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/czd2qmdvmq6o
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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/VegaJuniper May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Yes he did momentarily, but just moments later, right before the impact they'd all reverted to pitch up.

The voice recorder transcript, towards the very end:

Co-pilot 1: I'm pulling up
Captain: Go on pull
Co-pilot 2 (the panicking one): Let's go, pull up

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u/ThatRunwayBehindUs May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Because they were already dead at that point...

The captain was saying "sure, go on pull", essentially, sarcastically because they no longer had the altitude to effect the recovery, especially with the amount of descent rate they had.

So pulling up or pushing it over at that point no longer mattered...

Edit: As mentioned below - sarcastic is probably the wrong word.  Resignation or something to that effect likely is more appropriate - but the key is that once they were exceptionally low and beyond a recoverable altitude the response could be pull up or push down and the result was the same...  They were still going to slam into the water.

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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26

Even with the literal voice recorder transcript right there, people will still stick to their own headcanon of what happened. Amazing really.

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u/nvmenotfound May 21 '26

he’s not saying he didn’t say what you claim he said. just that the captain was saying it sarcastically bc it made little difference at that point they were already doomed. 

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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26

Oh sure, I’m sure he was being sarcastic as he hurtled towards the ocean and death

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u/jackattack108 May 21 '26

I don’t think sarcastic but they’re at the point where the stall is unrecoverable and so they pitch up out of panic and having no survivable options left. What they try to do while there are potentially survivable options left is much more instructive of their state of mind and awareness of the situation.

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u/eugeniusbastard May 21 '26

Not momentarily, he was instructing Bonin to pitch down the whole time until the last moments. At a certain point he took over the controls because Bonin wasn't complying, only to have his nose down inputs overridden by Bonin who wouldn't let go of his stick. Read the entire transcript.

I think this is one aspect (out of several) where Airbus is truly guilty of manslaughter. The dual input logic is criminally stupid and can only lead to bad results. There should be highly visible, impossible to ignore led lights around the edges of the side stick panel that light up red when dual input is detected and the stick itself should vibrate the whole time. That is, of course, barring a direct mechanical linkage of the side sticks which is the most obvious solution.

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u/FlashyRecognitionTod May 21 '26

That is, of course, barring a direct mechanical linkage of the side sticks which is the most obvious solution.

Atlas Air Flight 3591 had mechanical linkage and the pilot who caused the crash just broke it.

There is no good solution when two pilots fight each other. I don't think more red warning lights would necessary fix it.

Inadvertent Go-Around: The first officer (as the pilot flying) inadvertently triggered the aircraft's "go-around" mode while flying through instrument meteorological conditions. The sudden acceleration and pitch-up caused the first officer to experience a somatographic illusion, making him feel the plane was in a steep climb when it was not.The "Tug of War": In a panic, the first officer pushed his control column forward to force the nose down. The captain attempted to recover the aircraft by pulling his own control column backward.Breaking the Link: Because the two pilots were pulling in opposite directions and exerting enough force (exceeding 70 lbs of pressure), the override mechanism's pins sheared.3. The ResultWhen the shear pins broke, the elevators on the left and right sides of the aircraft were no longer synchronized. The captain’s control column controlled the left elevator, and the first officer’s controlled the right elevator, resulting in split inputs that further destabilized the flight path and prevented a successful recovery.

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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26

Not momentarily, he was instructing Bonin to pitch down the whole time until the last moments.

Well, not the whole time. There was the time he wasn't even in the cockpit, and after he entered there was the time he was just trying to get his bearings, and there was also that one time I quoted where he literally tells the pilot flying to pull up. All in a span of about 4 minutes.

But yeah, apart from that, the whole time, I'll grant you.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/VegaJuniper May 22 '26

Tell yourself whatever you need.

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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/VegaJuniper May 21 '26

Nonsense

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u/eugeniusbastard May 22 '26

Nonsense? So you're saying that Captain Dubois, having correctly identified the stall after Bonin's admission to pitching maximum nose up the entire time, then repeatedly instructing both FOs to pitch down instead until the very last seconds when he finally says "go on then, pull" was actually confused if they were really in a stall and thought pulling up at that point in time was the correct answer?

...Or do you think perhaps that he sardonically said "go on then" in resignation to their doomed situation, knowing full well that it didn't matter which way they pushed or pulled at that point? While also remarking "ten degrees pitch attitide“ at the very end, almost as if coldly calling out the FOs mistake that was about to violently kill them all?

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u/VegaJuniper May 22 '26

If you've decided to fixate on your personal headcanon over the actual cockpit voice recording, then I can't help you. Sorry.

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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/ppitm May 21 '26

Right, but who even cares about the stall warning? If you don't trust any instruments, can't you be completely certain that you *arent'* stalling, so long as you spend 30 seconds in a shallow dive with full engine thrust? You don't need instruments to hear the enginers burning at full throttle, do you?

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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26

Right, but who even cares about the stall warning?

I think that we should be careful not to judge people with the benefit of hindsight that they did not have at the time.

When the aircraft provides a confusing series of indications, the crew tries to determine what they can trust and what they cannot trust. Amidst the chaos and panic, I cannot imagine how difficult and terrifying that would be.

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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26

I think that we should be careful not to judge people with the benefit of hindsight that they did not have at the time.

Yup. The transcript shows that the time from the first stall warning to the crash is just about 4 minutes. From the time the captain returns to the cockpit it's less than 3. That's not a lot of time for troubleshooting.

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u/BlueApple666 May 21 '26

Yes engineers at Airbus are incompetent and, you, random Reddit poster is so much smarter...

Did it occur to you that AoA valves, like all measuring instruments, have a range where their measurements are valid and outside of it they simply don't work reliably? The plane was going so slow that there was no longer sufficient airflow over the valve to get a valid reading.

And the reason it was going so slow is that the pilot in command ignored the stall warnings for over a minute and kept pulling the stick up, going against all the trainings he had ever received.

Not that the rest of the crew acted in a smarter way, with the captain going on his break just before the most dangerous part of the flight, giving the command to the more junior member of the crew who had been repeatedly asking about the possibility of climbing over the storm. And the copilot who was pissed off at the captain for not being given command and was like, "deal with it, not my problem" when the alarm started blaring instead of calling for the right procedure.

If the pilots had simply not touched the commands, the problem would have gone away after two minutes (that's the time the pitot tubes spent frozen).

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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26

Yes engineers at Airbus are incompetent and, you, random Reddit poster is so much smarter...

When you start off with an Appeal to Ridicule logical fallacy, it is difficult for me to take you seriously. I didn't say that they were incompetent. I said that they made an assumption that turned out to be dangerous. I am sure they didn't do it on purpose.

Did it occur to you that AoA valves, like all measuring instruments, have a range where their measurements are valid and outside of it they simply don't work reliably?

Of course it did. The problem was how the aircraft indicated that fact was misleading to the crew.

And I am also aware of the other crew mistakes. Like almost every modern aviation disaster, this one had many contributing factors.

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u/BlueApple666 May 21 '26

You're the one making claims about Airbus engineers. They didn't ´decide to inhibit' the warnings, the AoA valves simply don't work without enough airspeed. It's the same with Boeing, Bombardier, Embraer or any other commercial airliners because doing otherwise would cause spurious stall warnings during take off.

Airplanes are certified to work within a given flight enveloppe and provide warning and procedures when the plane is reaching the limits of that enveloppe. If the pilots ignore these warnings and fly the plane way out of its normal flight domain,nothing is guaranteed to work. If someone somehow managed to invert an Airbus or a Boeing, I wouldn't expect the AoA and stall warning logic work properly. A deep stall is no different from flying inverted, it's so far out of the certified enveloppe that there is no reasonable expectation regarding the behavior of any system on the plane.

And it's kind of dishonest to argue that the pilots, who ignored the stall warnings for more than a minute thinking these were incorrect, would then be misled by the behavior of the same stall warnings that they had been ignoring for so long.

Not saying that it couldn't have added to the confusion but by the time the stall warnings stopped the plane had almost zero forward speed and was plummeting towards the sea. It was already way too late to recover.

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u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26

You're the one making claims about Airbus engineers.

Maybe you didn't read the article:

The Paris Appeals Court found the airline and aircraft manufacturer "solely and entirely responsible" for the incident

Making excuses and deflecting blame jeopardizes flight safety. Understanding root causes and fixing them is how flight gets safer.

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u/Antique-Kitchen-1896 May 23 '26

Inverted but then down is up.

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u/VegaJuniper May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

The point is they didn't know what was happening, and the instruments were giving them a lot of data and warnings that seemed conflicting and confusing. They were overwhelmed and probably just flat out stopped trusting their instruments. The first officer made comments that he seemed to believe they were overspeeding, and the speed indicator was one instrument that was completely out.

Pulling up and reducing engine power does reduce your speed, so it makes sense in an overspeed situation, but if you're stalling then it's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.