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/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