A pilot facing faulty data and deafening alarms in an oversea thunderstorm pitched his plane sharply up instead of down as it stalled, then lost control, sending the Air France jet and all 228 people aboard to their deaths in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
The fatal move was part of a chain of events outlined in a report by French investigators on Thursday that could have legal consequences for plane maker Airbus and airline Air France — and could change the way pilots around the world are trained to handle planes manually.
“I don’t have control of the plane at all,” the pilot said, a minute before it crashed, according to a particularly gripping passage in the 224-page report.
The document is the result of three years of digging into what caused Air France’s deadliest-ever accident and makes sweeping recommendations for better preparing pilots worldwide to fly high-tech planes when confronted with a high-altitude crisis.
The Airbus 330 passenger jet flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed on June 1, 2009. Over-reliance on automated signals and inadequate training were repeatedly fingered as contributing to the crash, along with mounting stress in the cockpit.
Ice was the initial culprit. Ice crystals blocked speed sensors on the underbelly of the plane known as pitot tubes, the “unleashing element” in the crash, chief investigator Alain Bouillard said.
The erroneous speed readings prompted the autopilot to disengage and alarms to start sounding in the cockpit.
The pilot at the controls could not tell if the plane was stalling or going too fast, the report said.
Meanwhile, the plane’s flight director system gave conflicting information.
The flight director shows the pilot what movements of the controls he needs to make to keep the plane on a set course and altitude — but it relies on information from the pitots and other sensors. Investigators said the crew should have turned off the flight director at that point.
Instead, the pilot in control nosed the plane upward, thinking he was going too fast and the plane was in a dive, the report says. In fact, the plane was in an aerodynamic stall.
The decision to pull up so sharply instead of down was an “important element” in the cause of the crash, Bouillard said.
BEA chief Jean-Paul Troadec was careful to stress both technical and human factors in the crash. He said the pilots should have turned off automatic signal systems and flown entirely manually as soon as they realized the pitots were blocked.
William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia, said the pilots were unable to look past the conflicting information and understand what the aircraft was actually doing.
“Pilots a generation ago would have done that and understoond what was going on, but [the AF447 pilots] were so conditioned to rely on the automation that they were unable to do this,” he said.
“This is a problem not just limited to Air France or Airbus,” Voss said. “It’s a problem we are seeing around the world because pilots are being conditioned to treat automated processed data as truth, and not compare it with the raw information that lies underneath.”
The report could have legal implications: A separate French judicial investigation is still underway, and Air France and Airbus have been handed preliminary manslaughter charges.
Airbus, the manufacturer of the A330 plane, said in a statement that it is working to improve the pitot tubes and making other efforts to avoid future such accidents.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of