Watching Bonin's stick inputs pisses me off. That man had no business on the flight deck of a commercial airplane with that kind of panicking instinct.
OneOkami: Makes me angry too. Some real bad habits early on, combined with like you said, panicking instinct. I guess you are a pilot yourself, and probably have been an instructor. I can't say I'd do any better. But that's why I'm a Security Officer. Not airline pilot of a flagship airline.
even if he did nothing, the aircraft would have kept itself stalled. After the aircraft had stalled, the computer was trying to maintain 1G, so even when the stick was neutral the elevator was still full nose up, and when the stick was full foward, the elevator was still half nose up. He didn't hold the aircraft in a stall, he simply failed to recover it, as did the other pilot.
Man, could you educate yourself a little before talking nonsense. There's tons of information as well as final report for the accident. Use this> www.google.com
skypiratez i know i have read the final report, and it shows the elevator at full nose up for most of the decent, caused by the aircraft trying to hold 1G. everything i said is factually true
***** he did cause the initial stall, but after the aircraft had stalled his nose up inputs had no effect on the elevator position, the computer was holding them at full nose up to try to hold 1G. The other crew members were just as at fault though, they failed to recognize the situation either, in fact the pilot in the left seat KNEW at the beginning that bonnin was pulling back and told him to stop, but he took it no further than that. BTW the unreliable airspeed procedure is not trained for high altitude, its trained for climb, so he actually did apply the procedure he was trained for, it was just not the correct time to apply it. It was a massive screw up no doubt, but these pilots were just like any other pilots, they just happened to screw it up under those specific circumstances. The pilots were fatigued, there was nobody clearly in charge (flat authority gradient), lack of CRM, turbulence/buffeting, information overload and then just utter confusion and spatial disorientation, trust me when i say it could happen to any pilot under the right circumstances. It says more about their training than themselves, they were just doing their best, they were not bellow average pilots, they were fully qualified and had passed all of Air France's training requirements. If you blame just the pilots it solves nothing, you have to ask why the pilots did that and how can we stop pilots from doing that in the future. Oh and just an FYI, Bonnin was also glider pilot, so i'm very sure he knew how to hand fly and knew what a stall was.
Jamenator1 The elevator trim was nose up because the F/O was commanding a nose up! Look carefully how brief the nose-down inputs are. And the elevator trim responded to them with going nose-down. And if the F/O didn't do anything from the very beginning, there would have been no stall.
To me every single input Bonin applied to the aircraft pulled all the souls aboard that much closer to death. The man was told not to move the stick yet he persisted in his imbecile actions. Notice at 5:58 the right side stick Bonin gets instructed once again to remove his hands from the stick, he does, then as the other pilot regains control of the aircraft (left sidestick) slowly but meaningfully the plane starts to recover from the stall with AirSpeed, then not even 10 seconds Bonin touches the stick and finally completely takes the lives of all on board. deeply saddened
That's true. But what puzzles me more is why Robert didn't realize that Bonin was cancelling his inputs. There is a "Dual input" warning that was triggered. Airbus aircraft also have a Priority Takeover button, which lets one pilot take control and have the airplane ignore inputs from the other sidestick.
Abraham O the reason why ? Its because when robert pushed the nose down the plane started to recover which make the speed goes beyond 60kts and that triggered the stall warning again In which make Bonin think the only way was to keep pulling back until the stall alarm goes silent! stupidity at its peak :/
@andreasolsen5174 It wouldn't surprise me if Airbus only added it in afterwards. They really didn't seem to put much thought into how their fly-by-wire system might work in a real application, and that seems like something they'd miss.
@@vicroc4 alright 2 things.. Airbus had to prove to FAA and EASA (to name a few) that fly by wire works.. which they did.. AND.. 99% of aircraft accidents are caused by human factors.. AF447 being the perfect example of it.. Pilot Monitoring made clear instructions to let the plane figure itself out... and pilot flying didnt listen to those commands until it was too late..
Imagine the Captain exits cockpit for a nap and all is well... A few minutes later he re-enters and within a moment realizes the grave situation and within another moment slams into the ocean and is dead. Unbelievable, this just cannot happen.
Over the years as I've read more and more about this tragedy, I've come to believe that Bonin did not panic IMMEDIATELY after the auto pilot shut off. He was freaking out way before and Captain Dubois and Robert just didn't pick up on it.
This is why it would be helpful if the real recordings were released. Timing, tone of voice etc would reveal a huge amount of information about the internal state of mind of Bonin, and also the status relationship he had with the other two pilots.
@@yggdrasil9039 Neither of this was relevant to the accident. What was indeed relevant: The confusing Stall warnings of Airbus. When the plane's nose was lowered, the "Stall! Stall" warning sounded, when Bonin pulled the stick, the stall warning stopped. You can see it in the replay above. This can be explained by the airspeed being so low, that the stall warning shutting down / being overcasted by other warnings. However, it added to the confusion and to the FO (most likely) believing they were in an overspeed stall, or believing the stall warnings were false. Panic was a reaction to - not the cause of - the stall they've gotten themselves into.
@@petermuller5800 that feature of the stall warning going off when he lowered the nose (now fixed by Airbus) certainly added to the confusion , but the warning did not cause the stall. Bonin caused the stall, by pulling back on the stick. Why did he pull back on the stick? Because he panicked. But as the initial poster commented, he was freaking out long before the incident, and his desire to climb away from the problem is a very human reaction. It probably goes back to when we were primates and sought safety from predators and imminent threats by climbing up in the trees. Interesting and tragic that it overrode all his flight training. Pulling up is a page one error, but climbing away from danger is instinctively wired in.
@@petermuller5800 So I've watched a bunch of documentaries on this, and a couple of different versions of the flight data recorder animations and one of the best documentaries to help explain the behavior of the crew was done by the Mentour Pilot channel. At that time, in Air France training, they really only focused on stall recovery at low altitudes and when the alpha floor protection system was working (while the plane was in 'Normal Law'). The training advised the pilots to put the plane's engines into TOGA thrust, and apply maximum nose up on the side stick because at lower altitudes you can often power out and climb away from a stall, and the alpha floor protection system won't let you pull the nose up too far back. This scenario was iced over pitot tubes, with initially false stall warnings caused by unreliable airspeed. The pilots did not put proper emphasis on the ECAM action which told them they were now in alternate law and had no stall protection or bank angle protection, and I believe that revering back to his training, Bonin pulled back on the stick and inadvertently climbed to an altitude the plane couldn't fly at, causing the plane to lose attitude, and eventually enter an actual stall due to continued pulling back on the side stick while simultaneously losing speed. Further confusing the crew, once the instruments that measured speed were no longer clogged with ice and the plane was in a fully developed stall, they were reading speeds so low that they would only ever be seen while on the ground, so the stall warnings stopped; until the plane received nose down commands, restoring the airspeed measurements and bringing the stall warnings back, which only reenforced their idea that they should not be pushing forward on the side stick. Ideally, when those pilots ran into an unreliable airspeed scenario while in cruise, the pilots should have been able to look at their remaining instruments, see that the engine parameters are within normal limits, realize that nothing about the planes configuration has changed, and see on their attitude display that the plane was in level flight, so in all likelihood it was a speed measurement issue only, and they were fine where they were. At that point, they could have used the Airbus pitch and power settings in the planes manual to fly the aircraft manually until the pitot tube heaters do their job, and they can revert back to basic aerodynamics to fly the aircraft if they ran into a problem. Sadly, this didn't happen. The more experienced pilot didn't take over quickly enough and wasn't assertive enough, the captain didn't take a seat at the controls when he came back into the cockpit, Bonin kept putting his hands on the side stick and hitting the takeover button when it wasn't his job to be doing so, and none of them worked well under the stress of what turned into a more confusing scenario than it needed to be. I feel bad for all of them, despite all of Bonin's flawed control inputs which were human reactions in the grand scheme of things. None of them deserved what happened to them.
If you're 35,000 feet in the air AND flying over the ocean when the autopilot shuts off where does the common sense kick in and say, "Hey we have a few minutes to figure this out." There is IMMEDIATE panic and it still to this day disgusts me. The loss of life here is absurd.
In their defense, the autopilot disconnect was a result of unreliable airspeed. That is what really ticked them of. They then reverted to Alternate Law which has limited protection and indeed, the autopilot disconnect. There is some blame to put in the training system as well. Because a scenario like this, in that time, was rarely trained for. In the end though you just need to fly the damn plane, there are 3 independent pitots and they should have been able to fly pitch and power to buy time, assess, work checklists... and we would never heard about this.
Bonin appears to have assumed that the plane could not be stalled, failing to understand that the anti-stall mechanisms built into Normal Law do not apply in Alternate Law. But what else he thought was causing the plane to drop is anyone’s guess.
@@dave43211 This is my theory as well. He was probably told "you can't stall an airbus" which is true in Normal law. I wonder how much simulator flying is done in alternate law?
@@dave43211 At that point surely you just revert to old-fashioned aviation knowledge. I'm dropping, the stall warning is going, put the nose down, sort the AoA out, and dive out of it? We'll never know, of course.
This is a great video. I've seen this video 2 years ago, but now re-wacthing it again I noticed something that might explaine Bonin's non sense and erratic movements on the joystick. I think the guy was just paying attention to the FD (flight director). He tries desperately to put the black dot on the green cross. He does not care about angle of attack, speed, heading and altitude indicators. So instead of making an aircraft recovery and fly by himself, he just wants to mantain the programed course on the FMS. The only thing it matters on his head in the first seconds of the "emergency" (specially between 3:00 and 3:50) is to stay inside the green cross envelope. What makes me wonder is why is he so obcessed with the FD green cross (was it a training bad habit he developed?). Because the stall warning was there, the dual input warning, the altitude decreasing, from time to time the correct speed appears on the display, etc. What do you think people?
It was told in the final conclusion that the FD was inducing the pilot flying. It can be interpreted also that Bonin was fearing an overspeed and did not trust the stall warning, the crew not able to figure out which indications was really wrong. The final conclusion suggests this. In a word, even not being at the max altitude, there is strong clues that Bonin immediately took the situation as an overspeed and pitched up. Instead of taking a time to communicate his picture of the situation and take a time to analyse. Fatigue played a great role in the poor crew communication and management but also in décision process. The lack of training also. Adding to that, the pilots were first distracted by several fault messages. This along with fatigue created a false picture of the situation in their minds. A human brain takes about 20 seconds to interpret a situation. Past this delay, it's very difficult to get out of the first interpretation. After 30 seconds, they were not realizing they were putting the plane in a stall, they were already doomed. Sad. They certainly began to understand... Too late.
It’s called a sidestick not a joystick. And you’re leaving out one other critical element. Notice what the stall alarm does when the stick is pulled back?
Bonin made grave mistakes but he's definitely not doing random things or holding the stick back all the time in blind panic. He's actually responding to everything (even if wrongly). When the autopilot disconnects the altimeter shows a sudden loss of altitude, which implies the nose dropped, and speed would be rapidly increasing. Overspeed can be just as dangerous as stalling, so it's not illogical to pull the nose up right away. He didn't know it was a false reading. In those first moments Bonin also has trouble oversteering due to the controls responding differently (Alternate Law), but he does stabilize and center the controls (2:55), and actually lowers the nose to just 5 degrees up (alerted by co-pilot), regaining control. At this point however, he still doesn't know the speed of the plane and we get important hints that in his mind he's still afraid of overspeed. If you listen to the cockpit voice recording (ruclips.net/video/3d2zEuvlvEs/видео.html) he actually says he thinks they're "flying too fast" (30:12) right before the captain gets back. You can also see that right after he's done stabilizing the controls, he reduces the throttle. I can even imagine that the added noise from flying through ice subconsiously created the illusion of increased speed in his mind. Of course Bonin is supposed to use the altimeter in the absence of reliable speed indication, but he complains in the CVR: "the problem is I don't have vario" (31:22), which implies he doesn't trust the altimeter either. In this uncertain situation the first stall suddenly sounds, and he instantly responds with full throttle and stick back. Stick back is the wrong move here, but the CVR explains there is logic in his action: he is performing a TOGA move (Take Off / Go Around), which you normally use to save the plane from a crash. I think this shows he's becoming overwhelmed, unable to apply the proper procedure (but applying a procedure still). The other co-pilot is no help, he totally ignores the remark and just wishes out loud for the captain to be there already. Not long after, the last pitot unfreezes and the Flight Director cross likely reappears for Bonin, which would normally help him stay at his intended altitude. For some reason though it indicates that he's below his cruising altitude even though he's well above it at almost 38.000 ft. This could explain why he pulls on the stick again, trying to follow the FD. He knows he has throttle set to full, and being too low would confirm his earlier fears about nosediving, concluding that altitude needed to be gained rather than speed. You can also see that once again, he throttles back, this time all the way to zero (4:00) as altitude rapidly decreases. This is exactly what you would do if you were in a nosedive. In the end, had he trusted the stall warnings or at least tried at any point to dive for stall recovery, then all could have turned out OK. But if your mind is set on a certain track, especially under duress, it's extremely hard to "reset", especially if the solution is doing something you are (apparently) most afraid of.
we're both trying to Monday morning quarterback- but discussing this helps everyone sorta makes sense. That is true that his Speed indicator wasn't working BUT when does a plane ever Stall with nose pointing down, 99% of the time a plane doesn't stall pointing nose slightly downward & a high percentage that nose up does result in a plane that is stalled, correct? I agree with you, if the pilot doesn't have accurate speed readings being displayed and altitude is showing plane is falling & stalling is sounding. Its just a stressful and dire place nobody ever wants to find themselves in. What I learned is such a big plane, once stalled, even being at 37,000ft still isn't enough to recover if making incorrect control inputs. A pilot in this plane approaches 10,000ft and its almost like Game Over. Another sad fact is the Captain awakens and reenters BUT never jumps in the chair to actually try anything. He stands back stating what to try but never once grabbed the controls or Says I have control. Dual Control Input blows my mind- it either cancels out co pilot inputs or both pilots fighting over controls happens far too often. On the Airbus the other pilot can feel what the other one is inputting because they can't feel it on their joystick is sad.
Really good comment that kind of sheds light, for me, on some of Bonin's actions. It kind of reminds of the famous AeroPeru accident where Duct Tape was covering the static pitot ports. One pilot, there, also latched onto a sensible, albeit wrong, interpretation of their bad data. Panic and the fog of information really does a number on your cognitive ability. Like you said, pulling yourself out of the situation and reanalyzing the problem is difficult. It's almost like a kind of "sunk cost" mentality there. As in, _"if you start over, you waste precious time, so you can't start over."_
@@Mikinct > "That is true that his Speed indicator wasn't working BUT when does a plane ever Stall with nose pointing down". And how can you be sure the plane is stalling when flying blind and being unsure which instruments to trust? False stall alarms do exist and to my knowledge have resulted in at least 1 crash due to pilots lowering the nose, causing overspeed. And the point of my interpretation is that what happened before the first stall caused target fixation / tunnel vision; this happens all the time in stressful situations. > "Another sad fact is the Captain awakens and reenters BUT never jumps in the chair to actually try anything." The Captain wakes up with no idea what state the plane is in or what the pilots have already attempted. You don't just "jump in and try stuff". Maybe he thought they were still high up and it was best to analyze what was going on. Who knows. At best he might have immediately doublechecked that stall recovery was being performed, at which point Bonin might have voiced again that he was afraid of overspeed, and maybe the others could have overruled him at that point.
I can't believe you are trying to say Robert was useless here. And Bonin is panicking. You can see his stick movements. You hear a stall warning and you keep puling the nose up? Come on, be real.
Can't help but wonder if the other pilots would have figured out what Bonin was doing if the side sticks were yokes like on Boeings. Seeing my yoke being pulled into my gut while in a stall would certainly make me slap the other pilot and take control!
yep exactly! you could see a point at 14,000 where the plane levelled out though still dropping where some nose down to collect speed to revive the plane was easily possible. Then you look at Bonins control and hes ramming the nose upwards. COMPLETELY FUCKED
There's also the physical feedback when you're in an obvious stall (the yoke gets mushy) which you don't have in an Airbus. You don't have to rely on possibly erroneous instruments or stall warnings to tell you.
I keep thinking about those passengers that had their flight-information turned on. They would have seen the altitude getting lower and lower. Horrible...
@Patrick Bateman i dont think this plane had that option.. also it was night and most passangers were sleeping or trying to sleep.. they might had noticed some rocking side to side.. but no falling as it was a stable vertical speed..
Rather than the incessant "Stall" warnings which the pilots clearly didn't understand, what was really needed was an announcement in French by the computer: "PF Bonin, stop pulling on the stick. You are a complete nong and shouldn't even be in control of an airplane. Let go of the side stick immediately." Just that one simple message would have saved the plane.
Perhaps a basic understanding of human psychology would help you. The human brain is terrible at handling stress, and generally reverts back to training. The first thing to go when you are under significant stress is your hearing. The F/O did refer back to a form of training used for terrain escape and windshear recovery- max TOGA thrust and max pitch up. Under normal law, that’s Airbus SOP for gaining the best climb performance. It’s very easy for armchair pilots in the comments here to comment with hindsight - yet they all forget about the inadequate training for high altitude upset recovery. Throw in the startle factor alongside that they only had 3 minutes to diagnose and recover the airplane, makes it an extremely difficult situation.
@@WetaMantis Air France taught that in its training up until the time this crash happened, because at the time they thought most stalls would occur at a lower altitude, with the alpha floor protection working since the plane should be in normal law all of the time. Max nose up wouldn't matter if normal law was in effect since the plane would prevent you from overdoing it. They didn't want pilots to be shy in pulling the stick back, so they told them to "go for it", which as it turned out was a philosophy that relied too heavily on the alpha floor protection by assuming that it would always be working. This mindset has doomed Airbus crews before this incident and since. Alpha floor protection is a good thing but in my opinion the pilots that fly these planes need to be taught it almost at the engineering level in order for them to truly understand it and use it safely.
I have zero.piloting experience. But I know enough to push the nose down and not continue to pull the nose up like a moron. You have to wonder how someone with that much training could ride a plane down for minutes like that.
I would say that too, but let's be smart and annalise what happened. Pitot tube blocked due to icing condition and makes the airspeed unreliable, flying with no speed indicator is hard if not impossible to do. Bonin didn't know that the airplane is stalling because he know he can't trust the instrument. The problem is Bonin didn't calm down and check what instrument is faulty
Tomm Ed even without the speed indicator he still should have known what a stall felt like so for example the Angle of attack was higher than it normally would have been to keep the aircraft level and as you can tell from the side stick inputs it was taking a lot to get the aircraft back to being wings level which wouldn’t have been the case if he had sufficient speed )
Keyboard warriors are an odd lot! That's like saying Keanu in a Non Combative Setting, reloaded and fired his armaments flawlessly and speedily faster than any before him, which he did, but in a Non Combative situation! Put you in a storm, Thunderstorm, Wind, hail, droplets like bullets! Couple that with blaring alarms! conflicting Data! Inner ear balance confusing your instincts! Hindsight is 20-20! As it happened however, they had seconds to make a right choice.
Mentor Pilot on you-tube explains this better. The human brain under stress simply goes back to what was taught procedures. and what they were taught was to apply full throttle & pull back. But this only works in Normal Law when autopilot keeps the plane from ever stalling and at lower altitudes.
@@marceloluizfigueira7208 he is flying a330, and across the entire atlatic oceon. So it is probally obvious that a pilot with great experience would be able to do this job😅
@@stefanocozzi8188 Yep and Robert noticed it and even told Bonin "Alternate Law. Be careful we lost the protection". Makes me think Robert had a much more correct understanding of the situation but slipped into misunderstanding as he didn't understand why the nose was kept up and the plane stalling until he realized Bonin was pulling up. Makes me think had Robert taken controls when the pitot tubes froze the crash would not have happened.
@@mohamedtoure4388 I totally agree , i also think that if the more experienced pilot (Marc Dubois ) had not left the cockpit the incident would not have occurred.
Amazing to watch Bonin's stick. Why not simply keep the plane level? Since it was dark out, isn't the only option to fly by altimeter and artificial horizon? What was so confusing to him?
@@yunocchi5486 There's this device that indicates vertical speed. It's not difficult to tell at all that the airplane is stalling if you're going nose up and it's losing altitude so fast the gauge maxes out.
They have problem with the pitot tube. My thought why Bonin didn't rely on the altimeter and vsi probably because he wasn't sure on what instrument he can trust
It looked like that's what he was doing throughout the whole decent. Just trying to get the wings level, rather than concentrating on recovering out of the stall. It didn't help when the captain came back onto flight deck he further encouraged getting the wings level rather than sticking the nose down...
How do pilot interviews at Air France work? "Do you know what a stall is?" "I have no idea. I don't know how to fly a plane, but I can dial in numbers and press the autoland button." "CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE HIRED!!!"
Don't kid yourself. It isn't just Air France. This is the result of removing the pilot from the loop. Computers do a much better job flying than any human...until they don't. This is system-wide. Boeing has been less cavalier about handing over control to sensors and wires, but only by a bit. Airlines and aircraft manufacturers must remember that the cockpit works best when humans not only trump computers, but know how to save hundreds of lives when the computer gives up.
to respond 2 wrong assesments in thoses comments : 1. bonin was also a glidder pilot.. so about the pushing buttons and having no clue about aerodynamic and flying skills....still it remains strange his behaviour this time for sure. 2. automation is not a sudden progress , needs time and correction (see B737 Max flaw showed recently in air lion) but is the only way to secure more and more commercial flights since a320 disruptive choice for fbw and automation philosophy , which has become the standard for all plane manufacturers little by little , while air travel has exploded and safety records raised at the same time ...
@@slartybarfastb3648 All systems can be manually adjusted and switched off entirely from the cockpit, including robotic airplane control. This is precisely because sometimes the systems just fail and you need to fall back to flying by hand. Except in this case the pilots have utterly failed too.
Well said that's how I've always felt looking at this case. Pissed. Like immediately after auto-pilot goes off the hell breaks loose pilot screwing up big time
As a former airbus captain for 30 years, their fate was sealed the moment the captain left the cockpit. The reason I say this is the captain knew there was challenging weather up ahead with tops above the service ceiling of the 330. An extremely poor time to relinquish command and take a break. I realize hindsight is 2020 but if he would’ve waited 20 minutes and dealt with the weather and got on the other side of the storms, all those people would probably be alive today. I would’ve never left the airplane in charge of two first officers in a situation like that but, I understand we all don’t think alike.
@@lbowsk Has nothing to do with the quality of first officer. Has everything to do with making a command decision based on risk management. That’s why they pay the captains the big bucks!
@@fmondeo Those weren’t just “clouds”! They were massive thunderstorms in the ITCZ, some of the nastiest in the world. Staying safe in this business is all about risk management. RIP my fellow aviator.
The problem is that with such incompetence, Bonin would have likely made fall another plane in the future. The dude went in full panic mode and didn't do any of the CRM things, and same for the FO on the left even if he would have known how to fly the plane.
Looks to me like the real trouble started at 3:20 to 3:50. The Flight Director comes back having reverted to 1400fpm climb. He then spends the next 30seconds trying blindly to follow the FD bars, even though they are commanding over 20deg nose up at times. His attempts to follow these FD bars takes the aircraft from a recoverable position to a very difficult position in a fully developed stall. Don't be sto quick to jump on the "blame Bonin" bandwagon, the startle factor would have been immense and his attention narrowed so he could only see the FD bars, not the bigger picture. Maybe a change of FD logic so that when it comes back in a case like this it can command vertical speed 0? Or even that it doesnt come back until reselected? In this case I believe Bonin would have acted differently in those critical 30 seconds and the outcome could have been very different.
The only possible explanation is that Bonin legit panicked himself into completely forgetting his training and experience. Because, honestly....the only other explanation would be that he did it on purpose. There was plenty enough altitude to work out the problem.
If you look at the artificial horizon and Bonin input, you clearly figure out that he did not do it on purpose. He was just out of his depth trying to keep the wing levelled.
It’s so scary to think that the co pilot himself was causing the stall and that it wasn’t noticed sooner rather than later when they were to close to the surface to recover from the stall.
That isometric view of the plane should be an actual instrument in the plane's instrument panel. With all the technology today they could actually make that happen. Add some vectors to the display showing the plane's trajectory, speed and angle of attack with clear daylight graphics animations and it would be something anyone could understand, and it would be a very handy reference at a glance.
Great idea, unfortunately that will probably never happen. Because we live in a bullshit, red-tape filled world now which likes to over-complicate even the simplest of things, instead of just keeping things fucking simple.
The plane was giving true altitute and pitch grades but they ignored it (especially bonin), what makes you think that they would have listened to a isometric view?
@@BioTheHuman If you are disoriented and in a panic, it might help to just see a birds-eye view at a glance in addition the usual slew of instrumentation that requires one to indirectly derive the flight attitude of the plane. People tend to grossly underestimate how much panic and stress can cloud thinking and judgement. Obviously when pilots plow a working plane into the ground everything is giving accurate information. The plane was functioning normally. I don't see why that would be disputed. Its the pilots that where malfunctioning. And I was not referring to this in particular.
It maybe insensitive of me to say so, but this video infuriates me. This is completely inexcusable from the co-pilot who repeatedly pulled back on the stick. What on EARTH was he doing? It's as if he can't help himself.
the F/O caused the stall by pulling back on the stick when the AP disengaged, so yeah his daughter sitting there doing nothing would literally have been better than Bonin´s stick inputs.
Exactly, in another video it was said that if they just flied for one minute without touching anything, pitot tubes would unfreeze and eventually everything would be back to normal
I've watched and read a lot about this accident, but all of the sources take their time to explain the details of how it went down. Watching it unfold in real time is gut wrenching. Four minutes is nothing. Heart breakingly tragic 😢
What is so upsetting about this was that there was ample time to save the flight. A more experienced pilot would've assessed, controlled and fixed the problem within 2,500 feet.
If the autopilot shuts off because there's no accurate speed reading how do the stall warnings work, and why? The first stall warning comes just 3 seconds after Bonin says he's taking the controls. The other pilot asks "what's that?", right after the first stall alarm. Bonin answers that it's because there's no valid speed reading. At around 02:10:48 Bonin seems to have regained control and at 02:10:51 the stall warnings start again. And now things take a turn for the worse. It's my impression that the alarms going off in the cockpit made it more difficult to deal with the situation.
Stall warnings aren't linked to the airspeed sensors, but are either triggered by an angle-of-attack vane or a pressure transducer in the wing that detects when the airflow separates. I believe on the A330 it's an AoA vane. This is because it's entirely possible to stall a plane at its normal cruising speed if you can get the angle of attack high enough. Now, I'll agree that the stall warning system probably contributed to the crash. Here's how it works: Airbus put a computer between the pilot and the control surfaces. When the computer is in "normal law" (i.e. its default flight model that's used to generate control deflections), it automatically applies control deflections to keep the plane from approaching too high an angle of attack. Unless, of course, the airspeed indication is considered invalid - then it shifts into "alternate law" and just forwards the control stick inputs straight to the control surfaces without any protections. This also disables the auditory stall warnings, for some weird reason. In this situation, the airspeed sensors were clogged by ice, throwing the plane into alternate law and allowing the crew to get it into an extremely high AoA situation. This high AoA in turn kept the airspeed sensors from getting good readings even once they thawed out - except when the copilot pitched forward enough to start recovering from the stall. As the airspeed indications came back, so did the stall warning - and thus the copilot thought he was giving the wrong inputs. So he pulled back on the stick and the airspeed indications went away - and so did the stall warnings. Rinse and repeat until they run out of altitude. And that, my friends, is why fly-by-wire is a bad thing.
Imagine the passengers: not feeling any vertical velocity, the only evidence they had was the information displayed on their personal IFE screen. From one second to the other, they hit the ocean surface and were instantly dead! That’s so creepy and disturbing! 😣
@@haranglouis5252 they weren't aware of the situation at all, no acceleration clearly perceptible, only buffets at the beggining but clearly interpreted as a basic turbulance Indeed, none passengers screamed and didn't have their seabelt locked on
Flying 95% of autopilot and only manually taking control during T/O and LDG is what pilots are doing all day, every day. It is not without reason that the saying states: "Once the automation turns off or becomes unreliable, the pilots really earn their wages." In this case, 3 pilots were experienced button pushers to engage the autopilot and A/T but beyond that, they were clueless.
@@ericweynands That is not true; the captain was the only one with true experience. But he had spent the 3 night layover 'on the town' with his girlfriend and got little sleep.
One of the things that confused the hell out of the PF though is that the STALL STALL callout stopped each time the airspeed dropped low enough to become invalid (speed tape goes away). Then as soon as airspeed becomes valid, meaning the nose was pitched down, the STALL STALL would come back. This is very counter intuitive and Airbus has changed this since; right now the STALL STALL callouts do not disappear if airspeed goes invalid. It does not excuse the visible lack of competence in seat of pants flying and checking all the raw data to make an assessment that would have shown that the VS indicator was correct (they also didn't trust it due to previous pitot freezing). That is why nowadays there is a lot of emphasis on Upset Prevention and Recovery Training. Where pilots are taught basic flying skills with reduced or no automation where the aircraft is well outside the normal envelope at high altitude (as this A330 clearly was, the airspeed was so low they just couldnt believe this to be possible). The aircraft manufacturers developed special datasets from testflights which give good fidelity of the simulation outside the normal envelope, like a developed stall. This was previously not the case and pilots would train only until the stall warning, never beyond. Lastly, do not underestimate the spatial disorientation. In the night with a lot of aural alerts in, and zero visibility from the cockpit, it is very, very difficult to remains conscious of the environment and your place and velocity vector. Airbus has also added a Backup Speed System, where in case of unreliable airspeed, the speedscale is replaced with a colored bar which allows the crew to fly based on mainly angle of attack. That also could have saved the day. Sadly in a way, such accidents contribute to aviation safety as we know it.
This does not excuse this avoidable accident, but I agree 100% on: "do not underestimate the spatial disorientation. In the night with a lot of aural alerts in, and zero visibility from the cockpit, it is very, very difficult to remains conscious of the environment and your place and velocity vector." I flew Air France from Sao Paulo (not Rio) to Paris shortly after the BEA report publication into the AF447 accident, and we went through heavy turbulence (in the same intertropical convergence zone) in the middle of the night, and it was terrifying, not only for the resonance with the AF447 accident, but the feeling of utter disorientation, desolation, emptiness and vulnerability looking out of my rain-beaten window into an absolute blackness, over the middle of the vast and deep Atlantic Ocean. Every passenger was eyes-wide open on that night - similar perhaps to the condemned passengers of AF447 in their last 3 minutes of life.
This is not reassuring for passengers. Once the computer stopped flying the plane, the pilots could not fly it. How in Gods name could any pilot worthy of the name keep pulling back to try and make the plane fly? And this is not the only case of this happening. Airspeed is correct, attitude indicator is correct, stall warning is correct...still he pulls back?! :-(
You are right, it's a flght basic. Pull on the stick and the houses get smaller, keep pulling on the stick and they get bigger again. This is not the first case of commercial pilots reacting to a stall by holding the stick back either.
+Eduardo Álvares Ribeiro Colgan Air Flight 3407, and evidently according to the recently released report, even Air Asia 8501 which crashed less than a year ago. In the case of the Colgan Air flight, in the midst of the captain's incorrect response, the airplane itself tried to aid the recovery from the stall by forcing the yoke forward via a mechanism known as the "stick pusher". The captain...overrode this mechanism and continued pulling it back....stalling the plane and causing it to crash. Even if you don't account for cases where pilots have deliberately raised the nose despite a stall warning, there are frustratingly several cases of pilots failing to properly respond to a stall warning in a variety of scenarios.
+Elfenbeinturm Media Not "they". It was Bonin, the FO in the FO's seat. Robert (the relief pilot on the left) knew they needed to recover speed, he called for control and tried the lower the nose. Bonin didn't acknowledge and continued his nose up inputs (which cancelled out Robert's) without telling anyone until it was too late to really matter. Even if Bonin didn't trust the warning, that was no excuse for not at least correcting the trim. The ASI's temporarily malfunctioned but his ADI was fine. When the pitots froze all he had to do was keep a steady attitude until they cleared back up and they could re-activate the autopilot. There was no excuse for him to induce and maintain such an attitude. My conclusion is that Bonin was an incompetent pilot who proved he was unqualified to actually fly this plane in the absence of a computer doing it for him. Had Robert been given control when he called it he probably would've corrected it which is exactly what he tried to do when he and the Captain finally realized it was Bonin who'd been causing the problem all along.
Sorry for my ignorance but what's the purpose of idling throttle and pulling stick to maximum in stalling condition? I thought it should be vice versa...
because he thought he was overspeeding ( in his mind, the plane was nose down and was lossing altitude, which makes the plane to get crazy speed and can be very dangerous) , he pulled the stick to reach the correct cruise altitude. In his mind it was : the plane is nose down, lossing altitude and gain some dangerous speed. So he lowered the speed input and put the nose up.
And with the stall warning blaring the whole time? I understand it is disorientating at night but this really is inexcusable. When Robert takes control at about 5.54 and pushes the nose forwards, Bonin is still pulling back. I blame fly-by-wire. Robert and Dubois would not have been able to see what Bonin was doing. This would probably never have happened if the plane had been a Boeing with a yoke.
It's not that simple. I was the first to think that mere incompetence was the only factor but the way the situation develops explains some things. Careful viewing of the animation shows multiple occurrences of the airspeed indication coming back and going away again, along with the stall warning. Looking at the attitude indicator, you can see that the speed indication and stall warning return when the pilot puts the nose down! That is because the rest of the time the plane is in such a deep stall that the computer interprets indications as completely invalid and does not transmits them to the crew, including the stall warning!! The airspeed indicator does not read at all, it just sends an error message, and the stall warning ceases. Imagine being in an airplane where the stall warning goes on when you lower the nose and stops when you raise it! All with inconsistent airspeed indications. It seems (although I have not verified that) that the plane switched by default to direct law because of the incoherent flight information but the crew does not appear aware of that. If it is in direct law, all flight envelope protections are off. I'm not sure the PF would have tried the control inputs he did if he had known that flight envelope protection were disabled.
However, you do have a point. There was a lot of control inputs made, all with very little result. At some point, it seems the PF goes into "try anything and everything" mode with the flight controls. This would have been very visible with a yoke and would have attracted more feedback from other crewmembers. There should never have been so much dual input alarms and there should never have been so much yanking around of the controls. It seems that there was never enough patience from anyone to actually see if a control input was going to yield a result. The side stick makes it easy and inconsequential to play around with the controls while reducing the awareness that doing so moves large aerodynamic surfaces with crucial functions. They moved the stick trying to obtain a change in the warnings and incoherent flight indications instead moving to try to control the airplane. Part of the reason is that they really did not know what the airplane was doing.
pchantreau - I realise I am merely speculating with hindsight but I am of the understanding that there is a checklist for a loss of speed. I believe the correct procedure would be for the PF to keep the plane flying level and the PNF to perform the checklist. Seems the PF just panicked. If that procedure was followed at the start then there would most likely have been no issue and the pitot tubes would probably have unfrozen in a couple of mins.
TheHuntw2 They did unfreeze relatively quickly. PF didn't really panick but took an action he believed to be fairly safe and likely effective according to his training. 85% power and a little nose up is supposed to get you out of most stall situations at lower altitudes, I believe (not sure, I'm not an airbus pilot). At cruise altitude, where your safe window is much smaller, it is probably not advisable. However, if indeed they had flown without changing anything, keeping power and attitude, they would most likely not have stalled, you're right. The only thing that is completely incomprehensible to me is that nobody seems to ever have noticed the AOA indicator. It seems they were all looking at the wrong instruments, attempting to make what they saw fit some already known, simulator practiced, situation and they could never get there. So they fail to simply acknowledge what's in front of them as if somehow the true situation has already been considered impossible, although it's never been discussed. It's very strange.
TheHuntw2 I have to correct that. AOA is not displayed in the cockpit, according to the info at the beginning of the clip. That's unfortunate, it could have dissipated their confusion. On several occasions Bonnin says he fears they're in overspeed, it may have been the cause of his initial nose up input. Thereafter, he struggles with the stick to continuously try to keep the plane wings level with a slight nose up attitude, possibly in the belief that's what the airplane needs to start climbing again. At no time the crew even considers the possibility that they are stalled. It's incomprehensible. It's like collective cognitive impairment in the cockpit. The captain never steps into a captain's role, never suggests anything, never attempts to make an analysis of the situation. I can't understand.
As an airline pilot myself, I'd agree with you on the latter but not on the amateur part... I've been in crazy situations as a pilot (emergency evacuation in my case), and I can assure that experience means nothing if the personality of the individual dealing with the problem is not level headed in an emergency. I've seen grown men with 10 thousands of hours freeze up in a tight spot... It all truly depends on the manner in which the situation is dealt, in my case, that captain's thousands of hours was incident free, so he became jaded and nonchalant and was not ready for an emergency... It's hard to criticize if you aren't the one in the scenario looking at the big picture... But I think we can all agree, pilots and non pilots, that when an airplane stalls, YOU DONT PULL UP!! Damn!!
+mrcannotfindaname Correct me if I'm wrong on anything here, but this accident occured at a time when the pilots in question hadn't got proper training in dealing with situations like iced up pitot tubes etc. Think about how the whole situation evolved: Firstly, the pitot tubes got blocked by ice, and there was also turbulence. When a pitot tube gets blocked, the airspeed indicator starts to work like an altimeter; the higher you go, the higher will the read be on the speed indicator. So, the tube got blocked, and probably due to turbulence, the aircraft was bouncing up and down, and yes, not much deviation in altitude is required for the speed indication to vary. A bounce upwards caused the speed reading to increase rapidly, which then the pilot reacted to by pulling the stick to slow down the aircraft, this in turn increased the positive rate of the aircraft, further increasing the speed reading. Here I believe is where the confusion takes place, think about it; increasing speed, increasing altitude, A/P automatically disengaged, pitch black, turbulence, EICAM warnings on multiple different factors etc etc... So many things are happening at once that you get confused and don't really know what to focus on, they probably tried to understand the situation by interpeting the messages, and did not recognize that the first officer actually was pulling all the time at the stick without noticing because he was so used to the feeling already and the airbus trims the aircraft immediately to the new attitude that you present it to with the stick. He would not have felt any opposing force in the stick I believe. Think about a situation when you have caught yourself holding your hand continuosly on the gearstick in your car after changing gears, or biting your lip for a long time because you started to think how to write something in a correct manner in a really improtant text, or pretty much anything that you have done for a prologned time without even noticing it yourself, just because you got so completetly distracted by something else that caught your attention.
+Martijn Denecker +1, I'd even add the fact that, in these situations, no matter what the airspeed says, always rely on logic.. In other words, a leveled flight at a constant speed, pitch and angle of attack, should never cause an altitude change.. It doesn't make sense to be at 100kt of you're aircraft is leveled at 36000ft with a constant 4 degree pitch and you have 60% of N1..
just tragic, not going to comment on the skills or how events unfolded not even about automation dependency. lives were lost and what do we do about it, how we prevent the causes of this accident are the real matter here.
Absolutely astonishing. That crew flew the airplane in a full stall all the way down from 33,000 feet not knowing it. Because of the incredible inherent stability of the aircraft, there really wasn't any physical warning....
+Derrick Cui I think he didn't realise that FO was still making stick inputs, so throttled down to try and regain control. once pitched down can throttle up again, there wasn't enough time though.
They thought they were going fast, there was a lot of shaking and sounds in the deteriorating cockpit environment which made them think they were over speeding. Quite sad that 2/3 experienced pilots in the cockpit couldn't figure out what was going on with the plane.
Obviously the FD gave Bonin the instruction to climb as the computers calculated mistakenly a loss of altitude. He thought he was in an overspeed situation which could be overcome by such action.
You cannot be overspeeding with a stall warning. Stall means the wings do not have enough lift to keep the plane flying. So they should have ignored the speed tape and lower the nose?
One should take in consideration that they could not fully access the situation due to the fact that it was night and no atc. They were probably feelingvery high G forces due to the rapid descent and probably he misinterpreted them as overspeed. That can trick one's perception and explains the throttle positions almost to the end of the flight... To make it worse they could not have ONE correct reading about the SPEED in some mild weather scenario.. Well there's never only one factor in a crash I guess. Rip to all of them..
I strongly identify with most of the baffled comments on here. The only way to answer WTF was he/they doing, would be to develop a psychological state profile for each sequence of events. That is, so we would have a picture of the emotionals terrain to match with the physical issues, AoA, airspeed, altitude etc. We can make very reasonable guesses about what an individual is feeling in response to the aircraft's behaviour and I think it likely, quite easily link this to his control inputs in a logical way. A careful psychological study would give a much better than half assed explanation for their behaviour. Has this been attempted? because if not how can lessons be learned?
He was in a known psychological trap that proper training is supposed to overcome. When your instruments contradict each other or indicate you're in an "impossible" state (like around 03:02, with his airspeed showing plenty of speed, throttle at cruise setting, pitched right where the flight director says, yet a stall warning?), there's a tendency to fixate on waiting for it to make sense and rely on your physical sensation. They probably hit a terminal vertical velocity so he was only feeling 1G (feels like they're level), and attitude indicator and standby indicator showing wings level and only pitched slightly up. He probably thinks airspeed's obviously broken because it's swinging around wildly. He could easily wonder why the altimeter showed them descending so fast -- it doesn't make sense and doesn't physically feel like they were -- so maybe the altimeters are broken too? Or maybe there's wing damage and they lost elevator control? He may have felt things were "stable for now" with full aft sidestick so that's why he kept it where it was until someone could figure out which instruments were right and which weren't. The Aero Peru 603 crash showed similar flight crew confusion about what instruments and warnings were working and what weren't (also due to blocked pitot tubes).
@@ronwilliams357 The Airbus flight control system also reinforced his misperception by disabling the stall warning auditory indication when the pitot tubes weren't giving good readings (because of too high an angle of attack). Every time he pitched forward, the stall warning came back - but because he's feeling positive g and wasn't trusting the airspeed indicator, he actually believed they were going too fast. So he pulls up and obscures the pitot tubes again, disabling the stall warning and convincing him even further that he's on the right track.
When you are scared of an emergency situation and you are unable to handle it for minutes, your stress level and the amount of mistakes increase - logically... Nobody expects emergencies in the middle of a flight, that proceeded calmly so far
I noticed that on the animation, the flight director was recommending a nose-high attitude. I wonder if the pilot was led astray by this and if the director was responding to the erroneous airspeed. If that was the case, it seems like the flight director should have disengaged along with the autopilot.
One question I've always had is, after all three pitot tubes de-iced and the air data computers were in agreement again, why didn't normal law kick back in and re-establish the stall protection (alpha floor)? Is there something else that an Airbus crew has to reset in order to get out of alternate law and back to normal law?
Also the speed was so law at some point that the stall alarm stopped. Because nobody at airbus thought a plane would go that slow. And it was a problem in this accident because when they were regaining speed the stall alarm will go again.
Shouldn't a pilot know everything about there plane. And why didn't the captain say before he went tubes probably freeze up here chap's being a veteran of that route
in the voice transcript, Dubois is heard to tell Bonin to look at the Standby horizon, and then both Robert and Dubois tell Bonin he's "climbing" and therefore to go down. What was on the standby horizon that was different from the PFDs that he could see on both sides? Is it possible the PFD was wrong with respect to attitude?
That's what I'm thinking...How can you see the altitude dropping with a positive attitude and not think stall? The pitot tubes were also free by then...Unreal..
If you can't feel the +1.5G while pulling the stick with full throttle, then you push the damn stick! the CP came to flight deck after the stall begins. there is something wrong, why did he was not on the deck already? why the FO didn't called him immediately the problem occurs? why the CP did not take the stick and recover the situation? WHY on earth both of them did not use the IRS speed on top column?
He wanted to keep the plane "level". Unfortunately, he thought it would be a good idea to pull back and go crazy with the stick in attempt to stabilize the plane.
If you look closely, you can see that Bonin's actions on the flight stick are coordinated with the indications provided by the flight director wich was giving wrong ones obviously.
If you continually get a stall warning wouldn't that mean you're not going fast enough? Shouldn't they have left the throttle at full and put the nose down until the indicated airspeed demonstrated they were flying through the air again, especially with the sink rate going off as well? They weren't flying, they were falling.
Well, the stall alarm was triggered and could be heard on the CVR 75 times, also the pitot tubes only malfunctioned for about 30 seconds and the altitude indicator was working normal the whole time. The problem was that the first officer didn't want to believe he was stalling.
I think I can kinda see what bonin was trying to do. It looks like bonin was flying the thrust/pitch setting given in the unreliable speed memory items checklist - 10 degrees pitch and thrust in climb detent. 10 degrees pitch is only used below 10,000 feet. Above 10,000 feet the pitch should be only 5 degrees so this meant that he pitched up 5 degrees more than he should have. He might have done this out of muscle memory because most of his unreliable speed training in the simulator would have been at lower altitudes. When the plane started stalling he applied toga and 15 degrees of pitch which is a standard escape manovuer at low altitude (where most of his manual flying experience would have been from) He may have done this by instinct in a attempt to "climb away from danger". In fact this is exactly what the checklist tells you to do if you stall during takeoff. Basically he was flying the plane by the logic of as if it were at low altitude in normal law. Flying the plane at cruise in alternate law is not something he would have done often if at all. I don't want to be some armchair pilot but this might explain a bit how bonin was thinking
When it first happened, the very first min of the disaster sequence, his display is showing the plane is losing altitude 300-600 feet per min ( he didn’t know the pitot tube malfunction) and also he didn’t know he then was flying in alt law instead of normal law in the airbus where in normal law you can and were taught to pull the stick all the way back and full thrust the computer will not let the airbus stall.
At 5:54 Robert (Left) takes control and pushes the stick down and the aircraft slowly starts increasing airspeed and recovering...BUT WHY DOES HE STOP?!! At 5000 ft he brings his stick back to neutral and even begins inputting downward motions. Were both Robert and Bonin inept?
+FSX737Pilot X Neither of them recognized the stall, its likely that both thought that the aircraft wasn't responding properly (or at all) to their stick inputs. At several points on the CVR both pilots make comments about having no control over the aircraft.
+Jamenator1 Well according to the Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript, Bonin finally says that he had been pulling back the whole time. That is when Captain Dubois says "No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no." at 02:13:42. Then Robert says "Descend, then... Give me the controls... Give me the controls!" Bonin releases the controls and Robert takes the controls and begins pushing the stick to descend like he said.......but then he stops!!! HE HAD ENOUGH ALTITUDE TO RECOVER!!! WHY DID HE STOP???
FSX737Pilot X He stopped because he probably was unsure if they were in a stall, just 1 second before Bonnin said he had the stick back, Robert was saying "Climb, climb, climb, climb", so he obviously wasnt sure and the captain telling them to descend but not mentioning a "stall" probably didnt provide either of them with enough info to work out what was happening. It probably wouldnt have made a difference though, at that time they were descending through 8000ft, it would have been cutting it quite tight
The plane was losing critical speed so they are falling down. The nose should have been faced down but the pilot, maybe due to panic, kept the nose up thus contributing to the loss of speed.
I dont know why the side stick was pulled back causing nose up, IN A STALL NOSE DOWN ! ! ! no matter what plane, If speed is unreadable, NOSE DOWN! not up. increasing stall rate. this has happened before too. Based on not paying attention and pilots exhaustion.
***** It does seem very easy (now we know all the facts ) sat in a warn room during the day to say that they should have done this and should have put the nose down.But imagine this happening in the dark of night with no visual reference while you are been thrown around in a thunderstorm with the EICAS lighting up like a Christmas tree with error messages and alarms going off .Going from sat with the autopilot on and then the autopilot going off and you are left with control at the height of confusion.He sees the altitude tape winding down at a rate and in his mind to climb is to pull the stick back.In order to correctly react he would have first have to understand they were stalled and then reduce pitch attitude.The angle of attack remained greater than the stall angle of attack the whole time but the angle of incline displayed on the PFD remained (for most of the time ) normal.With no airspeed information and the confusion I can understand why he didn't recognize the stall.
I know its easy judging from the sidelines after the event, but seriously, not once was the side stick put forward, When IMC black out conditions occur, you rely on your instruments, not outside cues. this is how you pass your instrument rating. obviously after 3.5 minutes you may wantto try something else, rather than pulling the nose up.. just IMO and i understand that the a330 when speed tape is erratic the procedure, but they had a cricket chirp and stall warning that does not merit nose up attitude.
Well by that time it was to late for the speed of falling down and aoa was to great to overcome. Initial first minutes into the stall was pulled back left and right. Just frustration level when your seeing control inputs opposite of what your supoosed to do. I have a feeling later in the report is lack of training ect added to the crash
What was the difficulty in assessing the situation? Repeated stall warnings...the ADI almost constantly in the blue suggesting nose up...loss of airspeed....in the last seconds I was waiting for the stall warning voice to say "What! Am I a joke to you!?"
If the sidesticks were attached, the relief pilot would have corrected Bonin's mistakes on time, or would have proceeded in a quick diagnosis of what was going on.
It’s never been as accurate and it uses ground speed not airspeed so it will vary depending at altitude. The newer aircraft can use the AOA sensors to determine if they are at a safe speed and the A350 has a different back up speed and altitude mode
Good old times learning to fly a Cessna 152 and later on the Cessna 172... first lesson: if you hear the stall horn, nose down... what were those morons doing on a flight deck?
I don't get why don't Airbuses show the inputs of both sidesticks in one of the ECAMs. For example small indicators on the upper corners of the upper ECAM (one from both sidesticks) Or maybe just keep the stick input indicator active on the PFD while AP is inactive, because currently it deactivates just after takeoff right?
THE ANGLE OF ATTACK IS NOT DISPLAYED IN THE COCK PIT? THAT IS F**KING STUPID. THAT SHOULD BE A VITAL PARAMETER ON DISPLAY. WHAT MORON DESIGNED THAT OMISSION?
I heard like.. when they would pull up..the stall warning would stop and when the pushed the nose down..like they were supposed to the stall warning would sound. That would be extremely confusing to troubleshoot imo.
A lot of people asks what the PAX would have felt. Some sugarcoat it saying they would be sleeping and would not have felt or heard anything. They are WRONG. It would have been TERRIFYING for the passengers: - 2:10 They would have experienced the see-saw from left to right in addition to the bumps. - 3:05 They would have experienced the aircraft vibrations - 3:58 They would have felt the steep turn and initial sink - 3:46 They would have heard the jets roar up to the TO setting - max rev for its entirety - They would have heard and felt the plane dropping like a brick, sinking down thru turbulent winds and clouds - They would have heard and felt the wind as they they sunk at a very high rate I know its terrible, but that is what they would have experienced. Rest in Peace Read: www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877/
Yup, completely accurate. I been in turbulent flights during the night , even the slightest turbulence woke everyone up, kids crying, seat belt sign sound, flight attendants running to their seats. And it only lasted 1 minute.
Flying-Experience - The passengers of AF 447 did not not experience a "terrifying" descent. The aileron wing rolls were not steep banks and somewhat gradual in execution. The "vibrations" would have been minimal and probably not even noticeable from inside the cabin. There were no steep turns and the initial sink acceleration descent was gradual and would not have resulted in even 0g. Pretty much all flight regimes of the doomed descent never exceeded 1.7 g's which you can easily exceed in the kiddie section of a amusement park. The "roar" of the engines at TOGA only happened momentarily and would not have been appreciably louder than the 85% thrust setting at cruise. Plus, at higher altitudes, the decibel level of engine sound is muted and nowhere near as loud as during sea level take-offs. Also, 2 minutes prior to heading into the convective area, FO Bonin told FA "Marilyn" via the cockpit inter-phone to take a seat in her jumpseat and to tell the others to do the same. So the FA's and passengers were already given a head's up about some upcoming turbulence, which ended up being minimal (didn't even require a seatbelt). Finally, the captain (Dubois) was able to make his way to the cockpit and sit in the flight deck jump seat without having to put his seat belt on. He did not express any concerns about the aircraft's erratic flight on the CVR.
Flying-Experience I’ve ‘practiced’, this accident in the sim 3 times (full motion) over the years, and I can tell you, everyday turbulence can be more aggressive. If you’ve been in the sim (A330) and have a different experience, please let us know, otherwise stop being a scaremonger!
First of all I’m no pilot and have no training on flying an airplane, but I would like some ideas on why they would go full bore with the thrusters one minute then throttle back all the way in just a few seconds?
Gotta wonder if it had a yoke instead of the side stick if it would have been more obvious to captain and other pilots to see what inputs the guy flying was putting in, and for them to comprehend what was happening...
To all the armchair MSFS pilots who put all the blame on the FO: Two things to consider. (1) It took 3 seconds from autopilot disengaging to "Stall! Stall!". The first stall warning was false (due to pitot tubes icing), so no wonder, the later stall warnings were initially ignored. (2) As you can see in this replay, the stall warnings stopped when Bonin pulled the sidestick, and started again when the AoA decreased. This very confusing phenomenon (the airspeed being so low that the stall warning stops) added to the disorientation and to Bonin further pulling the stick. If I'm not mistaken, this fact is even mentioned in the final report of AF 447. I hope Airbus changed this very confusing stall warning behaviour. Last thing to mention: Neither of the three AF 447 pilots was suicidal. They all wanted to save the plane and souls on board. So stop blaming someone who paid with his life!
6:05 Bonin's sidestick movement was the last nail in the coffin for them. The other pilot was on his way of finally recovering it at the very last minute but unfortunately Bonin fucked up everything.. Look at the angle of attack 6:02... then 6:20.. So sad.
I guess Bonin doesn't understand that the horizon is not an absolute point to follow while flying. While the plane cruises, you'd keep the plane wings level on the center of the horizon. But when airspeed goes low, and a stall happens, the angle of attack changes, and the horizon that you see on the screen is not where you should be going for.
The deck angle of 15+° was apparent on each attitude indicator. The altimeters were unwinding rapidly. So point the plane in the direction it is going. Dump the nose. When Robert tried that, even though the wing was deep-stalled there seemed to be elevator authority. Good, they were in luck. Some planes in a deep stall don't have enough elevator authority to get the nose down.
I've "tried" the same figure on Flight Simulator with a B 747/400. The result is so dreadful, from 36,000 to sea level, the plan dives at more than 600 knots. From flight level 360 to sea level in less than 90 seconds.
@@Holland1994D And the thrust was low because the plane had climbed to 40000ft, the thin air and lost speed, then lost lift and started falling like a rock. And instead of putting the plane into the dive which would probably recovered it at that altitude, he was still pulling the nose up. He had absolutely no idea.
I think this is an school example of disorientation, panicking and being insecure in your actions. My first opinion was, that pilots were not to be blamed, because they encountered serious problem with losing their pitots. What is to blame here is, that they didnt change a descision and try to bypass the mass over atlantic, even for the price of possible additional fuel stop or even diverting back, because we all know what a problem encountering red zones can mean, especialy those over atlantic. Similar pitot problems were being reported on 340s and 330s at that time and that should be a good alert not to play with fire and could simply try to avoid such severe icing conditions, rather than encountering them carelessly. Regarding his actions, if not before, he could realise stall dive when his inputs became inreactive. Reduce power a bit to decrease nose up tendency and unload the bird with nose down input.Thing, learned at initial hours on cessna already. PIC should overtake here and with sidestick priority, overrun CM2's bad actions. With number of hours, he had, he should comprehend the situation. Also, it is obvious that speed tape was behaving really unusual, or at least, more unusual than altitude tape which was responding quiet logicaly. He could also compare IAS with GS a bit just for reference, as it takes data from IRS and he could predict pitotes being blocked within these 4 minutes. But lets be honest here, human factor played enormous role in this one. We can be smartasses now, but what they were going through within that 5 minutes, was a nightmare. So not blaming them on their reactions, but can totaly blame them for their descision making, before digging in that major thropical storm.
One detail about this accident that particuarly disturbs me is that later on it was concluded by the accident investigation team that after the plane had descended to about FL315 (31,500 feet) that the aircraft was in a virtually uncontrollable state and there was absolutely nothing they could do after that point to effectively recover the aircraft and still have the altitude to establish stable flight again. It would've taken a crew with an extremely competent understanding of flight control to have made the recovery from that It's a pretty daunting fact that even if Captain Dubois had intervened at an earlier time or hadn't had his inputs cancelled out by Bonin that the outcome would most likely have stayed the exact same..
This comment section is full of armchair pilots who've never set foot in a real cockpit before. Read the official report, the stall alarm was contradictory, and sensorial hallucinations may have occurred, I'm not sure many people here would've saved the plane, it seems obvious now that we know what happened, but at the time, even the experienced captain didn't know what was happening
Not an amateur here. The PF of this aircraft had no idea of what a high altitude stall is and how to recover from it. His actions only aggravated the situation. If the Captain had not been having fun in Rio with his lover (she was on board) could have been on better shape to delay his nap until they were clear of the stormy weather over the Atlantic. We pilots used to cross it every week know that on the inter-tropical convergence there's always rough weather. Thanks.
@@cockpitchatter1 Exactly plain incompetence of lack of professionalism. im not a pilot i just sell eyeglasses. if i know a difficult client is coming today to get his glasses that are delayed i dont go away from the store. i stay just if i need to defuse a potentially problematic situation with him. he had hundreds of lives on his shoulders.
Its clear plane was lost mainly duo to pilot incompetence. Bonin was panicking even before Captain went to take his rest, listening to comms before autopilot switched of he sounded stressed, he was in no position to fly that plane. Additionally, all problems started with erratic movement of stick, which was really not what you expect from professional pilot. They were at 35000 feet, at that point, when pitot tubes froze, all he had to do is remain calm and make minimal (if any) movements with the stick. At that altittude, small inputs mean alot, and because of air density, its easy to stall the plane and hard to get it back. As he hecticly moved the stick, it went from bad to worse. Their altittude dropped like a rock, and there is no way anyone was saving that plane when it went below 30k except if the pilot knew exactly what is the cause, which at that point was not clear to any of them. Once Captain came back and heard he has been pulling stick up entire time he knew what time it was, but descent was massive and after seconds of pushing nose down, they heard "Terrain, pull up, pull up" which made Bonin pull up AGAIN (this time instinctively) as they knew they were crashing. This is tragic story of flying perfectly fine plane into abyss. But many things had to happen in order for this to happen, and while Bonin is mainly at fault, the fact that it was decided to go through heavy storm, with Capt going to sleep at that moment and pitot tubes freezing at 35000 feet meant any movement of plane was to be extremely careful and there was no place for panic. Unfortunately, Bonin panicked and was anything but careful, and we know what happened in the end. That descend from 37000 feet to ocean was panic inducing, very hard to think in this case, only possible way to save the plane was identifying stall at 30000+, rollling plane a bit to side and pushing stick down in order to actually fly again. Pushing stick down at those altittudes wont help with stall, they would wait for too much to get it going again, roll was needed as well.
+Ernest Chabert Yes, but he didn't physically took control of the plane when he enter the cockpit he would of relized what was happening, instead he just watched until it was too late :(
Bonin was quick to react to the autopilot disconnect. Aside from slight over corrections, maintained control but then clearly lost situational awareness bringing the aircraft into a deep stall
Watching Bonin's stick inputs pisses me off. That man had no business on the flight deck of a commercial airplane with that kind of panicking instinct.
YOU mean "cockpit" !
He was a son of a bitch.
I think him and the other crew thought they lost engines or thurst.
Yea, if you believe anything Airbus says.
OneOkami: Makes me angry too. Some real bad habits early on, combined with like you said, panicking instinct. I guess you are a pilot yourself, and probably have been an instructor.
I can't say I'd do any better.
But that's why I'm a Security Officer. Not airline pilot of a flagship airline.
The F/O did excellent job keeping the plane stalled for 4+ minutes.... Such a tragic loss due to incompetence...
even if he did nothing, the aircraft would have kept itself stalled. After the aircraft had stalled, the computer was trying to maintain 1G, so even when the stick was neutral the elevator was still full nose up, and when the stick was full foward, the elevator was still half nose up. He didn't hold the aircraft in a stall, he simply failed to recover it, as did the other pilot.
Man, could you educate yourself a little before talking nonsense. There's tons of information as well as final report for the accident. Use this> www.google.com
skypiratez i know i have read the final report, and it shows the elevator at full nose up for most of the decent, caused by the aircraft trying to hold 1G. everything i said is factually true
***** he did cause the initial stall, but after the aircraft had stalled his nose up inputs had no effect on the elevator position, the computer was holding them at full nose up to try to hold 1G. The other crew members were just as at fault though, they failed to recognize the situation either, in fact the pilot in the left seat KNEW at the beginning that bonnin was pulling back and told him to stop, but he took it no further than that. BTW the unreliable airspeed procedure is not trained for high altitude, its trained for climb, so he actually did apply the procedure he was trained for, it was just not the correct time to apply it. It was a massive screw up no doubt, but these pilots were just like any other pilots, they just happened to screw it up under those specific circumstances. The pilots were fatigued, there was nobody clearly in charge (flat authority gradient), lack of CRM, turbulence/buffeting, information overload and then just utter confusion and spatial disorientation, trust me when i say it could happen to any pilot under the right circumstances. It says more about their training than themselves, they were just doing their best, they were not bellow average pilots, they were fully qualified and had passed all of Air France's training requirements. If you blame just the pilots it solves nothing, you have to ask why the pilots did that and how can we stop pilots from doing that in the future.
Oh and just an FYI, Bonnin was also glider pilot, so i'm very sure he knew how to hand fly and knew what a stall was.
Jamenator1 The elevator trim was nose up because the F/O was commanding a nose up! Look carefully how brief the nose-down inputs are. And the elevator trim responded to them with going nose-down. And if the F/O didn't do anything from the very beginning, there would have been no stall.
To me every single input Bonin applied to the aircraft pulled all the souls aboard that much closer to death. The man was told not to move the stick yet he persisted in his imbecile actions. Notice at 5:58 the right side stick Bonin gets instructed once again to remove his hands from the stick, he does, then as the other pilot regains control of the aircraft (left sidestick) slowly but meaningfully the plane starts to recover from the stall with AirSpeed, then not even 10 seconds Bonin touches the stick and finally completely takes the lives of all on board. deeply saddened
That's true. But what puzzles me more is why Robert didn't realize that Bonin was cancelling his inputs. There is a "Dual input" warning that was triggered. Airbus aircraft also have a Priority Takeover button, which lets one pilot take control and have the airplane ignore inputs from the other sidestick.
Abraham O the reason why ? Its because when robert pushed the nose down the plane started to recover which make the speed goes beyond 60kts and that triggered the stall warning again In which make Bonin think the only way was to keep pulling back until the stall alarm goes silent! stupidity at its peak :/
Bomfunk777 sidestick priority came after this accident if i am not wrong
@andreasolsen5174 It wouldn't surprise me if Airbus only added it in afterwards. They really didn't seem to put much thought into how their fly-by-wire system might work in a real application, and that seems like something they'd miss.
@@vicroc4 alright 2 things.. Airbus had to prove to FAA and EASA (to name a few) that fly by wire works.. which they did.. AND.. 99% of aircraft accidents are caused by human factors.. AF447 being the perfect example of it.. Pilot Monitoring made clear instructions to let the plane figure itself out... and pilot flying didnt listen to those commands until it was too late..
Imagine the Captain exits cockpit for a nap and all is well... A few minutes later he re-enters and within a moment realizes the grave situation and within another moment slams into the ocean and is dead. Unbelievable, this just cannot happen.
Anything can happen when Bonin is at the controls.
Well it did happen :/
Bonin from 3:50 to around 4:30 is like 40 SOLID seconds of a stick input that has no place outside a stunt show. Like what 😳 the fuck.
I wonder what was he dreaming about??
Don’t think the captain was having a nap.
Atleast he joined the club before eternal life✈️✈️✈️
Over the years as I've read more and more about this tragedy, I've come to believe that Bonin did not panic IMMEDIATELY after the auto pilot shut off. He was freaking out way before and Captain Dubois and Robert just didn't pick up on it.
This is why it would be helpful if the real recordings were released. Timing, tone of voice etc would reveal a huge amount of information about the internal state of mind of Bonin, and also the status relationship he had with the other two pilots.
@@yggdrasil9039 Neither of this was relevant to the accident. What was indeed relevant: The confusing Stall warnings of Airbus. When the plane's nose was lowered, the "Stall! Stall" warning sounded, when Bonin pulled the stick, the stall warning stopped. You can see it in the replay above. This can be explained by the airspeed being so low, that the stall warning shutting down / being overcasted by other warnings. However, it added to the confusion and to the FO (most likely) believing they were in an overspeed stall, or believing the stall warnings were false. Panic was a reaction to - not the cause of - the stall they've gotten themselves into.
@@petermuller5800 that feature of the stall warning going off when he lowered the nose (now fixed by Airbus) certainly added to the confusion , but the warning did not cause the stall. Bonin caused the stall, by pulling back on the stick. Why did he pull back on the stick? Because he panicked. But as the initial poster commented, he was freaking out long before the incident, and his desire to climb away from the problem is a very human reaction. It probably goes back to when we were primates and sought safety from predators and imminent threats by climbing up in the trees. Interesting and tragic that it overrode all his flight training. Pulling up is a page one error, but climbing away from danger is instinctively wired in.
@@petermuller5800 So I've watched a bunch of documentaries on this, and a couple of different versions of the flight data recorder animations and one of the best documentaries to help explain the behavior of the crew was done by the Mentour Pilot channel. At that time, in Air France training, they really only focused on stall recovery at low altitudes and when the alpha floor protection system was working (while the plane was in 'Normal Law'). The training advised the pilots to put the plane's engines into TOGA thrust, and apply maximum nose up on the side stick because at lower altitudes you can often power out and climb away from a stall, and the alpha floor protection system won't let you pull the nose up too far back. This scenario was iced over pitot tubes, with initially false stall warnings caused by unreliable airspeed. The pilots did not put proper emphasis on the ECAM action which told them they were now in alternate law and had no stall protection or bank angle protection, and I believe that revering back to his training, Bonin pulled back on the stick and inadvertently climbed to an altitude the plane couldn't fly at, causing the plane to lose attitude, and eventually enter an actual stall due to continued pulling back on the side stick while simultaneously losing speed. Further confusing the crew, once the instruments that measured speed were no longer clogged with ice and the plane was in a fully developed stall, they were reading speeds so low that they would only ever be seen while on the ground, so the stall warnings stopped; until the plane received nose down commands, restoring the airspeed measurements and bringing the stall warnings back, which only reenforced their idea that they should not be pushing forward on the side stick. Ideally, when those pilots ran into an unreliable airspeed scenario while in cruise, the pilots should have been able to look at their remaining instruments, see that the engine parameters are within normal limits, realize that nothing about the planes configuration has changed, and see on their attitude display that the plane was in level flight, so in all likelihood it was a speed measurement issue only, and they were fine where they were. At that point, they could have used the Airbus pitch and power settings in the planes manual to fly the aircraft manually until the pitot tube heaters do their job, and they can revert back to basic aerodynamics to fly the aircraft if they ran into a problem. Sadly, this didn't happen. The more experienced pilot didn't take over quickly enough and wasn't assertive enough, the captain didn't take a seat at the controls when he came back into the cockpit, Bonin kept putting his hands on the side stick and hitting the takeover button when it wasn't his job to be doing so, and none of them worked well under the stress of what turned into a more confusing scenario than it needed to be. I feel bad for all of them, despite all of Bonin's flawed control inputs which were human reactions in the grand scheme of things. None of them deserved what happened to them.
He was quick to take control, inputs shoulda been smaller but given the startle and storm slight over corrections are understandable
If you're 35,000 feet in the air AND flying over the ocean when the autopilot shuts off where does the common sense kick in and say, "Hey we have a few minutes to figure this out." There is IMMEDIATE panic and it still to this day disgusts me. The loss of life here is absurd.
This.
Compare these clowns to the miracle on the hudson
In their defense, the autopilot disconnect was a result of unreliable airspeed. That is what really ticked them of. They then reverted to Alternate Law which has limited protection and indeed, the autopilot disconnect. There is some blame to put in the training system as well. Because a scenario like this, in that time, was rarely trained for.
In the end though you just need to fly the damn plane, there are 3 independent pitots and they should have been able to fly pitch and power to buy time, assess, work checklists... and we would never heard about this.
Bonin appears to have assumed that the plane could not be stalled, failing to understand that the anti-stall mechanisms built into Normal Law do not apply in Alternate Law. But what else he thought was causing the plane to drop is anyone’s guess.
@@dave43211 This is my theory as well. He was probably told "you can't stall an airbus" which is true in Normal law. I wonder how much simulator flying is done in alternate law?
@@dave43211 At that point surely you just revert to old-fashioned aviation knowledge. I'm dropping, the stall warning is going, put the nose down, sort the AoA out, and dive out of it?
We'll never know, of course.
This is a great video. I've seen this video 2 years ago, but now re-wacthing it again I noticed something that might explaine Bonin's non sense and erratic movements on the joystick. I think the guy was just paying attention to the FD (flight director). He tries desperately to put the black dot on the green cross. He does not care about angle of attack, speed, heading and altitude indicators. So instead of making an aircraft recovery and fly by himself, he just wants to mantain the programed course on the FMS. The only thing it matters on his head in the first seconds of the "emergency" (specially between 3:00 and 3:50) is to stay inside the green cross envelope. What makes me wonder is why is he so obcessed with the FD green cross (was it a training bad habit he developed?). Because the stall warning was there, the dual input warning, the altitude decreasing, from time to time the correct speed appears on the display, etc. What do you think people?
It was told in the final conclusion that the FD was inducing the pilot flying.
It can be interpreted also that Bonin was fearing an overspeed and did not trust the stall warning, the crew not able to figure out which indications was really wrong.
The final conclusion suggests this.
In a word, even not being at the max altitude, there is strong clues that Bonin immediately took the situation as an overspeed and pitched up. Instead of taking a time to communicate his picture of the situation and take a time to analyse.
Fatigue played a great role in the poor crew communication and management but also in décision process. The lack of training also.
Adding to that, the pilots were first distracted by several fault messages. This along with fatigue created a false picture of the situation in their minds.
A human brain takes about 20 seconds to interpret a situation. Past this delay, it's very difficult to get out of the first interpretation.
After 30 seconds, they were not realizing they were putting the plane in a stall, they were already doomed.
Sad.
They certainly began to understand... Too late.
@dothemathright 1111 you're right. It bas been pointed by many pilots.
Airbus design did not help.
Yes when the captain re enter the cockpit he told Bonin to focus on on the artificial horizon and keep the wing leveled. He did a great job at that.
Similar thing happen I believe with Emirates 777
It’s called a sidestick not a joystick. And you’re leaving out one other critical element. Notice what the stall alarm does when the stick is pulled back?
Bonin made grave mistakes but he's definitely not doing random things or holding the stick back all the time in blind panic. He's actually responding to everything (even if wrongly).
When the autopilot disconnects the altimeter shows a sudden loss of altitude, which implies the nose dropped, and speed would be rapidly increasing. Overspeed can be just as dangerous as stalling, so it's not illogical to pull the nose up right away. He didn't know it was a false reading.
In those first moments Bonin also has trouble oversteering due to the controls responding differently (Alternate Law), but he does stabilize and center the controls (2:55), and actually lowers the nose to just 5 degrees up (alerted by co-pilot), regaining control.
At this point however, he still doesn't know the speed of the plane and we get important hints that in his mind he's still afraid of overspeed. If you listen to the cockpit voice recording (ruclips.net/video/3d2zEuvlvEs/видео.html) he actually says he thinks they're "flying too fast" (30:12) right before the captain gets back. You can also see that right after he's done stabilizing the controls, he reduces the throttle. I can even imagine that the added noise from flying through ice subconsiously created the illusion of increased speed in his mind.
Of course Bonin is supposed to use the altimeter in the absence of reliable speed indication, but he complains in the CVR: "the problem is I don't have vario" (31:22), which implies he doesn't trust the altimeter either. In this uncertain situation the first stall suddenly sounds, and he instantly responds with full throttle and stick back. Stick back is the wrong move here, but the CVR explains there is logic in his action: he is performing a TOGA move (Take Off / Go Around), which you normally use to save the plane from a crash. I think this shows he's becoming overwhelmed, unable to apply the proper procedure (but applying a procedure still). The other co-pilot is no help, he totally ignores the remark and just wishes out loud for the captain to be there already.
Not long after, the last pitot unfreezes and the Flight Director cross likely reappears for Bonin, which would normally help him stay at his intended altitude. For some reason though it indicates that he's below his cruising altitude even though he's well above it at almost 38.000 ft. This could explain why he pulls on the stick again, trying to follow the FD. He knows he has throttle set to full, and being too low would confirm his earlier fears about nosediving, concluding that altitude needed to be gained rather than speed. You can also see that once again, he throttles back, this time all the way to zero (4:00) as altitude rapidly decreases. This is exactly what you would do if you were in a nosedive.
In the end, had he trusted the stall warnings or at least tried at any point to dive for stall recovery, then all could have turned out OK. But if your mind is set on a certain track, especially under duress, it's extremely hard to "reset", especially if the solution is doing something you are (apparently) most afraid of.
very sensible analysis 👏🏽
we're both trying to Monday morning quarterback- but discussing this helps everyone sorta makes sense. That is true that his Speed indicator wasn't working BUT when does a plane ever Stall with nose pointing down, 99% of the time a plane doesn't stall pointing nose slightly downward & a high percentage that nose up does result in a plane that is stalled, correct?
I agree with you, if the pilot doesn't have accurate speed readings being displayed and altitude is showing plane is falling & stalling is sounding. Its just a stressful and dire place nobody ever wants to find themselves in.
What I learned is such a big plane, once stalled, even being at 37,000ft still isn't enough to recover if making incorrect control inputs. A pilot in this plane approaches 10,000ft and its almost like Game Over.
Another sad fact is the Captain awakens and reenters BUT never jumps in the chair to actually try anything. He stands back stating what to try but never once grabbed the controls or Says I have control.
Dual Control Input blows my mind- it either cancels out co pilot inputs or both pilots fighting over controls happens far too often. On the Airbus the other pilot can feel what the other one is inputting because they can't feel it on their joystick is sad.
Really good comment that kind of sheds light, for me, on some of Bonin's actions. It kind of reminds of the famous AeroPeru accident where Duct Tape was covering the static pitot ports. One pilot, there, also latched onto a sensible, albeit wrong, interpretation of their bad data. Panic and the fog of information really does a number on your cognitive ability. Like you said, pulling yourself out of the situation and reanalyzing the problem is difficult. It's almost like a kind of "sunk cost" mentality there. As in, _"if you start over, you waste precious time, so you can't start over."_
@@Mikinct > "That is true that his Speed indicator wasn't working BUT when does a plane ever Stall with nose pointing down".
And how can you be sure the plane is stalling when flying blind and being unsure which instruments to trust? False stall alarms do exist and to my knowledge have resulted in at least 1 crash due to pilots lowering the nose, causing overspeed. And the point of my interpretation is that what happened before the first stall caused target fixation / tunnel vision; this happens all the time in stressful situations.
> "Another sad fact is the Captain awakens and reenters BUT never jumps in the chair to actually try anything."
The Captain wakes up with no idea what state the plane is in or what the pilots have already attempted. You don't just "jump in and try stuff". Maybe he thought they were still high up and it was best to analyze what was going on. Who knows. At best he might have immediately doublechecked that stall recovery was being performed, at which point Bonin might have voiced again that he was afraid of overspeed, and maybe the others could have overruled him at that point.
I can't believe you are trying to say Robert was useless here.
And Bonin is panicking. You can see his stick movements.
You hear a stall warning and you keep puling the nose up? Come on, be real.
Can't help but wonder if the other pilots would have figured out what Bonin was doing if the side sticks were yokes like on Boeings. Seeing my yoke being pulled into my gut while in a stall would certainly make me slap the other pilot and take control!
yep exactly! you could see a point at 14,000 where the plane levelled out though still dropping where some nose down to collect speed to revive the plane was easily possible. Then you look at Bonins control and hes ramming the nose upwards. COMPLETELY FUCKED
There's also the physical feedback when you're in an obvious stall (the yoke gets mushy) which you don't have in an Airbus. You don't have to rely on possibly erroneous instruments or stall warnings to tell you.
I shall take your word for it, I drive a landrover you see...
dont blame airbus for anything. they have 100% the safest planes on this earth
No they don't. Plenty Airbus have crashed for many reasons. Stop being naive
I keep thinking about those passengers that had their flight-information turned on. They would have seen the altitude getting lower and lower. Horrible...
+Marc Liljeqvist And the rest would have seen the ocean getting closer and closer.
mm most were probably trying to get some rest at such a late hour or just watching a movie
It happened at night. They would have seen nothing out their window.
@Patrick Bateman i dont think this plane had that option.. also it was night and most passangers were sleeping or trying to sleep.. they might had noticed some rocking side to side.. but no falling as it was a stable vertical speed..
When you feel your ears pop as the jet descends you know something is wrong.
Captain: No, stop pulling up!
Bonin: Okay
Bonin (ten seconds later): *i'll fuckin do it again*
Yes, it looks like he was doing that on purpose!! His wife was on the plane. A murder / suicide??
@@smith4496 honestly, probably just pure panic.
I am not the biggest fan of flying, but seeing a guy like Bonin fly makes me wanna become a pilot. For the sake of everyone.
Oops naughty me, I had the stick up the whole time!
If you think that way, I beg you not to become a pilot. For the sake of everyone.
@@michaels4162 What a foolish comment.
@@AJayAnswersYou for the sake of everyone it’s best if you don’t become a pilot
@@meonlybro What a stupid comment.
Rather than the incessant "Stall" warnings which the pilots clearly didn't understand, what was really needed was an announcement in French by the computer: "PF Bonin, stop pulling on the stick. You are a complete nong and shouldn't even be in control of an airplane. Let go of the side stick immediately." Just that one simple message would have saved the plane.
ygg drasil I thought some planes give a stall warning and say “ nose down “ or at least should since the computer will tell you to “ pull up “
This is very space odyssey and it would be both amazing and scary if planes could do that
Perhaps a basic understanding of human psychology would help you. The human brain is terrible at handling stress, and generally reverts back to training.
The first thing to go when you are under significant stress is your hearing.
The F/O did refer back to a form of training used for terrain escape and windshear recovery- max TOGA thrust and max pitch up. Under normal law, that’s Airbus SOP for gaining the best climb performance.
It’s very easy for armchair pilots in the comments here to comment with hindsight - yet they all forget about the inadequate training for high altitude upset recovery. Throw in the startle factor alongside that they only had 3 minutes to diagnose and recover the airplane, makes it an extremely difficult situation.
@@FlyGuy98 using max pitch up during a stall is the definition of stupidity.
@@WetaMantis Air France taught that in its training up until the time this crash happened, because at the time they thought most stalls would occur at a lower altitude, with the alpha floor protection working since the plane should be in normal law all of the time. Max nose up wouldn't matter if normal law was in effect since the plane would prevent you from overdoing it. They didn't want pilots to be shy in pulling the stick back, so they told them to "go for it", which as it turned out was a philosophy that relied too heavily on the alpha floor protection by assuming that it would always be working. This mindset has doomed Airbus crews before this incident and since. Alpha floor protection is a good thing but in my opinion the pilots that fly these planes need to be taught it almost at the engineering level in order for them to truly understand it and use it safely.
The airplane was doing everything to put its nose down, but Bonin did everything he could to avoid that.
Bizarre fact: Bonin's wife was on the plane as well, and she was a *physics* teacher
They really coulda survived this but natural selection I guess
I have zero.piloting experience. But I know enough to push the nose down and not continue to pull the nose up like a moron. You have to wonder how someone with that much training could ride a plane down for minutes like that.
Read the report.
I would nose down full power to get out as soon as the stall warning goes. Don’t they know stall = not enough air speed on wings
@@mudchair16 where is the report please or what to search to find it ?
I would say that too, but let's be smart and annalise what happened. Pitot tube blocked due to icing condition and makes the airspeed unreliable, flying with no speed indicator is hard if not impossible to do. Bonin didn't know that the airplane is stalling because he know he can't trust the instrument. The problem is Bonin didn't calm down and check what instrument is faulty
Tomm Ed even without the speed indicator he still should have known what a stall felt like so for example the Angle of attack was higher than it normally would have been to keep the aircraft level and as you can tell from the side stick inputs it was taking a lot to get the aircraft back to being wings level which wouldn’t have been the case if he had sufficient speed )
Watching the F/O's inputs was so difficult. How can someone at such a high level of aviation standard forget the basics...
Because he was not at standard level,..AF training is simply scary
"High level" of aviation. What a joke... Did someone tell you that?
Keyboard warriors are an odd lot! That's like saying Keanu in a Non Combative Setting, reloaded and fired his armaments flawlessly and speedily faster than any before him, which he did, but in a Non Combative situation! Put you in a storm, Thunderstorm, Wind, hail, droplets like bullets! Couple that with blaring alarms! conflicting Data! Inner ear balance confusing your instincts! Hindsight is 20-20! As it happened however, they had seconds to make a right choice.
Mentor Pilot on you-tube explains this better. The human brain under stress simply goes back to what was taught procedures. and what they were taught was to apply full throttle & pull back. But this only works in Normal Law when autopilot keeps the plane from ever stalling and at lower altitudes.
@@marceloluizfigueira7208 he is flying a330, and across the entire atlatic oceon. So it is probally obvious that a pilot with great experience would be able to do this job😅
Mcas would have been very effective in getting this aircraft out the stall....ironically!
😂😂😂
Well airbus does does have a Stall protection automation called Alpha Floor, which forces the nose of the plane down when it is dangerously high.
@@mohamedtoure4388 problem was they were in alternate law meaning .. no anti stall protection
@@stefanocozzi8188 Yep and Robert noticed it and even told Bonin "Alternate Law. Be careful we lost the protection". Makes me think Robert had a much more correct understanding of the situation but slipped into misunderstanding as he didn't understand why the nose was kept up and the plane stalling until he realized Bonin was pulling up. Makes me think had Robert taken controls when the pitot tubes froze the crash would not have happened.
@@mohamedtoure4388 I totally agree , i also think that if the more experienced pilot (Marc Dubois ) had not left the cockpit the incident would not have occurred.
Amazing to watch Bonin's stick. Why not simply keep the plane level? Since it was dark out, isn't the only option to fly by altimeter and artificial horizon? What was so confusing to him?
@@yunocchi5486 There's this device that indicates vertical speed. It's not difficult to tell at all that the airplane is stalling if you're going nose up and it's losing altitude so fast the gauge maxes out.
They have problem with the pitot tube. My thought why Bonin didn't rely on the altimeter and vsi probably because he wasn't sure on what instrument he can trust
Sometimes it looks like was intentional
It looked like that's what he was doing throughout the whole decent. Just trying to get the wings level, rather than concentrating on recovering out of the stall. It didn't help when the captain came back onto flight deck he further encouraged getting the wings level rather than sticking the nose down...
With no reliable airspeed, 80% thrust and 5 degrees of pitch and the plane would have settled into stable flight smh. Even I know that.
How do pilot interviews at Air France work?
"Do you know what a stall is?"
"I have no idea. I don't know how to fly a plane, but I can dial in numbers and press the autoland button."
"CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE HIRED!!!"
Well I'm sure you would have been the better choice to get hired right?
Retards or retards?
Don't kid yourself. It isn't just Air France. This is the result of removing the pilot from the loop. Computers do a much better job flying than any human...until they don't. This is system-wide. Boeing has been less cavalier about handing over control to sensors and wires, but only by a bit. Airlines and aircraft manufacturers must remember that the cockpit works best when humans not only trump computers, but know how to save hundreds of lives when the computer gives up.
to respond 2 wrong assesments in thoses comments :
1. bonin was also a glidder pilot.. so about the pushing buttons and having no clue about aerodynamic and flying skills....still it remains strange his behaviour this time for sure.
2. automation is not a sudden progress , needs time and correction (see B737 Max flaw showed recently in air lion) but is the only way to secure more and more commercial flights since a320 disruptive choice for fbw and automation philosophy , which has become the standard for all plane manufacturers little by little , while air travel has exploded and safety records raised at the same time ...
@@slartybarfastb3648 All systems can be manually adjusted and switched off entirely from the cockpit, including robotic airplane control. This is precisely because sometimes the systems just fail and you need to fall back to flying by hand. Except in this case the pilots have utterly failed too.
This pissed me off
Well said that's how I've always felt looking at this case. Pissed. Like immediately after auto-pilot goes off the hell breaks loose pilot screwing up big time
Can u say why would u put a profile picture like this , what kind of illness u have , i relly wanna punch u in the face
As a former airbus captain for 30 years, their fate was sealed the moment the captain left the cockpit. The reason I say this is the captain knew there was challenging weather up ahead with tops above the service ceiling of the 330. An extremely poor time to relinquish command and take a break. I realize hindsight is 2020 but if he would’ve waited 20 minutes and dealt with the weather and got on the other side of the storms, all those people would probably be alive today. I would’ve never left the airplane in charge of two first officers in a situation like that but, I understand we all don’t think alike.
You must have had lousy FO's at your airline.
@@lbowsk Has nothing to do with the quality of first officer. Has everything to do with making a command decision based on risk management. That’s why they pay the captains the big bucks!
The captain knew what he was doing. He said these clouds wouldn't stop him from taking a break.
@@fmondeo Those weren’t just “clouds”! They were massive thunderstorms in the ITCZ, some of the nastiest in the world. Staying safe in this business is all about risk management. RIP my fellow aviator.
The problem is that with such incompetence, Bonin would have likely made fall another plane in the future.
The dude went in full panic mode and didn't do any of the CRM things, and same for the FO on the left even if he would have known how to fly the plane.
Looks to me like the real trouble started at 3:20 to 3:50. The Flight Director comes back having reverted to 1400fpm climb. He then spends the next 30seconds trying blindly to follow the FD bars, even though they are commanding over 20deg nose up at times. His attempts to follow these FD bars takes the aircraft from a recoverable position to a very difficult position in a fully developed stall.
Don't be sto quick to jump on the "blame Bonin" bandwagon, the startle factor would have been immense and his attention narrowed so he could only see the FD bars, not the bigger picture.
Maybe a change of FD logic so that when it comes back in a case like this it can command vertical speed 0? Or even that it doesnt come back until reselected? In this case I believe Bonin would have acted differently in those critical 30 seconds and the outcome could have been very different.
The only possible explanation is that Bonin legit panicked himself into completely forgetting his training and experience. Because, honestly....the only other explanation would be that he did it on purpose. There was plenty enough altitude to work out the problem.
If you look at the artificial horizon and Bonin input, you clearly figure out that he did not do it on purpose. He was just out of his depth trying to keep the wing levelled.
It’s so scary to think that the co pilot himself was causing the stall and that it wasn’t noticed sooner rather than later when they were to close to the surface to recover from the stall.
That isometric view of the plane should be an actual instrument in the plane's instrument panel. With all the technology today they could actually make that happen. Add some vectors to the display showing the plane's trajectory, speed and angle of attack with clear daylight graphics animations and it would be something anyone could understand, and it would be a very handy reference at a glance.
Great idea, unfortunately that will probably never happen.
Because we live in a bullshit, red-tape filled world now which likes to over-complicate even the simplest of things, instead of just keeping things fucking simple.
For real.
The plane was giving true altitute and pitch grades but they ignored it (especially bonin), what makes you think that they would have listened to a isometric view?
@@BioTheHuman If you are disoriented and in a panic, it might help to just see a birds-eye view at a glance in addition the usual slew of instrumentation that requires one to indirectly derive the flight attitude of the plane. People tend to grossly underestimate how much panic and stress can cloud thinking and judgement. Obviously when pilots plow a working plane into the ground everything is giving accurate information. The plane was functioning normally. I don't see why that would be disputed. Its the pilots that where malfunctioning. And I was not referring to this in particular.
Too distracting.
RIP
To the passengers and crew of Air France Flight 447
It maybe insensitive of me to say so, but this video infuriates me. This is completely inexcusable from the co-pilot who repeatedly pulled back on the stick. What on EARTH was he doing? It's as if he can't help himself.
+massivethrobbingmast I agree with you.
I agree whole heartedly... This is the same thing that brought down colgan in '06
My 10 year old daughter would have done a better job by simply not touching anything.
the F/O caused the stall by pulling back on the stick when the AP disengaged, so yeah his daughter sitting there doing nothing would literally have been better than Bonin´s stick inputs.
So my 2 yo do
pitot tubes only stop for a few seconds if bonin did not do anything the plane will recover in few seconds ...... he simply need to keep plane leveled
Exactly, in another video it was said that if they just flied for one minute without touching anything, pitot tubes would unfreeze and eventually everything would be back to normal
@@yunocchi5486 the speed and att reading is on the display they even have AoA reading and the plane is making "stall sound"
I've watched and read a lot about this accident, but all of the sources take their time to explain the details of how it went down. Watching it unfold in real time is gut wrenching. Four minutes is nothing. Heart breakingly tragic 😢
What is so upsetting about this was that there was ample time to save the flight. A more experienced pilot would've assessed, controlled and fixed the problem within 2,500 feet.
If the autopilot shuts off because there's no accurate speed reading how do the stall warnings work, and why? The first stall warning comes just 3 seconds after Bonin says he's taking the controls. The other pilot asks "what's that?", right after the first stall alarm. Bonin answers that it's because there's no valid speed reading. At around 02:10:48 Bonin seems to have regained control and at 02:10:51 the stall warnings start again. And now things take a turn for the worse. It's my impression that the alarms going off in the cockpit made it more difficult to deal with the situation.
Stall warnings aren't linked to the airspeed sensors, but are either triggered by an angle-of-attack vane or a pressure transducer in the wing that detects when the airflow separates. I believe on the A330 it's an AoA vane. This is because it's entirely possible to stall a plane at its normal cruising speed if you can get the angle of attack high enough.
Now, I'll agree that the stall warning system probably contributed to the crash. Here's how it works: Airbus put a computer between the pilot and the control surfaces. When the computer is in "normal law" (i.e. its default flight model that's used to generate control deflections), it automatically applies control deflections to keep the plane from approaching too high an angle of attack. Unless, of course, the airspeed indication is considered invalid - then it shifts into "alternate law" and just forwards the control stick inputs straight to the control surfaces without any protections. This also disables the auditory stall warnings, for some weird reason.
In this situation, the airspeed sensors were clogged by ice, throwing the plane into alternate law and allowing the crew to get it into an extremely high AoA situation. This high AoA in turn kept the airspeed sensors from getting good readings even once they thawed out - except when the copilot pitched forward enough to start recovering from the stall. As the airspeed indications came back, so did the stall warning - and thus the copilot thought he was giving the wrong inputs. So he pulled back on the stick and the airspeed indications went away - and so did the stall warnings. Rinse and repeat until they run out of altitude.
And that, my friends, is why fly-by-wire is a bad thing.
Imagine the passengers: not feeling any vertical velocity, the only evidence they had was the information displayed on their personal IFE screen. From one second to the other, they hit the ocean surface and were instantly dead! That’s so creepy and disturbing! 😣
Lol they were free falling. Of course they were feeling the vertical speed.
@@haranglouis5252 they weren't aware of the situation at all, no acceleration clearly perceptible, only buffets at the beggining but clearly interpreted as a basic turbulance
Indeed, none passengers screamed and didn't have their seabelt locked on
What amazes me is that even the most experienced pilots often forget the very basics taught to them.
Flying 95% of autopilot and only manually taking control during T/O and LDG is what pilots are doing all day, every day. It is not without reason that the saying states: "Once the automation turns off or becomes unreliable, the pilots really earn their wages." In this case, 3 pilots were experienced button pushers to engage the autopilot and A/T but beyond that, they were clueless.
@@ericweynands That is not true; the captain was the only one with true experience. But he had spent the 3 night layover 'on the town' with his girlfriend and got little sleep.
One of the things that confused the hell out of the PF though is that the STALL STALL callout stopped each time the airspeed dropped low enough to become invalid (speed tape goes away). Then as soon as airspeed becomes valid, meaning the nose was pitched down, the STALL STALL would come back. This is very counter intuitive and Airbus has changed this since; right now the STALL STALL callouts do not disappear if airspeed goes invalid.
It does not excuse the visible lack of competence in seat of pants flying and checking all the raw data to make an assessment that would have shown that the VS indicator was correct (they also didn't trust it due to previous pitot freezing).
That is why nowadays there is a lot of emphasis on Upset Prevention and Recovery Training. Where pilots are taught basic flying skills with reduced or no automation where the aircraft is well outside the normal envelope at high altitude (as this A330 clearly was, the airspeed was so low they just couldnt believe this to be possible). The aircraft manufacturers developed special datasets from testflights which give good fidelity of the simulation outside the normal envelope, like a developed stall. This was previously not the case and pilots would train only until the stall warning, never beyond.
Lastly, do not underestimate the spatial disorientation. In the night with a lot of aural alerts in, and zero visibility from the cockpit, it is very, very difficult to remains conscious of the environment and your place and velocity vector.
Airbus has also added a Backup Speed System, where in case of unreliable airspeed, the speedscale is replaced with a colored bar which allows the crew to fly based on mainly angle of attack. That also could have saved the day. Sadly in a way, such accidents contribute to aviation safety as we know it.
This does not excuse this avoidable accident, but I agree 100% on: "do not underestimate the spatial disorientation. In the night with a lot of aural alerts in, and zero visibility from the cockpit, it is very, very difficult to remains conscious of the environment and your place and velocity vector."
I flew Air France from Sao Paulo (not Rio) to Paris shortly after the BEA report publication into the AF447 accident, and we went through heavy turbulence (in the same intertropical convergence zone) in the middle of the night, and it was terrifying, not only for the resonance with the AF447 accident, but the feeling of utter disorientation, desolation, emptiness and vulnerability looking out of my rain-beaten window into an absolute blackness, over the middle of the vast and deep Atlantic Ocean. Every passenger was eyes-wide open on that night - similar perhaps to the condemned passengers of AF447 in their last 3 minutes of life.
That is some absolutely beautiful flying... You have to respect those inputs, Bonin was on an alpha level neither you or I can even comprehend
This is not reassuring for passengers. Once the computer stopped flying the plane, the pilots could not fly it. How in Gods name could any pilot worthy of the name keep pulling back to try and make the plane fly? And this is not the only case of this happening. Airspeed is correct, attitude indicator is correct, stall warning is correct...still he pulls back?! :-(
You are right, it's a flght basic. Pull on the stick and the houses get smaller, keep pulling on the stick and they get bigger again.
This is not the first case of commercial pilots reacting to a stall by holding the stick back either.
+Mike Breen When did that happen? In which flight?
+Eduardo Álvares Ribeiro Colgan Air Flight 3407, and evidently according to the recently released report, even Air Asia 8501 which crashed less than a year ago. In the case of the Colgan Air flight, in the midst of the captain's incorrect response, the airplane itself tried to aid the recovery from the stall by forcing the yoke forward via a mechanism known as the "stick pusher". The captain...overrode this mechanism and continued pulling it back....stalling the plane and causing it to crash.
Even if you don't account for cases where pilots have deliberately raised the nose despite a stall warning, there are frustratingly several cases of pilots failing to properly respond to a stall warning in a variety of scenarios.
+Elfenbeinturm Media Not "they". It was Bonin, the FO in the FO's seat. Robert (the relief pilot on the left) knew they needed to recover speed, he called for control and tried the lower the nose. Bonin didn't acknowledge and continued his nose up inputs (which cancelled out Robert's) without telling anyone until it was too late to really matter.
Even if Bonin didn't trust the warning, that was no excuse for not at least correcting the trim. The ASI's temporarily malfunctioned but his ADI was fine. When the pitots froze all he had to do was keep a steady attitude until they cleared back up and they could re-activate the autopilot. There was no excuse for him to induce and maintain such an attitude.
My conclusion is that Bonin was an incompetent pilot who proved he was unqualified to actually fly this plane in the absence of a computer doing it for him. Had Robert been given control when he called it he probably would've corrected it which is exactly what he tried to do when he and the Captain finally realized it was Bonin who'd been causing the problem all along.
OneOkami A very good summary.
Sorry for my ignorance but what's the purpose of idling throttle and pulling stick to maximum in stalling condition? I thought it should be vice versa...
Yeah, exactly.
That's why the plane crashed, because these imbeciles didn't know what they were doing
because he thought he was overspeeding ( in his mind, the plane was nose down and was lossing altitude, which makes the plane to get crazy speed and can be very dangerous) , he pulled the stick to reach the correct cruise altitude. In his mind it was : the plane is nose down, lossing altitude and gain some dangerous speed. So he lowered the speed input and put the nose up.
And with the stall warning blaring the whole time? I understand it is disorientating at night but this really is inexcusable. When Robert takes control at about 5.54 and pushes the nose forwards, Bonin is still pulling back. I blame fly-by-wire. Robert and Dubois would not have been able to see what Bonin was doing. This would probably never have happened if the plane had been a Boeing with a yoke.
It's not that simple. I was the first to think that mere incompetence was the only factor but the way the situation develops explains some things. Careful viewing of the animation shows multiple occurrences of the airspeed indication coming back and going away again, along with the stall warning. Looking at the attitude indicator, you can see that the speed indication and stall warning return when the pilot puts the nose down! That is because the rest of the time the plane is in such a deep stall that the computer interprets indications as completely invalid and does not transmits them to the crew, including the stall warning!! The airspeed indicator does not read at all, it just sends an error message, and the stall warning ceases. Imagine being in an airplane where the stall warning goes on when you lower the nose and stops when you raise it! All with inconsistent airspeed indications. It seems (although I have not verified that) that the plane switched by default to direct law because of the incoherent flight information but the crew does not appear aware of that. If it is in direct law, all flight envelope protections are off. I'm not sure the PF would have tried the control inputs he did if he had known that flight envelope protection were disabled.
However, you do have a point. There was a lot of control inputs made, all with very little result. At some point, it seems the PF goes into "try anything and everything" mode with the flight controls. This would have been very visible with a yoke and would have attracted more feedback from other crewmembers. There should never have been so much dual input alarms and there should never have been so much yanking around of the controls. It seems that there was never enough patience from anyone to actually see if a control input was going to yield a result. The side stick makes it easy and inconsequential to play around with the controls while reducing the awareness that doing so moves large aerodynamic surfaces with crucial functions. They moved the stick trying to obtain a change in the warnings and incoherent flight indications instead moving to try to control the airplane. Part of the reason is that they really did not know what the airplane was doing.
pchantreau - I realise I am merely speculating with hindsight but I am of the understanding that there is a checklist for a loss of speed. I believe the correct procedure would be for the PF to keep the plane flying level and the PNF to perform the checklist. Seems the PF just panicked. If that procedure was followed at the start then there would most likely have been no issue and the pitot tubes would probably have unfrozen in a couple of mins.
TheHuntw2 They did unfreeze relatively quickly. PF didn't really panick but took an action he believed to be fairly safe and likely effective according to his training. 85% power and a little nose up is supposed to get you out of most stall situations at lower altitudes, I believe (not sure, I'm not an airbus pilot). At cruise altitude, where your safe window is much smaller, it is probably not advisable. However, if indeed they had flown without changing anything, keeping power and attitude, they would most likely not have stalled, you're right. The only thing that is completely incomprehensible to me is that nobody seems to ever have noticed the AOA indicator. It seems they were all looking at the wrong instruments, attempting to make what they saw fit some already known, simulator practiced, situation and they could never get there. So they fail to simply acknowledge what's in front of them as if somehow the true situation has already been considered impossible, although it's never been discussed. It's very strange.
TheHuntw2 I have to correct that. AOA is not displayed in the cockpit, according to the info at the beginning of the clip. That's unfortunate, it could have dissipated their confusion. On several occasions Bonnin says he fears they're in overspeed, it may have been the cause of his initial nose up input. Thereafter, he struggles with the stick to continuously try to keep the plane wings level with a slight nose up attitude, possibly in the belief that's what the airplane needs to start climbing again. At no time the crew even considers the possibility that they are stalled. It's incomprehensible. It's like collective cognitive impairment in the cockpit. The captain never steps into a captain's role, never suggests anything, never attempts to make an analysis of the situation. I can't understand.
By looking at the stick input made by that F/O, I will conclude that he's nothing but a drunk amateur who doesn't know what he is doing.
As an airline pilot myself, I'd agree with you on the latter but not on the amateur part... I've been in crazy situations as a pilot (emergency evacuation in my case), and I can assure that experience means nothing if the personality of the individual dealing with the problem is not level headed in an emergency. I've seen grown men with 10 thousands of hours freeze up in a tight spot... It all truly depends on the manner in which the situation is dealt, in my case, that captain's thousands of hours was incident free, so he became jaded and nonchalant and was not ready for an emergency... It's hard to criticize if you aren't the one in the scenario looking at the big picture... But I think we can all agree, pilots and non pilots, that when an airplane stalls, YOU DONT PULL UP!! Damn!!
+mrcannotfindaname Correct me if I'm wrong on anything here, but this accident occured at a
time when the pilots in question hadn't got proper training in dealing
with situations like iced up pitot tubes etc. Think about how the whole
situation evolved:
Firstly, the pitot tubes got blocked by ice, and there was also turbulence. When a pitot tube gets blocked, the airspeed indicator starts to work like an altimeter; the higher you go, the higher will the read be on the speed indicator. So, the tube got blocked, and probably due to turbulence, the aircraft was bouncing up and down, and yes, not much deviation in altitude is required for the speed indication to vary. A bounce upwards caused the speed reading to increase rapidly, which then the pilot reacted to by pulling the stick to slow down the aircraft, this in turn increased the positive rate of the aircraft, further increasing the speed reading. Here I believe is where the confusion takes place, think about it; increasing speed, increasing altitude, A/P automatically disengaged, pitch black, turbulence, EICAM warnings on multiple different factors etc etc... So many things are happening at once that you get confused and don't really know what to focus on, they probably tried to understand the situation by interpeting the messages, and did not recognize that the first officer actually was pulling all the time at the stick without noticing because he was so used to the feeling already and the airbus trims the aircraft immediately to the new attitude that you present it to with the stick. He would not have felt any opposing force in the stick I believe.
Think about a situation when you have caught yourself holding your hand continuosly on the gearstick in your car after changing gears, or biting your lip for a long time because you started to think how to write something in a correct manner in a really improtant text, or pretty much anything that you have done for a prologned time without even noticing it yourself, just because you got so completetly distracted by something else that caught your attention.
+Martijn Denecker +1, I'd even add the fact that, in these situations, no matter what the airspeed says, always rely on logic.. In other words, a leveled flight at a constant speed, pitch and angle of attack, should never cause an altitude change.. It doesn't make sense to be at 100kt of you're aircraft is leveled at 36000ft with a constant 4 degree pitch and you have 60% of N1..
Exactly my point. Life = attitude. Crazy how applicable that is in all kinds of aspects :-)
+mrcannotfindaname Its completely possible then Bonin was drunk, its impossible to do a toxicology test
The fact that these guys didn't understand stall recovery nor aerodynamic theory is unreal and scary as hell.
just tragic, not going to comment on the skills or how events unfolded not even about automation dependency. lives were lost and what do we do about it, how we prevent the causes of this accident are the real matter here.
Jakub Vlk You said it all. The solution is to rethink automation dependence and ensure pilots have a mastery of basic airmanship.
Absolutely astonishing. That crew flew the airplane in a full stall all the way down from 33,000 feet not knowing it. Because of the incredible inherent stability of the aircraft, there really wasn't any physical warning....
What I don't understand is why at 6:22 when robert had the controls he throttled down to idle..
+Derrick Cui I think he didn't realise that FO was still making stick inputs, so throttled down to try and regain control. once pitched down can throttle up again, there wasn't enough time though.
Thrust levers should have been placed at max thrust and left there. Then perhaps firewalled when the situation became more grave.
Probably also to reduce pitch up moment induced by the thrust.
They thought they were going fast, there was a lot of shaking and sounds in the deteriorating cockpit environment which made them think they were over speeding. Quite sad that 2/3 experienced pilots in the cockpit couldn't figure out what was going on with the plane.
Obviously the FD gave Bonin the instruction to climb as the computers calculated mistakenly a loss of altitude. He thought he was in an overspeed situation which could be overcome by such action.
You cannot be overspeeding with a stall warning. Stall means the wings do not have enough lift to keep the plane flying. So they should have ignored the speed tape and lower the nose?
One should take in consideration that they could not fully access the situation due to the fact that it was night and no atc. They were probably feelingvery high G forces due to the rapid descent and probably he misinterpreted them as overspeed. That can trick one's perception and explains the throttle positions almost to the end of the flight... To make it worse they could not have ONE correct reading about the SPEED in some mild weather scenario.. Well there's never only one factor in a crash I guess. Rip to all of them..
Stall, Stall, Stall..... Nose down!!!!
I strongly identify with most of the baffled comments on here. The only way to answer WTF was he/they doing, would be to develop a psychological state profile for each sequence of events. That is, so we would have a picture of the emotionals terrain to match with the physical issues, AoA, airspeed, altitude etc. We can make very reasonable guesses about what an individual is feeling in response to the aircraft's behaviour and I think it likely, quite easily link this to his control inputs in a logical way. A careful psychological study would give a much better than half assed explanation for their behaviour. Has this been attempted? because if not how can lessons be learned?
He was in a known psychological trap that proper training is supposed to overcome. When your instruments contradict each other or indicate you're in an "impossible" state (like around 03:02, with his airspeed showing plenty of speed, throttle at cruise setting, pitched right where the flight director says, yet a stall warning?), there's a tendency to fixate on waiting for it to make sense and rely on your physical sensation. They probably hit a terminal vertical velocity so he was only feeling 1G (feels like they're level), and attitude indicator and standby indicator showing wings level and only pitched slightly up. He probably thinks airspeed's obviously broken because it's swinging around wildly. He could easily wonder why the altimeter showed them descending so fast -- it doesn't make sense and doesn't physically feel like they were -- so maybe the altimeters are broken too? Or maybe there's wing damage and they lost elevator control? He may have felt things were "stable for now" with full aft sidestick so that's why he kept it where it was until someone could figure out which instruments were right and which weren't.
The Aero Peru 603 crash showed similar flight crew confusion about what instruments and warnings were working and what weren't (also due to blocked pitot tubes).
A proper HUMAN BEING would never endanger a heavy plane in a situation like this.
Thomas Watvedt that sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened
@@ronwilliams357 The Airbus flight control system also reinforced his misperception by disabling the stall warning auditory indication when the pitot tubes weren't giving good readings (because of too high an angle of attack). Every time he pitched forward, the stall warning came back - but because he's feeling positive g and wasn't trusting the airspeed indicator, he actually believed they were going too fast. So he pulls up and obscures the pitot tubes again, disabling the stall warning and convincing him even further that he's on the right track.
When you are scared of an emergency situation and you are unable to handle it for minutes, your stress level and the amount of mistakes increase - logically...
Nobody expects emergencies in the middle of a flight, that proceeded calmly so far
How hard it is to maintain a level flight? Why you have to pull it up?
Note that the speed indication on the right (Pilot Flying) PFD is still incorrect, but not recorded. 2:59
I noticed that on the animation, the flight director was recommending a nose-high attitude. I wonder if the pilot was led astray by this and if the director was responding to the erroneous airspeed. If that was the case, it seems like the flight director should have disengaged along with the autopilot.
Apparently now there told turn off the fight director
@@leesmavicmoments5598 good to know. thanks
So just pull back on the stick and full throttle? This is the only thing they did? Even I know you need airspeed to keep flying.
One question I've always had is, after all three pitot tubes de-iced and the air data computers were in agreement again, why didn't normal law kick back in and re-establish the stall protection (alpha floor)? Is there something else that an Airbus crew has to reset in order to get out of alternate law and back to normal law?
I believe sometimes the FAC computers have to be reset. But they didn’t know when they airspeed was back to being reliable
Also the speed was so law at some point that the stall alarm stopped. Because nobody at airbus thought a plane would go that slow. And it was a problem in this accident because when they were regaining speed the stall alarm will go again.
Shouldn't a pilot know everything about there plane. And why didn't the captain say before he went tubes probably freeze up here chap's being a veteran of that route
Why go thru the 1st couple of minutes of the sound and not have any??
That ADI and rate of descent are f**king scary :O
in the voice transcript, Dubois is heard to tell Bonin to look at the Standby horizon, and then both Robert and Dubois tell Bonin he's "climbing" and therefore to go down. What was on the standby horizon that was different from the PFDs that he could see on both sides? Is it possible the PFD was wrong with respect to attitude?
That's what I'm thinking...How can you see the altitude dropping with a positive attitude and not think stall? The pitot tubes were also free by then...Unreal..
If you can't feel the +1.5G while pulling the stick with full throttle, then you push the damn stick!
the CP came to flight deck after the stall begins. there is something wrong, why did he was not on the deck already? why the FO didn't called him immediately the problem occurs? why the CP did not take the stick and recover the situation? WHY on earth both of them did not use the IRS speed on top column?
The first few minutes it looks like hes trying to follow the flight director
why did he pull back on the stick. why? why ? why?
It has absolutely nothing to do with autism.
Gnitteg Dellort learn to take a joke
Actually make a funny joke to begin with before you start telling people to learn to take one.
He wanted to keep the plane "level". Unfortunately, he thought it would be a good idea to pull back and go crazy with the stick in attempt to stabilize the plane.
If you look closely, you can see that Bonin's actions on the flight stick are coordinated with the indications provided by the flight director wich was giving wrong ones obviously.
If you continually get a stall warning wouldn't that mean you're not going fast enough? Shouldn't they have left the throttle at full and put the nose down until the indicated airspeed demonstrated they were flying through the air again, especially with the sink rate going off as well? They weren't flying, they were falling.
Why isnt he pushing down the nose of the airplane to gain speed... fuck how hard can it be to check that you are dropping like a fucking stone
Well, the stall alarm was triggered and could be heard on the CVR 75 times, also the pitot tubes only malfunctioned for about 30 seconds and the altitude indicator was working normal the whole time. The problem was that the first officer didn't want to believe he was stalling.
Miam ga That may be, but isn't the GPS indicating the airspeed independently of the pitot tube? Could have checked that too?
Also wouldn't they feel alarmed that they probably are weightless since they are falling like that?
ya but, If the nose is up at like 20 degrees and the plane is still dropping at around 6000 feet per minute you know that your in a stall
I think I can kinda see what bonin was trying to do.
It looks like bonin was flying the thrust/pitch setting given in the unreliable speed memory items checklist - 10 degrees pitch and thrust in climb detent. 10 degrees pitch is only used below 10,000 feet. Above 10,000 feet the pitch should be only 5 degrees so this meant that he pitched up 5 degrees more than he should have. He might have done this out of muscle memory because most of his unreliable speed training in the simulator would have been at lower altitudes. When the plane started stalling he applied toga and 15 degrees of pitch which is a standard escape manovuer at low altitude (where most of his manual flying experience would have been from) He may have done this by instinct in a attempt to "climb away from danger". In fact this is exactly what the checklist tells you to do if you stall during takeoff.
Basically he was flying the plane by the logic of as if it were at low altitude in normal law. Flying the plane at cruise in alternate law is not something he would have done often if at all.
I don't want to be some armchair pilot but this might explain a bit how bonin was thinking
It would seem to me that AirBus could simply add a gauge on each side so that each pilot could see what the other pilot is doing with his sidestick.
This is what "DUAL INPUT" is for.
@@based_seattle That only sounds when both pilots are working their sticks, Thats not supposed to happen to begin with.
Point your finger at Bonin all you want. Knowledgeable people point their finger at Air France.
Fucking hell! Just looking at the crazy right sidestick input is enough to keep me from flying forever.
Can... Someone... Please... Explain... Me.... WHY did Bonin pulling up the stick so much for NO REASON?
When it first happened, the very first min of the disaster sequence, his display is showing the plane is losing altitude 300-600 feet per min ( he didn’t know the pitot tube malfunction) and also he didn’t know he then was flying in alt law instead of normal law in the airbus where in normal law you can and were taught to pull the stick all the way back and full thrust the computer will not let the airbus stall.
At 5:54 Robert (Left) takes control and pushes the stick down and the aircraft slowly starts increasing airspeed and recovering...BUT WHY DOES HE STOP?!! At 5000 ft he brings his stick back to neutral and even begins inputting downward motions. Were both Robert and Bonin inept?
+FSX737Pilot X FO was still making stick inputs counteracting his and he didn't realise. the joys of sidesticks...
+FSX737Pilot X Neither of them recognized the stall, its likely that both thought that the aircraft wasn't responding properly (or at all) to their stick inputs. At several points on the CVR both pilots make comments about having no control over the aircraft.
+Jamenator1 Well according to the Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript, Bonin finally says that he had been pulling back the whole time. That is when Captain Dubois says "No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no." at 02:13:42. Then Robert says "Descend, then... Give me the controls... Give me the controls!" Bonin releases the controls and Robert takes the controls and begins pushing the stick to descend like he said.......but then he stops!!! HE HAD ENOUGH ALTITUDE TO RECOVER!!! WHY DID HE STOP???
FSX737Pilot X He stopped because he probably was unsure if they were in a stall, just 1 second before Bonnin said he had the stick back, Robert was saying "Climb, climb, climb, climb", so he obviously wasnt sure and the captain telling them to descend but not mentioning a "stall" probably didnt provide either of them with enough info to work out what was happening. It probably wouldnt have made a difference though, at that time they were descending through 8000ft, it would have been cutting it quite tight
a moment of silence for those who reached to this video and have no clue whats happening .
No
The plane was losing critical speed so they are falling down. The nose should have been faced down but the pilot, maybe due to panic, kept the nose up thus contributing to the loss of speed.
why didnt the pilots put the nose down to pick up speed and stop the stall
I dont know why the side stick was pulled back causing nose up, IN A STALL NOSE DOWN ! ! ! no matter what plane, If speed is unreadable, NOSE DOWN! not up. increasing stall rate. this has happened before too. Based on not paying attention and pilots exhaustion.
***** It does seem very easy (now we know all the facts ) sat in a warn room during the day to say that they should have done this and should have put the nose down.But imagine this happening in the dark of night with no visual reference while you are been thrown around in a thunderstorm with the EICAS lighting up like a Christmas tree with error messages and alarms going off .Going from sat with the autopilot on and then the autopilot going off and you are left with control at the height of confusion.He sees the altitude tape winding down at a rate and in his mind to climb is to pull the stick back.In order to correctly react he would have first have to understand they were stalled and then reduce pitch attitude.The angle of attack remained greater than the stall angle of attack the whole time but the angle of incline displayed on the PFD remained (for most of the time ) normal.With no airspeed information and the confusion I can understand why he didn't recognize the stall.
I know its easy judging from the sidelines after the event, but seriously, not once was the side stick put forward, When IMC black out conditions occur, you rely on your instruments, not outside cues. this is how you pass your instrument rating. obviously after 3.5 minutes you may wantto try something else, rather than pulling the nose up.. just IMO and i understand that the a330 when speed tape is erratic the procedure, but they had a cricket chirp and stall warning that does not merit nose up attitude.
"not once was the side stick put forward" ? at 4;40 the side stick was placed forward.and held there for a period of time.
Well by that time it was to late for the speed of falling down and aoa was to great to overcome. Initial first minutes into the stall was pulled back left and right. Just frustration level when your seeing control inputs opposite of what your supoosed to do. I have a feeling later in the report is lack of training ect added to the crash
What was the difficulty in assessing the situation? Repeated stall warnings...the ADI almost constantly in the blue suggesting nose up...loss of airspeed....in the last seconds I was waiting for the stall warning voice to say "What! Am I a joke to you!?"
Aircraft: STALL!! STALL!! STALL!! STALL!! STALL!! STALL!! STALL!!
Pilots: what is it
?
If the sidesticks were attached, the relief pilot would have corrected Bonin's mistakes on time, or would have proceeded in a quick diagnosis of what was going on.
I tried hard on my simulator with the Aerosoft a330. Couldn’t recreate the scenario and fall 10,000 feet a min
I just wonder, why don't aircafts use GPS information as a backup for faulty sensors, as in this case Pitot tubes?
It’s never been as accurate and it uses ground speed not airspeed so it will vary depending at altitude. The newer aircraft can use the AOA sensors to determine if they are at a safe speed and the A350 has a different back up speed and altitude mode
How Could state of the art, one of the most technologically advanced jetliner ever builded in the history of aviation simply fall out the sky!!!???
Good old times learning to fly a Cessna 152 and later on the Cessna 172... first lesson: if you hear the stall horn, nose down... what were those morons doing on a flight deck?
I thought the fly-by wire automatically takes over control of the plane so it doesn't crash,
...could they have made the graphic any smaller? :-/
I don't get why don't Airbuses show the inputs of both sidesticks in one of the ECAMs. For example small indicators on the upper corners of the upper ECAM (one from both sidesticks)
Or maybe just keep the stick input indicator active on the PFD while AP is inactive, because currently it deactivates just after takeoff right?
Humdreds of thousands of dollars to hold the nose up for three minutes. I've watched enough on RUclips to immediately push the nose down.
THE ANGLE OF ATTACK IS NOT DISPLAYED IN THE COCK PIT? THAT IS F**KING STUPID. THAT SHOULD BE A VITAL PARAMETER ON DISPLAY. WHAT MORON DESIGNED THAT OMISSION?
I heard like.. when they would pull up..the stall warning would stop and when the pushed the nose down..like they were supposed to the stall warning would sound. That would be extremely confusing to troubleshoot imo.
A lot of people asks what the PAX would have felt. Some sugarcoat it saying they would be sleeping and would not have felt or heard anything. They are WRONG.
It would have been TERRIFYING for the passengers:
- 2:10 They would have experienced the see-saw from left to right in addition to the bumps.
- 3:05 They would have experienced the aircraft vibrations
- 3:58 They would have felt the steep turn and initial sink
- 3:46 They would have heard the jets roar up to the TO setting - max rev for its entirety
- They would have heard and felt the plane dropping like a brick, sinking down thru turbulent winds and clouds
- They would have heard and felt the wind as they they sunk at a very high rate
I know its terrible, but that is what they would have experienced.
Rest in Peace
Read: www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877/
Yup, completely accurate. I been in turbulent flights during the night , even the slightest turbulence woke everyone up, kids crying, seat belt sign sound, flight attendants running to their seats. And it only lasted 1 minute.
sorry meant to write less than a minute.
Flying-Experience - The passengers of AF 447 did not not experience a "terrifying" descent. The aileron wing rolls were not steep banks and somewhat gradual in execution. The "vibrations" would have been minimal and probably not even noticeable from inside the cabin. There were no steep turns and the initial sink acceleration descent was gradual and would not have resulted in even 0g. Pretty much all flight regimes of the doomed descent never exceeded 1.7 g's which you can easily exceed in the kiddie section of a amusement park.
The "roar" of the engines at TOGA only happened momentarily and would not have been appreciably louder than the 85% thrust setting at cruise. Plus, at higher altitudes, the decibel level of engine sound is muted and nowhere near as loud as during sea level take-offs.
Also, 2 minutes prior to heading into the convective area, FO Bonin told FA "Marilyn" via the cockpit inter-phone to take a seat in her jumpseat and to tell the others to do the same. So the FA's and passengers were already given a head's up about some upcoming turbulence, which ended up being minimal (didn't even require a seatbelt).
Finally, the captain (Dubois) was able to make his way to the cockpit and sit in the flight deck jump seat without having to put his seat belt on. He did not express any concerns about the aircraft's erratic flight on the CVR.
Flying-Experience I’ve ‘practiced’, this accident in the sim 3 times (full motion) over the years, and I can tell you, everyday turbulence can be more aggressive. If you’ve been in the sim (A330) and have a different experience, please let us know, otherwise stop being a scaremonger!
First of all I’m no pilot and have no training on flying an airplane, but I would like some ideas on why they would go full bore with the thrusters one minute then throttle back all the way in just a few seconds?
Gotta wonder if it had a yoke instead of the side stick if it would have been more obvious to captain and other pilots to see what inputs the guy flying was putting in, and for them to comprehend what was happening...
To all the armchair MSFS pilots who put all the blame on the FO: Two things to consider. (1) It took 3 seconds from autopilot disengaging to "Stall! Stall!". The first stall warning was false (due to pitot tubes icing), so no wonder, the later stall warnings were initially ignored. (2) As you can see in this replay, the stall warnings stopped when Bonin pulled the sidestick, and started again when the AoA decreased. This very confusing phenomenon (the airspeed being so low that the stall warning stops) added to the disorientation and to Bonin further pulling the stick. If I'm not mistaken, this fact is even mentioned in the final report of AF 447. I hope Airbus changed this very confusing stall warning behaviour. Last thing to mention: Neither of the three AF 447 pilots was suicidal. They all wanted to save the plane and souls on board. So stop blaming someone who paid with his life!
6:05 Bonin's sidestick movement was the last nail in the coffin for them. The other pilot was on his way of finally recovering it at the very last minute but unfortunately Bonin fucked up everything.. Look at the angle of attack 6:02... then 6:20.. So sad.
I guess Bonin doesn't understand that the horizon is not an absolute point to follow while flying. While the plane cruises, you'd keep the plane wings level on the center of the horizon. But when airspeed goes low, and a stall happens, the angle of attack changes, and the horizon that you see on the screen is not where you should be going for.
The deck angle of 15+° was apparent on each attitude indicator.
The altimeters were unwinding rapidly.
So point the plane in the direction it is going. Dump the nose.
When Robert tried that, even though the wing was deep-stalled there seemed to be elevator authority. Good, they were in luck. Some planes in a deep stall don't have enough elevator authority to get the nose down.
were they able to get the flight back to normal towards the very end and if so when?
5:55
you could really see the difference between the pilot that knows what to do and the copilot huh
Wish David had taken controls earlier or never let Bonin fly.
Wow. How they allowed this guy into the cockpit?
even a four year old who plays video games would know how to recover from this
My only flight experience is on flight simulators for PC 💻 and I guarantee you, I wouldn't crash this plane like the dumbass F/O did
What do you know about coffin corner or Mach buffet boundary ? Anything ? Well, you don’t know how to recover this plane...
I've "tried" the same figure on Flight Simulator with a B 747/400. The result is so dreadful, from 36,000 to sea level, the plan dives at more than 600 knots. From flight level 360 to sea level in less than 90 seconds.
That's not what happened. The plane stalled because the nose was pitched up and thrust was low
@@Holland1994D And the thrust was low because the plane had climbed to 40000ft, the thin air and lost speed, then lost lift and started falling like a rock. And instead of putting the plane into the dive which would probably recovered it at that altitude, he was still pulling the nose up. He had absolutely no idea.
I think this is an school example of disorientation, panicking and being insecure in your actions. My first opinion was, that pilots were not to be blamed, because they encountered serious problem with losing their pitots. What is to blame here is, that they didnt change a descision and try to bypass the mass over atlantic, even for the price of possible additional fuel stop or even diverting back, because we all know what a problem encountering red zones can mean, especialy those over atlantic. Similar pitot problems were being reported on 340s and 330s at that time and that should be a good alert not to play with fire and could simply try to avoid such severe icing conditions, rather than encountering them carelessly. Regarding his actions, if not before, he could realise stall dive when his inputs became inreactive. Reduce power a bit to decrease nose up tendency and unload the bird with nose down input.Thing, learned at initial hours on cessna already. PIC should overtake here and with sidestick priority, overrun CM2's bad actions. With number of hours, he had, he should comprehend the situation. Also, it is obvious that speed tape was behaving really unusual, or at least, more unusual than altitude tape which was responding quiet logicaly. He could also compare IAS with GS a bit just for reference, as it takes data from IRS and he could predict pitotes being blocked within these 4 minutes. But lets be honest here, human factor played enormous role in this one. We can be smartasses now, but what they were going through within that 5 minutes, was a nightmare. So not blaming them on their reactions, but can totaly blame them for their descision making, before digging in that major thropical storm.
One detail about this accident that particuarly disturbs me is that later on it was concluded by the accident investigation team that after the plane had descended to about FL315 (31,500 feet) that the aircraft was in a virtually uncontrollable state and there was absolutely nothing they could do after that point to effectively recover the aircraft and still have the altitude to establish stable flight again. It would've taken a crew with an extremely competent understanding of flight control to have made the recovery from that
It's a pretty daunting fact that even if Captain Dubois had intervened at an earlier time or hadn't had his inputs cancelled out by Bonin that the outcome would most likely have stayed the exact same..
This comment section is full of armchair pilots who've never set foot in a real cockpit before.
Read the official report, the stall alarm was contradictory, and sensorial hallucinations may have occurred, I'm not sure many people here would've saved the plane, it seems obvious now that we know what happened, but at the time, even the experienced captain didn't know what was happening
Bonins inputs were incorect stall early on and pulls back..
anyway the stall alarm was contradictory it was a lack of training from airbus and the fly-by-wire system. Poor CRM!
Not an amateur here. The PF of this aircraft had no idea of what a high altitude stall is and how to recover from it. His actions only aggravated the situation. If the Captain had not been having fun in Rio with his lover (she was on board) could have been on better shape to delay his nap until they were clear of the stormy weather over the Atlantic. We pilots used to cross it every week know that on the inter-tropical convergence there's always rough weather.
Thanks.
@@cockpitchatter1 Exactly plain incompetence of lack of professionalism. im not a pilot i just sell eyeglasses. if i know a difficult client is coming today to get his glasses that are delayed i dont go away from the store. i stay just if i need to defuse a potentially problematic situation with him. he had hundreds of lives on his shoulders.
Its clear plane was lost mainly duo to pilot incompetence. Bonin was panicking even before Captain went to take his rest, listening to comms before autopilot switched of he sounded stressed, he was in no position to fly that plane.
Additionally, all problems started with erratic movement of stick, which was really not what you expect from professional pilot. They were at 35000 feet, at that point, when pitot tubes froze, all he had to do is remain calm and make minimal (if any) movements with the stick. At that altittude, small inputs mean alot, and because of air density, its easy to stall the plane and hard to get it back.
As he hecticly moved the stick, it went from bad to worse. Their altittude dropped like a rock, and there is no way anyone was saving that plane when it went below 30k except if the pilot knew exactly what is the cause, which at that point was not clear to any of them. Once Captain came back and heard he has been pulling stick up entire time he knew what time it was, but descent was massive and after seconds of pushing nose down, they heard "Terrain, pull up, pull up" which made Bonin pull up AGAIN (this time instinctively) as they knew they were crashing.
This is tragic story of flying perfectly fine plane into abyss. But many things had to happen in order for this to happen, and while Bonin is mainly at fault, the fact that it was decided to go through heavy storm, with Capt going to sleep at that moment and pitot tubes freezing at 35000 feet meant any movement of plane was to be extremely careful and there was no place for panic. Unfortunately, Bonin panicked and was anything but careful, and we know what happened in the end.
That descend from 37000 feet to ocean was panic inducing, very hard to think in this case, only possible way to save the plane was identifying stall at 30000+, rollling plane a bit to side and pushing stick down in order to actually fly again. Pushing stick down at those altittudes wont help with stall, they would wait for too much to get it going again, roll was needed as well.
Dam*,, this SIC was not competent... He doesn't know what stall is.. It is better for all pilot to fly glider first before taking their PPL..
That 120 sec is a lot amount of time..
Bonin was a glider pilot.
+Ernest Chabert
Yes, but he didn't physically took control of the plane when he enter the cockpit he would of relized what was happening, instead he just watched until it was too late :(
Denise Delangeli
That airspeed and chirping sound has a lot of meaning in 120Sec...
@Denise Delangeli No, Bonin was pf.
Bonin was quick to react to the autopilot disconnect. Aside from slight over corrections, maintained control but then clearly lost situational awareness bringing the aircraft into a deep stall