Air France Jet 'Seconds From Disaster' After Autopilot Fails

[allardjd 1,853]

Air France Jet 'Seconds From Disaster' After Autopilot Fails in Drama with Chilling Echoes of Brazil Crash

http://www.dailymail...azil-crash.html

A poorly written article by someone whose apparent qualifications to write about aviation is that he's seen an airplane once, or at least knows someone who has.

He gets all of eight words in before using the "nose-dive" term.

The event seems to have occurred in July on a Caracas to Paris flight - or Paris to Caracas; there's no arrow on the course line image and the article doesn't really say. The aircraft that had the problem is reported as an A340 but the one pictured in the article has only two engines - A330?

Anyway - turbulence, autopilot disengaged, AC climbed and decelerated, pilots recovered; no stall, but close per the report. Two minor injuries to the crew were probably flight attendants in the cabin, but not sure. The implication is that if the AC had stalled they'd all have died, which, of course, is not necessarily correct.

John

[cattz 0]

It's the 'Daily Mail' - say no more

[mutley 4,498]

+1 with that cattz (Not often I agree with a cat!)

"Its speed dropped to just three knots from stalling" how do they know that?

[stu7708 244]

The news reports are what they are... mostly rubbish when it comes to aviation..

But I think the author made one good point. That this incident could help in understanding what went wrong with AF447, if they can establish that the situation was as similar as the article say.

But then again that wasn't his own words, it was a quote

[Andrew Godden 945]

The quality of the report aside (after seeing your comments I didn't bother reading it to avoid the frustration it would cause), the incident sounds similar to two incidents Qantas had with A330-300s back in Oct and Dec 2008. With the subsequent Air France, AF447 crash into the Atlantic in Jun 09, uneducated and ignorant media speculation started drawing similarities with the two earlier Qantas incidents as well as the pitot tube issue.

However, the ATSBs interim report in Nov 09, indicated an issue with the ADIRUs as being the cause of the Qantas A330 problem. Apparently the ADIRUs can suffer a phenomenon called "dozing" and this leads to the disengaging of the AP and the subsequent (rapid) loss of altitude.

Cheers

Andrew

[allardjd 1,853]

FDR data after the fact would tell with high precision how close they were to a stall. The FDRs on the newer Airbus are pretty sophisticated and record hundreds of channels of data. Even so, stalls at 38,000 feet don't have to be fatal if you push the nose over and get the speed up and angle of attack down again.

There's no mention of icing, pitot issues or loss of reliable air data in the Caracas flight article, so the parallels with AF 447 are somewhat superficial, I think. By now anything flying should have the new pitots installed, another disparity from AF 447. The AP did disengage in both cases, but in AF 447 it disengaged because of unreliable air data, which it is programmed to do. That doesn't seem to be the case in the more recent incident.

@ Andrew -> Interesting stuff and I wasn't aware of those events. After each event, if it's properly investigated and the lessons learned applied, the software gets better and better, just as has always been the case with hardware over the years. Thankfully nobody paid in blood for those particular lessons learned.

John

[hurricanemk1c 195]

Yep - that's a '330 - another supposed connection to '447?

[allardjd 1,853]

Yep - that's a '330 - another supposed connection to '447?

According to the article the Caracas flight was an A340 even though the picture shows an A330, so I guess that's another disconnect.

Frankly, I don't see a heck of a lot in the way of useful similarities between the two events.

John