AirAsia Accident Report Released

somewhereupthere said:
Highest I've ever hand-flown (admittedly neither Boeing nor Airbus) was FL370. I didn't like it. AP was inop (pre-RVSM days).

Because of the thinner air the airplane tends to be less responsive, you need greater deflection of a control surface to achieve the same reaction of a lesser input in thicker air. Because the aircraft's reaction time for a given input (as compared to lower altitude) is increased, pilot's tend to over control the aircraft using larger inputs, and thus experiencing PIO.

The problem with that can be the so called coffin corner, where you may be near critical AOA for stall, but also near a speed at which the local airflow around the wing surfaces have reached Mach1. A shockwave over the wing develops and eventually can lead to mach tuck.

I'm not a fan of pilots intentionally hand flying an aircraft at altitude, but I am a fan of pilots receiving appropriate training in this area, especially concerning high altitude upset recovery.

Very good video here
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Thanks. I'm aware of the balancing act between stalling and overspeeding, but didn't know about the delayed response after making inputs, leading to PIO's. Makes sense though.

The part that seems crazy (one of many) is not doing anything for 9 seconds between the AP kicking off and ending up in a 53 degree bank. I know there's got to be an audible warning when the AP disconnects on the Bus, but maybe with all the master cautions going off they were too disoriented? On the Plane I fly when the AP kicks off unexpectedly it's very loud and obvious.
 
My memories of hand flying at altitude pre RVSM ( 50/50 chance of having a deferred autopilot ) are those of finessing the airplane as MikeD said, you pretty much just thought of what control input you wanted and you would get the desired result.
Anything more than small control inputs at altitude tend to lead to large flight path deviations due to the fact that you are generally at a pretty high TAS.
:)
 
MikeD said:
The actual flying itself, generally speaking, is the easy part of most emergencies. The troubleshooting of the emergency itself is the more difficult part. Hence it makes sense for the more experienced person to be working the EP, while the lesser experienced person need only keep the plane from hitting other planes, the ground or anything attached to the ground, while assisting beyond that to the best of their ability.
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Well of course clearly, but when the control of the airplane is in serious question, the captain needs to step in more aggressively. What's that thing we learned/taught as instructors? Aviate Navigate Communicate. Fly the plane first. Aviating/Flying the plane was clearly not happening successfully at the hands of the first officer, and why I made the statement about the CA needing to step in in that moment. Besides it would be very distracting to run a QRH procedure (or whatever Airbus calls it) while the airplane is falling out of the sky screaming at you with a highly unusual attitude situation present...
 
JustinS said:
Well of course clearly, but when the control of the airplane is in serious question, the captain needs to step in more aggressively. What's that thing we learned/taught as instructors? Aviate Navigate Communicate. Fly the plane first. Aviating/Flying the plane was clearly not happening successfully at the hands of the first officer, and why I made the statement about the CA needing to step in in that moment. Besides it would be very distracting to run a QRH procedure (or whatever Airbus calls it) while the airplane is falling out of the sky screaming at you with a highly unusual attitude situation present...
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Did you read post #30, by chance? :)
 
JustinS said:
I did. Somehow I thought you posted the one I replied to after that post this morning when I logged in on JC on my phone. :oops:
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Its all good. I fully agree with you. Can't really do much of anything until aircraft control is had in some way, at some point.
 
Seggy said:
The issue in these accidents isn't the Airbus.
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I completely agree. You hold the stick at the aft limit in an Airbus, or a Cessna, and you're going to impact terrain/water. I think the important question is why are there professional pilots that think this is in any way an appropriate control input. The next question is why was there no positive exchange of control? I think these questions need to be explored before attention is turned to what the electronics can or cannot do.
 
Derg said:
Generally when bad stuff happens, the copilot flies and the captain runs the ECAM. I really don't have any special powers in my left hand that a properly trained copilot doesn't have in his right.
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Key word "properly trained." I would go out on a limb and say that a copilot who has spent their training in an ab initio environment and can't recover from a basic unusual attitude is not properly trained. This needs to be practiced both in the sim and in a real airplane where you can feel the effects of spatial disorientation.

I also think from a human factors perspective, the Airbus flight control model of independent non-moving sticks with an override button and non-moving thrust levers with autothrust detents has failed.

It was an interesting experiment and a radical departure from the normal way of doing things in the late 1980s, but I think today's training environment has become particularly intolerant of it. Pilots, airlines and airplane manufacturers all share an obligation to not kill passengers for dumb reasons. Loss of control is an extremely dumb reason to kill a bunch of people when everything else on the airplane is mostly still working. But it's even dumber to kill a bunch of people if there's a guy who was capable of stopping it but didn't because he didn't understand his control inputs were being cancelled out.
 
Boris Badenov said:
Oh cool. I was afraid that maybe you'd gotten your uh "wires crossed" again. I mean, if I'm a-summin' correctly, you've got 831 hours of !*JET*! time, only some of which was accumulated after 2004. That's a pretty sweet gig! Tell you what, though...unless you were, like, 16 at the time, no more attempted old jokes, gramps.
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inigo88 said:
I also think from a human factors perspective, the Airbus flight control model of independent non-moving sticks with an override button and non-moving thrust levers with autothrust detents has failed.
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I agree with this. I don't understand how that wasn't seen in the design phase. How did one of the human factors people they hire not step in and say... uh ya - this thing here where the other pilot is out of the loop from no feedback. Ya, change that.

Not that the accident was airbuses fault. It's just that their design philosophy is a big gaping hole in the first slice of cheese.

I kind of wonder that if they changed it, someone would see it as admitting fault in design failure and have litigation problems.
 
Cóndor said:
The CA had over 20,000 hours and the FO over 2,200 hours including 1,300 (give or take a few hours) in the A-320, and both of them passed their most recent PCs without any issues so I'm not exactly sure how they can be low-time/low-skill unless you're referring to their FAC troubleshooting exposure time and electronic/computer systems engineering skills.

I'm curious as to what your suggested solution for these types of accidents would be . . . maybe make all pilots go through aircraft systems engineering school? Make them fly 1,500 hours in a C-172 or PA-28 that don't have anything resembling FACs or separate side-stick controls so that they can become proficient at basic stall recovery skills? Not to be rude or anything but if you're going to rant about crews like these being too low-skill and low-time to fly transport category aircraft, then the least you can do is tell us how our industry can solve your perceived issue.
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Is it systemic or did all these foreign carriers with similar accidents just get unlucky? I don't really know. With a lot of these foreign pilots (taught overseas), what sort of curriculum are they getting taught? Are they even getting taught it? There was a great article about the fraud of Indian flight schools not too long ago, guys with "350" hours had, in some cases, less than 45 minutes in an airplane and it was from the back seat.

How many times do current/former CFI's post about their foreign students, and how the vast majority of them scare the crap out of them in the airplane? Yet they can operate an Airbus, or be taught to, because the airplane is so forgivingly designed that 3rd world countries were the ideal design customer with almost no time actually spent learning to fly. Going to the right seat of an Airbus at 200-300 hours, you've effectively skipped the apprentice stage of learning. We all went out and did stuff in airplanes that scared the crap out of us, but we learn from it, and "never again" we will allow it to happen.

Personally I don't think operating such a highly automated aircraft is really that much of a learning experience, personally. Worse than doing t&g's with students in a Cessna. While I operate an Airbus, I flew an RJ. I flew a Beechcraft. Those airplanes gave me a lot of ingrained muscle memory that is tough to forget and were infinitely harder to operate within tolerances.

I will say training programs at the airlines needed to change. The fact that you were failed if you lost altitude on a stall blew me away, and was absolutely negative training. This was an FAA failure, as they made the standards. It's what happens when you have people who don't really have a clue about how to fly make rules about, well, flying.

But dreaming up a program, where you take guys from zero to hero and train them almost exclusively in the "box" of operating in an airline environment, is not the way to go, IMO. You're just going to get more of the same issues. Yeah, you have butts in seats but they'll just repeat Air France, AirAsia, Malaysia, etc because they never really learn how to fly an airplane.

If can be done, IMO Daniel Webster (now defunct) had the absolute best idea. Private pilot cert, glider rating, instrument, commercial, multi, CFI, then CFI-G, then MEI after you've done that a while. We should be focusing on training well rounded individuals, not this "airline direct" crap that leaves out all the basic, fundamental skills we learned (keep in mind, doing stupid stuff by yourself in small airplanes is also a powerful learning tool) that prevent us from crashing into retaining walls on VFR days and from stalling a transport category airplane at 35,000 feet and never recovering. In the same way it takes time for your beverage of choice to "age", it also takes time to develop any good tradesman.
 
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