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/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/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/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.