IIRC the solution was to speak English. The reason being that speaking English (when that is not your native tongue) put the cockpit crew in professional mode, where it was okay to question superiors.
It was also caused by "cockpit gradient" the flight engineer and FO knew about the problem but were reluctant to point it out to the captain (because it was such a silly little thing)
It's a balance. As they say, "aviate, navigate, communicate" in that order. Maybe they assumed the pilots were busy staying in control of the plane and waited for them to ask?
But on the other hand, we also have evidence that the power gradient on a plane is fairly strong and this means lower-ranked crew are less likely to report problems, as much as they try to create a culture where they would.
To me, this moment is one of the failure points in the incident and is entirely the captain’s fault.
Captain: What the hell are you doing?
Benin: We've lost control of the plane!
Robert: We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything
Now, instead of a team working jointly on a problem, we have two juniors feeling that they have to justify and defend themselves to their captain. It’s a really poor psychological position to be in with a time-critical problem to be solved.
It’s a human response, obviously, but I’m betting it’s the opposite of what his training would have recommended.
IMO, in that moment, the Captain either needed to get his crew problem-solving, or take control himself. unfortunately he did neither.
I heard it was the Airbus weirdness of steering setup that noticeably added to the problems (Separate, disjointed joysticks)
One pilot pulled up as hard as he could while the other one thought he was pushing down, making the confusion this much worse
Well it seems that in this case the problem stopped immediatly after the captain said my aircraft. The problem if I understand the report is that before that he was applying inputs even though he wasn't supposed to fly.
A "more right" solution would have been to implement a "stick pusher" system to make it obvious to the pilot what was going on. But that would have required pilot training and punctured the illusion that the plane can be flown by any pilot who has flown any 737 made since the 1960's
I agree that a better fix would have been to have synchronised joy sticks, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of telemetry
I'm aware that the pitot tubes iced over, but they de-iced long before the point of no return
And I bet the pilots would have listened to a 'kibitzer'. The senior pilot actually told the junior one to stop pulling up, knowing it would cause problems, and would presumably have taken control more forcefully if he'd been aware that the junior pilot had resumed pulling up after bein asked to stop. He just didn't know. Better communication, syncd joysticks or telemetry could all have helped make him aware of that.
Thanks for that! It's interesting (to me) that they descend (well, ascend!) into politeness with both pilots and controller addressing each other 'sir'.
Entirely speculating, but it sounds like the fundamental problem is that they had a confused Captain and First Officer who both thought they were the Pilot Flying. Human factors / psychology issue. Sure, on a Boeing you'll feel the other pilot's input, but if you're tired enough, or panicking because the plane's not doing what you expected, you might not get the hint.
Task saturation is a very real problem in today's airliners, particularly during takeoff and approach/landing. You're trying to do a ton of things in a small
amount of time, while dealing with a dynamic situation outside, and in this case after a long, tiring flight over the Atlantic.
There are a great series of (dated but still good) videos from American Airlines about automation dependency, human factors and the simple but very real problems that develop as a result - often leading to panic and disaster when things go wrong. Search YT for "children of the magenta".
Crew Resource Management should have kicked in and the Pilot Monitoring should have taken over on rotating the moment the Pilot flying did not steer after V1.
That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.
> In the case of AF447, the first officer (Robert) has to constantly ask the second officer (Bonin) what he is doing and why he is climbing
The fact that this happens at all makes me think that there could have been a hardware malfunction or that something got wedged forcing the stick back ever so slightly. So FO says "why are you pulling back?" and SO doesn't even respond since his hand isn't on the control.
In this case the Boeing system wouldn't have stepped in, granted. But in this case the Boeing system also wouldn't have let things get so far so fast. It's much, much harder to accidentally jam a big control yoke so far forwards. It would also take more than the weight of a camera to do so.
The title should read "Airbus' automated flight control conflict resolution system saves plane from problem that Airbus' poor cockpit design allowed to happen in the first place" but that's not catchy.
One possible approach that might have helped in the Air France case might be to let the pilots know what the plane doesn't know, instead of bombarding them with the unsolvable problems it did know.
At one point, they were at full thrust, nose-up, and climbing, yet in the heat of a storm of warnings, they failed to recognize that the airframe, engines, wings were all performing exactly as designed, aside from a panicking computer.
At that point they had completely lost situational awareness, and held the plane nose-up and falling until it contacted the water. If they had been able to 'step back' and look at the wider situation, they almost certainly should have been able to guesstimate some power settings, trim appropriately to lower the nose to recover to a normal flight attitude and hang on until they could trouble-shoot the frozen pitot tubes that had caused the air data computers to lose airspeed info.
That was a very strange interaction... I thought this was something to be avoided by ATC, suggesting things. Usually the conversational training is asking out details with no influence, and repeat question to make clear the answer was not understood. Right?
> they had luck of having a third pilot in the cabin present
They did indeed, one who remembered that the solution to runaway trim is to turn off the trim system. This is something that is supposed to be a "memory item".
Note that all three sets of flight crews successfully countered the runaway trim using the electric trim switches. They were not overwhelmed to the point of not understanding that the trim system was the problem, as they were countering it.
This was so underwhelming to the first LA crew that they didn't even bother to inform the next crew about it, or even have the plane taken out of service and fixed.
The request to minimize frequency changes was to lessen their workload in the cockpit and was probably also meant to convey that they were still a bit busy flying the plane. It's not an unreasonable request.
Maybe a shift-change caused the surgical team to be different from normal, so people aren't as comfortable with each other. There's social/professional pressure to fit within a hierarchy, especially with new people. Maybe a few people lower on the totem pole think something might be off, but don't want to say anything lest they risk appearing to undermine the surgeon.
So, at first it appears that a whole room of people would need to independently make the same mistake. But that's not so; only a few critical people need to make the mistake, and with enough ambiguity in the process (easily caused by anything happening 'out of the ordinary'), it won't be corrected some percentage of the time. Even seemingly trivial things.
The FAA found this occurring in the cockpit, especially from the '3rd seat'. A pilot and first officer may be 'in the weeds' dealing with the immediate threat of a situation, whereas others have the benefit of distance to reflect on a situation and observe more clearly. They don't get tunnel vision, and are in a better place to diagnose a tricky problem. However, they may not feel empowered to speak up, or feel they don't have the information the pilots do. Aviation has, broadly, sought to correct this and encourage anyone to speak up. Recently, this happened during the flight before the Indonesia 737 crash where similar AoA/MCAS issues occurred, but a 3rd pilot helped to address the situation.
A voice alert in a cockpit where people are probably frantically shouting at each other is just as ridiculous.
There's no substitute for physical feedback. It's instantaneous and impossible to miss. It's completely beyond my comprehension that Airbus eliminated it.
As I recall, the one pilot held full back stick all the way down, while the other pilot tried and failed to recover. Releasing the back stick and executing a normal stall recovery would have saved the airplane at just about any time.
It's a cute mental trick if you ask me.
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