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After a whole lot of spinning the AF447 report, Ubu comes up with this brilliant conclusion:

Unfortunately, some U.S. carriers have bought Airbus 330, including Delta and Northwest Airlines -- and a lot of Asian companies, including Cathay Pacific and Thai Airways. So even if you avoid Air France, you're not guaranteed to avoid these unstable, fly-by-wire-and-computer airplanes.

There's only one small problem with this: consider what would've happened if it were a 747 that lost the airspeed indication and pilots made the same inputs. I can tell you: they would've also stalled it, but instead of riding an airplane that remained controllable, they would've spun in and reached the surface in many fragments. This is what happens if you stall an "iron" airplane with swept wings at altitude (the corner of the envelope in which an airliner cruises is called "coffin corner" for that reason).

Least you think I am exaggerating, things like that happened many times (although personally I only remember cases of Tu-154 spinning in from cruise, due to the way my interests were focused). The simple fact is that computerized airplanes save lives.

The failure of AF447 crew was not keeping the pitch even after the airspeed indication ceased, since the gyroscopic information remained. Sticking with it would've prevented the stall (although I'm not sure if it would've broken a well-developed stall). One problem, however, is that it's extremely hazardous to make abrubt nose-down inputs in an airliner. A test flight of An-148 went down because, just like on AF447, its airspeed indicator failed and the crew responded with nose-down inputs, which were often called in hindsight from AF447 crew. The airplane oversped and broke up in mid-air.

In my opinion, A-330 is a safer airplane and any of the Boeing's old iron, and Ubu just has no clue about the topic, at all. That said, pro made a certain pushback towards basics of flying (e.g. Rapp did, although, oddly enough I do not see either Mac or Karlene addressing it in my feedreader's cache). Note, however, that in case of AF447 we'd be talking about basic flying, but not visual flying, because outside references were not available (it was pitch black over the ocean, like when JFK Jr. died -- and he wasn't flying an "automated" airplane). What really should be done is an improvement in training curriculum that includes airspeed indicator failures in particular, and partial panel in general. Oh, and bring up the fully-computerized 787 online sooner. That will help to shut up the Airbus haters.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 04:03 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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