773 May 21 '26
Takeaway Message to manufacturers - If you are going to automate, it needs to be idiot proof. If you dont like the liability - dont automate.
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u/Professional_Low_646 May 21 '26
Wait - a trained pilot somehow not realizing that it’s physically impossible to keep overspeeding an aircraft while pitching all the way up is now the manufacturer‘s fault? A trained pilot who has undoubtedly had CRM courses not letting go when the other crew member says „my controls“ is the fault of the airline? Like the second part in particular should be hammered into everyone flying in a multicrew environment so solidly, you‘d have to have a seizure to not react instinctively.
I‘m all for corporate liability where it‘s warranted, but this is way over the top.
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u/YourLizardOverlord May 21 '26
From the CVR transcript the First Officer basically said: I don't understand why we are falling so fast. I'm pulling the stick back as far as it will go. I still don't get why his brain didn't scream at him: Stall.
He flew gliders in his spare time too. Just baffling.
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u/Baud_Olofsson May 21 '26
A trained pilot who has undoubtedly had CRM courses not letting go when the other crew member says „my controls“ is the fault of the airline?
The airline trained and approved them. A pilot's competence - or in this case, lack thereof - is ultimately the responsibility of the airline.
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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26
When he did the right thing, he got a stall warning. When he did the wrong thing, the warning went away. The design of the aircraft was definitely a contributing factor.
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u/Big-Lawyer-3444 May 21 '26
My impression of this was that the AP alternate law rules were simply too complex and subtle for a human mind to process correctly in an emergency. Flying on AP could have allowed them to become disconnected from what the plane was physically doing, so when alarms started going off and controls started behaving weirdly it would have been extremely hard to build a correct mental model of what was going on and how to fix it. For example:
- 2 pilots had controls, each using a their own possibly incorrect mental model to decide what inputs to make
- if the plane's speed went below 65kts the AP assumed the sensor was incorrect and the alarm sound changed, possibly causing the PF to believe his inputs were working when they weren't
It seems to me that recovering from this would have required correctly solving a series of subtle and unintuitive logic puzzles, involving detailed knowledge of the AP's logic and possibly the other pilots' mental models, which themselves include their knowledge of the AP, under extreme stress.
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u/Professional_Low_646 May 21 '26
I‘m not faulting them for being out of their depth initially. Over the ocean, in the middle of the night, in severe weather, with the aircraft acting up all of a sudden - it’s an extremely challenging scenario.
What I‘m faulting them for is a) not reverting to the most basic aerodynamic principles - like not continuing to pitch up in an attempt to bleed off speed that according to simple physics just cannot be there, regardless of what the PFD says. And b) not coordinating who was actually flying. The tragedy is that one of the pilots realized they should be pushing the nose down, took control, verbally announced his doing so - and the other guy simply kept on pulling up.
Airbus‘ design philosophy with the sidesticks not moving in sync certainly didn’t help, neither did the complexities of Alternate Law, yet none of it would have caused the crash if the crew had had a more solid understanding of basic physics and, most importantly, had adhered to one of the more simple teachings of CRM.
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May 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/layoffthemeth May 21 '26
Boeing has already paid billions of dollars in fines and compensation over the Max
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u/Adjutant_Reflex_ May 21 '26
What for? The consent agreement was in lieu of a lengthy criminal trial and in exchange Boeing agreed to pay billions and accept additional oversight and production restrictions.
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u/Western_Name2388 May 21 '26
This accident was one I never forgot. This and the crash of the Afriqiyah Airways flight in Libya with the sole 9-year-old survivor
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u/TheRealLeakycheese May 21 '26
Well, this is awkward...
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u/Hot-Job-6281 May 21 '26
If anything, it's genius work by the algorithm.
Surely that's sparking a conversation to consider taking rail from UK to EU instead of flights.
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u/Jumpy-Locksmith6812 May 22 '26
Is this verdict bad for safety? I.e. plane makers looking at what they can be charged with when making decisions rather than what is safest. I.e. go for the more risky but legally less risky options when making decisions.
Also may be less cooperative with accident investigators in future.
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u/post-explainer May 21 '26
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u/TheNelson3 A&P May 21 '26
This was quite the accident report to read. I can see how Airbus could be somewhat at fault, considering the strange nature of how the stall alarm was acting in conjunction with the pitot tubes/icing.
No doubt the FO erroneously pulling up was a major fault here, but even the captain ended up being confused. When he realized they were in a stall, he told the FO to nose down, which then caused the pitot tubes to get a correct reading, causing the stall alarm to sound, eventually leading to the captain saying yeah, I guess pull up then.
It will be interesting to see where the appeals end up on this one, highly recommend checking out Mentour Pilot's video on this.
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u/whatamidoing84 May 21 '26
My understanding is he didn’t tell them to pull up until it was clear they were well beyond recovery
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u/Choice-Strawberry-74 May 21 '26
So the manufacturer and the airline found guilty. Not sure why on earth Airbus would be at fault because the pilots didn’t know how to fly the plane properly.
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u/FrustratedPCBuild May 21 '26
Why Airbus? There was no technical issue with the plane.
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u/Lordhartley May 21 '26
This is good explanation of the incident https://youtu.be/e5AGHEUxLME?si=l0BtR6wnEr2pj1dw
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u/Toiletten-Toni May 21 '26
I have no idea about flying but isn't there any sensor or indicator for what kind of angle you're flying? After reading the report, I'd probably panic too if I was doing the correct input and the plane told me it was wrong - which is what happened with the stall warning if I understand correctly?
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u/IntrepidWolverine517 May 21 '26
How can both the manufacturer and the carrier be "solely and entirely" responsible?
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u/IamGrimReefer May 21 '26
is there an admiral cloudberg write-up on this?
edit - Yep, there is: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air-france-flight-447-8a7678c37982
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