Comment by WalterBright
3 days ago
When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others, like JFKjr's crash.
3 days ago
When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others, like JFKjr's crash.
What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed?
To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and pushed the stick forward. But it was too late.
If the captain could figure it out, so could the computer.
I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground. They could have recovered if they pushed the stick forward - failing basic stall recovery training.
There are many others - I've watched every episode of Aviation Disasters. Crew getting spatially disoriented is a common cause of crashes.
No, one of the pilots put the plane into an aerodynamic stall because they had failed sensors giving them erroneous airspeed information and he kept overriding the other pilot who was doing the correct thing to recover from the stall he had put the aircraft in.
What exactly was a computer at the time supposed to figure out with unreliable data, especially after a stall had first developed?
Also in fairness I was a bit too opaque with my point, which is that 1) LVL requires the pilot to actually press it, which they are unlikely to do if like you yourself have mentioned they are clueless about what situation they're actually in, and 2) LVL is not appropriate stall recovery so I don't really see how it is relevant to a case of an aerodynamic stall.
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> a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.
There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
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(It was AF 447.) I take this opportunity to recommend Admiral Cloudberg's excellent analysis (longread): https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
The autopilot had disengaged, most likely because the pitot tubes had iced over.
The aircraft system entered ALT2 mode, where bank-angle protection is lost. Protection for angle-of-attack is also lost when 2 or more input references are lost.
You might describe these circumstances as the computer saying "I don't know what the heck's going on, you humans figure it out please".
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IIRC, they were dealing with frozen pitot tubes or other sensors that were keeping the air data computing hardware from getting valid input. An automated "Get me out of trouble" button might have had the opposite effect.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the captain figured out what was wrong immediately, but he was too late.
BTW, my dad taught instrument flying in the AF. He said it was simple - look at the instruments. Bring the wings level, then the pitch level. Although simple, your body screams at you that it's wrong.
He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of the controls. This was against regulation, but he wasn't going to let a student pilot kill him.
When JFKjr's crash was on the evening news, he said two words - "spacial disorientation". Months later, that was the official cause.
> He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of the controls.
Most flight instructors just keep a spare pen in their pocket to jab an uncooperative student in thigh with. (Thankfully almost never used.)
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they were disoriented because a sensor was frozen or something like that and the readings were not correct if I remember correctly, an automatic system would have received the same wrong information.
Since the captain recognized the problem and took corrective action immediately, the avionics could have done so, too.