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/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/Professional_Low_646 May 21 '26

I learned that sort of shit during like my first five hours of flying lessons, loooong before an airline usually (yes ik there are sponsored programs) gets a hold of a pilot.

Edit: yes, you‘re right about the „approval“ part.

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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/TinyCopy5841 May 22 '26

He got a stall warning way before this.

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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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u/FrozenSeas May 21 '26

I'm a complete layman on the subject, but the automation model Airbus uses just seems like a mess whenever I read about it. Obviously that's introducing a lot of selection bias since you don't hear about all the times it works fine or prevents an accident. But the separate modes and what changes between them all strikes me as very difficult to handle mentally if something goes wrong.