Comment by filleduchaos
3 days ago
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.
> LVL requires the pilot to actually press it
Of course. I did say it was a button to press!
> LVL is not appropriate stall recovery
It should be. I don't see how it couldn't be designed to do stall recovery. After all, the avionics do recognize a stall (as it activates the "pull up" stick shaker).
"and he kept overriding the other pilot who was doing the correct thing to recover from the stall he had put the aircraft in."
Yep, the real design problem here is the idiocy of allowing dual input.
I will repeat this as I have had to say it before:
There is no engineering fix to AF447. You cannot protect a plane from what is essentially a rogue pilot who is not restrained.
It would have happened exactly the same in a Boeing. The problem was a supposedly trained and tested pilot responding to a somewhat normal event (loss of awareness and disorientation) by freaking the fuck out and throwing a plane into the ocean from 30k feet. The copilot knew what was going on with 3 minutes left until impact, and was trying to fix things, and was using the feature to override dual input, and was still being hampered by a pilot who was refusing to do the only safe thing he should have: Sit back and shut the fuck up.
The actual solution is regular testing of pilots in stressful simulations to ensure they react predictably in bad situations. That can never be perfect though.
My suggestion was not about overriding the "nut behind the wheel", but providing the crew with a button that says "fix it".
P.S. my lead engineer at Boeing told me they can fix everything but the "nut behind the wheel".
As I mentioned before, my dad taught instrument flying. What he'd do is go through all the maneuvers where your body gets tricked, and the student (under a blackout hood so they could only see the instruments) must recover. And they'd do it over and over, until the student stopped believing his screaming senses and trusted the instruments.
I don't know all that can be simulated in a simulator. I don't know if modern flight training is sufficient.
BTW, experiments were done with birds to see how they flew "in the soup" (zero visibility). The birds would just fold their wings and drop out of it. It seems that evolution hasn't evolved a method for navigating blind.