One thing the Airbus pilot mentioned is that when the computer kicks out, *all* feedback on the controls ends. You literally don’t know where the center is, because the feedback is provided via electrically controlled selenoids that provide “resistance” similar to what would be provided by mechanical controls acting hydraulically upon control surfaces in a traditional airliner and once the computer kicks out, all you have is one of those floppy computer joysticks that gives you no real feedback at all. Did the pilots think they had the controls centered in a neutral attitude when they were actually pulling back on the controls? Again, we don’t know, at least not from the published report.

One thing I’ll point out: As with the USAF, the BEA likes to pin things as “pilot error” whenever they can. The summary we were provided is *not* a full transcript of what happened, it is an edited one. Selectively? Again, we don’t know…

But the one thing that struck me from what that Airbus pilot said was just how f*cked those pilots were once the computer started scrolling error messages rather than showing them attitude and speed. They were operating in the realm of blind guess then, Sully himself couldn’t have gotten out of that situation. No feedback on the controls so no idea what position the control surfaces were in. No attitude. No speed. Contradictory error messages scrolling across the screens. The pilots did everything wrong, but they were fucked whatever they did, because if they’d chosen the other extreme (push forward on the controls, push throttles to 100%) they would have ended up arrowing into the ocean too. Without any way of knowing what their angle of attack was, there was no way that jet was going anywhere but where it ended up.

You must be reading something else, or someone is making guesses, because there is nothing that would suggest high speed as a factor.

They reduced speed when they started climbing on the updraft, but that was as close as anything I can find for labeling high speed as an issue.

In short, minus some way of knowing their attitude, they were pretty well f*cked. This is a case where an old-timey gyroscopically-stabilized mechanical attitude steam gauge would have saved their bacon. But they don’t have one in an Airbus cockpit… the closest is a tiny bubble level used to tell whether you’re parked on level ground so that the fuel load balancing can be done right, but it would have been useless in an aircraft being tossed all around in the middle of a thunderstorm.

– Badtux the Flightless Penguin

I still don’t understand how they didn’t know they were in a stall – their stomachs would have told them they were free-falling. In a stall you increase power and, if you have altitude, you point the nose down to gain speed. They never went below a 35° up angle. It makes no sense. That’s a primary flight training emergency drill for recovery from a stall.

I wasn’t there, so I’ll have to wait to see what the investigation board says, but it looks like the pitot tube icing and pilot error will probably get equal billing.

Or as the Airbus driver put it: “They were *so* fucked.”

– Badtux the Flightless Penguin

The “black boxes” are in the tail section, and the debris field on the bottom is fairly compact. The vertical stabilizer is a composite and floats, as did most of the early debris that was recovered. It took days to get ships to the location, so the debris had time to drift from the point for impact.

They need something simple in the cockpit that will work when the instruments lie, like a pendulum in a jar or a centering bubble indicator like I have on my tripod. There’s a lot to be said for the old ball attitude indicator.

I hated it when we had to go to 40,000 and above, because you have to resort to oxygen and in the event of decompression, you have to use pressure breathing, i.e. the oxygen is entering under pressure and you have to work to exhale. Standard breathing doesn’t working in the near vacuum of those altitudes and you won’t have time to put a mask on before passing out. We didn’t stay up there long, the engines barely function, but it was really tiring.

So basically: The electronic instruments virtually all went blank, there were no mechanical steam gauge backups that would function in a thunderstorm, and it was pitch black outside so no horizon. At that point all the pilots could do was guess at the true situation and respond to the guessed situation. Unfortunately they guessed wrong :(.

My suspicion is that the same updraft and turbulence that forced the jet up to 38,000 feet also tore off the stabilizer. If the jet was going 400mph at the time of the microburst encounter, this would explain why the tail was found 40 miles away from the main body of the jet… it got tore off first. It would also explain some of the confusion that was in the cockpit… an Airbus without its vertical stabilizer is virtually unflyable, the machine would have been responding entirely differently from what the crew and more importantly the fly-by-wire system expected, and if the fly-by-wire system had a case of brain freeze from all this weird data it was getting and started feeding weird things to their displays or blanked their displays , they would have literally been flying blind, since the fly-by-wire system is what flies an Airbus, not the pilot. The only things that you can control on an Airbus that’s not fly by wire is the trim tabs and the engine thrust… and they *did* push the engine thrust all the way.

Note that Airbus has been denying for years that there is a problem with their tail, yet tails keep falling off. Tails don’t fall off of any other passenger airliner. Just sayin’ :twisted:.

– Badtux the Flightless Penguin

There’s now way of knowing when the vertical stabilizer separated, it may have been on entry to the water, or the impact of smacking the water. The aircraft would have “flown” through the water to its resting place.