Details emerge of Air France B777 landing incident
aerotime.aero
aerotime.aero
Edit: Wow - reading the report I see they got to a 24 degree pitch angle on go around? That seems high, I thought you topped out at 15 or so. This is Air France stuff all over again with the pitch up into a stall etc. I'd love to know how experienced the FO was.
"Eventually a point is reached whereby any further increase in angle of attack does not produce an increase in lift, and this point is called the stalling, or critical, angle of attack. Each airfoil has a different critical angle of attack, but with typical general aviation airfoils it is roughly 16 to 20 degrees. "
Pitch and AoA are different, but during a landing / go around you are in a low speed regime and it just seems like pitching to nearly 30 degrees nose up is excessive. Is that Air France's standard go around vs 10-15?
The true story might be that the captain saved this plane with his nose down inputs.
Or the AoA was a product of the other pilot over correcting from what they thought was unintended nose down behavior. Hard to say, clearly bad procedure either way though. It's why there's clear protocol regarding who is in control of the plane.
Close to the ground in the pattern most folks in the US are taught to be very careful about this. Ie, when you are low and slow, don't go for a big pitch up or a steep bank. There isn't time to recover.
That said, I've got NO clue about 777's, so maybe a 25 degree pitch up on takeoff / go around is normal. Hard to imagine aerodynamically that working.
What makes you think it's taught differently outside of the US?
I wonder if this is sustainable. The era of affordable general aviation aircraft is over, people are flying 50 year old planes because the new basic cessnas costs $400K each.
It'll be fine regardless, there'll be no shortage in the military -> commercial pilot funnel of the most militarized country in the world.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/units-flying-f-15c-ds-...
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/2021-usaf-ussf-almanac-e...
Granted, this is transparently an attempt to recover some remnant of a meaningful argument from the wreckage of the one I was trying to make, but it might still be interesting for someone more familiar than I with where to find the relevant data.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/03/01...
Whether or not I fully buy the argument, I don't suppose I know. I do know that a lifetime of reading, study, and home simulation taken together taught me less about what an airplane does when it's flying than did one fifteen-minute discovery flight in a Piper Archer. It's different for professionals than for an aviation-nerd amateur, of course. But I see no reason in principle to assume there aren't things you only really learn from spending enough time flying a plane too small and simple to lie to you, and every reason from experience to assume that there are.
(Having just seen your edit, I'm no longer sure this qualifies as a response on point, but I'm going to let it stand and finish my supper.)
Little, because you don't have to own a plane to fly it; the commercial pilot funnel comes through private flight schools and military aviation (over time shifting from the former from the latter), not mainly from I-bought-a-plane-with-cash non-commercial private pilots.
Not that this is me - if nothing else, you probably can't get my mom into an aircraft even at gunpoint - but it is more like the question that wants to be considered here.
Who attends those private flight schools? Unaffordable aircraft obviously won't improve things and seem quite likely to make things worse.
If I recall correctly, Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith has had some things to say based on his own experience here. In any case, whether or not that model is actively used today, I would be entirely unsurprised to see it spread widely in the next couple of decades, and maybe not only in the airline industry.
At some point the pilot shortage might get severe enough that airlines have to hire pilot trainees with little or no experience and then pay them to go through a training program. So far that hasn't been necessary but it's a common model in other countries.
I suppose the larger discussion is properly around the vast increase in income inequality over recent decades, and I'd have done well to contextualize it there before now.
(In my defense, I've had such a day that the early root canal appointment, which played out like something from Marathon Man - not that my dentist is less than excellent, but I'm glad I already knew that because we had about half an hour there during which the least surprising thing in the world would have been for him to ask me "is it safe?" - that was the second most significant thing to happen since the sun last rose. So it's quite possible I am bringing less than my best to this discussion that I'm using to help me wind down toward sleep.)
Why?
This wasn't always the case though. There's a chapter in the book Where is My Flying Car? that explains how this was a result of the early 70s explosion of product liability regulations + a FAA that was and continues to be completely apathetic to general aviation
It’s bullshit, of course. The archetype, if it ever existed, has been in decline since 1945 at the latest. Within that time, miles traveled have increased 15-fold, accidents have been reduced by 95 % (for a combined risk reduction of factor 300) while costs have come down by 80 %.
The adrenaline junkie will get bored and kill everyone with carelessness or controlled-flight-into-terrain. Because the total number of exciting situation in your 30 year career is, to a near approximation, zero. A good pilot today is a bureaucrat, meticulously running through checklists day after day.
There was at some point a philosophical split between Airbus and Boeing, the former going for fly-by-wire including automatic modification of pilot inputs etc., while Boeing was culturally invested that archetype of a pilot and preferring more direct controls. The outcome: no discernible difference in the safety records of these supposedly different approaches. Pilots from very different backgrounds? No difference. What matters for safety isn’t character, it’s process. And that’s great because processes scale, natural-born aviators don’t.
Why do you believe so? Honest question.
I don't know about France (but Europe tends to be aligned), but a basic commercial license in the UK requires 200 hours of flying experience. On top of that you would need a multi-crew rating, an instrument rating a multi-engine rating and a type rating on the plane you are going to fly. Enough to recognise that pushing the yoke left makes the plane bank left.
My brother wanted to be a pilot and was looking at moving to the US because it is cheaper and has more consistent weather. He also told me the licences were easier to get than in Europe. I think you have fallen into the 'US is best trap'
He has, and yes European licenses are tougher.
AFAIK, a typical path for a pilot in the US is to start taking lessons in a small plane, then, after getting the private license, make money flying, typically as a flight instructor, in order to pay for flight hours in bigger planes. The result is a lot of flight hours as a pilot in command. Hours as a flight instructor are particularly important because you have to cover for your student mistakes.
In countries with a weaker aviation culture future pilots tend to go to flight schools where they do the required number of hours and pass the tests but nothing more. There is simply not enough demand for general aviation flight instructors. The number of flight hours may be significant and the tests hard, but they fly mostly as students, not as pilots in command. So while they may know the technique and procedures, they lack the experience of being in charge of the plane.
I'd say that France is not the worst in that regard, we have many "aeroclubs", but not as good as the US.
In the US you can't become a flight instructor with a private pilots licence. You have to pass your commercial licence first. Just like in Europe.
You have to do at least 100 of your hours as pilot in command in the UK to get your commercial license. You will have to finish that before you can be an instructor. You can't make money from flying until you have finished your commercial licence.
To be an airline pilot you will need to have flown 1500hours in Europe or the US. Nobody gets there because of culture, they get there by flying 1500 hours
The US has better flying weather so you can build his more quickly, is cheaper and because there are more trainees there are more opportunities to build hours at someone else's expense. But cheaper does not mean better.
I'm sorry, but I call BS on what you are implying here.
First, post 9/11, most European airlines killed off their Ab-Initio programmes.
Therefore for most European airlines, the only route to getting a seat in the pointy end is the so-called "Direct Entry" route. This either requires pre-existing civilian qualifications and experience (i.e. unfrozen ATPL with real-life hours in the bag), or otherwise being ex-military with equivalent qualifications and experience in that world.
For the few airlines that do offer Ab-Initio, then I'm afraid it's complete BS if you think ab-initio trainees for any European airline just get dumped in a simulator and trained how to follow the magenta line. They will follow the same route as anyone else, i.e. they will be sent off to the US or Australia (because of the consistent weather, not anything else) and will work their way through the usual route SEP -> MEP -> Hours building .... they will then come back to Europe and finish off by getting an EU license. Only once they've got their commercial qualifications and have built experience will they then start Line Training which is where things like MCC come in, and that's where sim time starts coming in.
Simulators are expensive to run, even more expensive to buy, and there are not many of them around. They typically run 24x7 and are used for refreshers for existing crew as well as training new ones. To think there's enough spare capacity floating around to train green newbies from zero is a pipe dream.
Finally, on a practical note the newbie in the right seat will always be paired with a more experienced captain in the left seat. You will never find two noobs up front.
Is pitch the angle of the wing, and AoA the angle of the wing relative to the fluid across the wing?
The only plane that ever went into production where the angle of the wing could be changed relative to the angle of the fuselage (other than on the way to the crash site) was the F-8 Crusader [0].
GGP post has it correct.
The difference between the pitch angle of the plane and that of the wings is indeed fixed in any normal aircraft.
Also it seems crazy that a modern aircraft can have pilots silently fighting one another for controls without realizing it. If standard practice is to have only one operating the controls at any time, why not a switch that enforces input from only one set of controls?
There is a safety feature where if you put enough force on one control column, you can break this linkage. You then have independent control, but the left column will only control the left ailerons and the right column only the right aileron. I assume the second case happened on this flight, but I cannot be sure.
There is no such switch or alarm because for Boeing planes, that's how they are built. The left column connects to the left wing, the right to the right, all via cables. In order for one column to control both, there have to be cables connecting them
https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-ha...
How could the first officer be confused by the 7° bank angle even though he was the only one flying the descent?
I'm willing to forgive the decision to not land in Beiruit on a flimsy pretext in the first place, but to not divert to Larnaca shows unforgivable decision making.
In a jet you'll pitch up to 15 degrees initially, reduce flaps (if landing flaps were selected, for example from 30 back to 15), then once climbing you'll retract the gear. At that point you're going to have to pitch up much more than 15 degrees if you don't want to overspeed. It all happens much faster with two big jet engines compared to an underpowered general aviation plane.
Especially if the crew thought they had an emergency and went full power combined with a light fuel load, you would expect a serious pitch up to avoid overspeeding the flaps.
Yes, on a small GA going to +24 degrees on a go around really jumped out as high, especially if you were starting low and very slow (on landing not uncommon). But I have zero big twin knowledge.
I wish they'd included a speed plot to go with the pitch plot. The plot does show what looks like full power. Given flight duration fuel would have been way down so plane would have been (relatively) lightish most likely.
What's the risk of overspeeding? Can you actually reach speeds that are dangerous to the engines while climbing?
A: B, take the helm
B: I have the helm
Skipper: Prepare to tack
Crew: Ready to tack
Skipper: Helm's a lee
Skipper tacks, crew does their stuff
A: "You have the flight controls."
B: "I have the flight controls."
A: "You have the flight controls."Imagine being in an emergency, possibly listening to someone speaking while wearing an oxygen mask, in a smoke filled cabin, with alarms going off, and asking yourself - "wait did they say 'you ^have^ the controls', or 'you _have_ the controls'".
He might also just see that B is making inputs and assume, if they are being lax, but I assume they wouldn't.
Err… isn’t that exactly how Air France Flight 447 crashed? Both people thought they were flying, doing opposite things, the plane cancelled out their inputs and did nothing.
SYN
SYN-ACK
ACKP1: Take the controls
P2: I have the controls
P1: You have the controls
It’s basically syn:ack
A plane doesn't need to have both controls mechanically linked, or both active at the same time. You could have a nice big toggle in the middle of the cockpit that is either 2 or 3 positions (L/R/Both). Toggling it will announce "Left/Right in control" and activate the stick shaker on the dead side and re-announce if any input is received.
Panic isn't something that you can remove by training nor train for. It needs to be factored into the design that only one set of inputs is effective at a time.
If you have a switching control, mechanical or digital, it is a thing that can fail, and even if you assume it would be good before considering that, you have to consider the impact failure has on net utility, especially if a plausible failure mode renders both controls inoperable.
Of course it is. It's probably 50% of training.
Panic increases the impact of mental workload and induces a kind of "tunnel thinking" similar to tunnel vision: you become fixated on one problem and one solution, without considering other parameters and options.
But panic is caused, many times, by surprise and lack of competence.
You avoid panic by becoming more familiar with specific emergency situations.
And you fight panic by learning to recognize it early, reduce mental workload, organize and follow procedures.
I find it worrying that this incident shows a lack of professionalism from the crew. When something unexpexted happened, they simply jumped on the controls at once, didn't communicate and simply blamed the plane. This is amateurish, and somehow... quite French (I am French).
On the contrary, that's exactly what repetitive training of emergency scenarios is about.
Panic happens when you get overwhelmed with multiple bad things happening and each one requires dedicated concentration, you don't have that much attention to give so panic sets in and you do all of the tasks badly. The solution is to train repeatedly so all the reactions are muscle memory (or mental "muscle memory"), which lets you remain comfortable and in control because you've done this a hundred times before.
In SCUBA diving for example many fatal accidents are the overlap of simple problems that end up overwhelming the diver because they had not practiced it enough or recently enough.
"As a consequence of the accident, sweeping changes were made to international airline regulations and to aircraft. Aviation authorities around the world introduced requirements for standard phrases and a greater emphasis on English as a common working language."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Comm...
Here's an article stating exactly that: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2022/04/28/Pilots-p...
> If opposing forces on the two columns pass a certain limit, the link between them is deactivated or “desynchronized” to prevent accidents in the case of one side getting jammed.
That still leaves the question of how to interpret opposing inputs for the physical control surfaces, though
What's not clear is how the linkage still connects to the flight controls. The idea seems to be that the one which is moving wins. What is clear is that, if your side becomes disconnected, your yoke doesn't do anything. No wonder one pilot was frantic. It seems that you get reconnected by moving the disconnected yoke to agree with the one in control. Then the pin falls into the notch and the yokes are connected again. Not sure about that. You can see the pin and notch in the patent drawings.
This is independent of the fly-by-wire system. That's downstream from these mechanical devices.
I wonder if pilot training includes knowledge that yoke disconnection is possible.
Probably, I've heard https://www.youtube.com/c/MentourPilotaviation talk about it as well.
Task saturation - followed by loss of situational awareness - is a very real problem in today's airliners, particularly during takeoff and approach/landing. You're trying to do a ton of things in a small amount of time, while dealing with a dynamic situation outside, and in this case after a long, tiring flight over the Atlantic.
There are a great series of (dated but still good) videos from American Airlines about automation dependency, human factors and the simple but very real problems that develop as a result - often leading to panic and disaster when things go wrong. Search YT for "children of the magenta".
> your airplane [lets go controls]
Those are the words to be exchanged to avoid confusion.
I do wonder if there's some training deficiency or cultural issue that leads to this scenario in Air France flights.
And that’s the root of many issues in aviation. It works 99.99% of the time is not always good enough.
> your airplane
> my airplane
1. I'm losing command
2. I've got command
I thought Boeing did not have sidesticks, and the yokes/control columns are linked to give actual feedback (to emulate most airplanes, which do this with mechanical controls). Is that not the case?
> I thought Boeing did not have sidesticks, and the
> yokes/control columns are linked to give actual feedback
> (to emulate most airplanes, which do this with mechanical
> controls). Is that not the case?
Boeing's philosophy seems to be to provide physical feedback for most or all of the controls. So, yeah, the control columns are linked (even on fly-by-wire planes like the 777 and 787). But that's not very useful once you're dealing with startled and/or panicked pilots. Take a look at the Atlas Air or Sriwijaya Air crashes.
The problem with Air France has nothing to do with Boeing or Airbus and everything to do with pilot standards and training. At this point Air France is lucky. Look at the Air France incident in 2020 (A318). Or their incident in Bogota in 2017 (A340). Or the 2011, 2012 x2, and 2013 incidents where the Airbus (A320/321) alpha floor protection prevented an Air France crew from crashing on approach to Marseille x2, Hamburg, and Tel Aviv. At some point Air France's luck will run out.
Private pilot here.
This is so hard. It’s not an excuse, especially for professional pilots.
But I can share from experience how much your “animal brain” fights you in this situation. Pulling back leverages lift in most normal flight, until you go too slow (stall), and then you suddenly very much need to do the opposite. But the normal behavior becomes second nature, like walking.
My examiner in 2020 said the biggest thing the FAA was stressing about was a serious uptick in incidents with slow flight (and stall) handling during takeoff/landings.
A year ago, we had an experienced local private pilot wreck his plane (lucky no major injuries) succumbing to exactly this. Took off, lift conditions a little worse than normal, started to leave ground effect, felt the plane stall, pulled back, started losing altitude, panicked and pulled back harder, tailed down and fell side wards. Plane totaled. He recounted to me after how he knew what to do. He’s trained multiple times. Done lots of stall recovery. Has done many many short field takeoffs (which is similar, pop the plane off the ground and then stay low to build speed). But was still chagrined at how panick/situation management got the better of him that time.
Being master of your animal brain in all situations is hard. And you never know, because you can never test all situations.
Another counterintuitive thing is that tactile feedback isn't necessarily helpful. There's a lot of whinging about how Airbus doesn't provide any feedback in the sidestick when both pilots are doing conflicting things, same with the thrust levers (or whatever they're called in Airbus land). Pilots have crashed Boeing airliners that give you this "important" feedback.
Anyways, my point was that stall recovery is something that's usually drilled into pilots. Unfortunately for the AF 447 crew, nobody told them that the stall warning would turn off when they flew so far outside the envelope that they were in "undefined behavior" territory. And that led to at least one of the pilots not recognizing that they'd stalled in the first place. But like any crash there are many contributing factors, and if any one of those had been different the plane wouldn't have crashed.
If it were just one or two examples of poor airmanship at Air France then sure, it'd be easy to chalk it up to "flying is hard". And yeah, the pandemic has robbed a lot of pilots of their necessary practice. But the four or five cases I cited where Airbus' "alpha floor protection" saved Air France flights were all pre-pandemic. At some point you've gotta look at what those incidents and accidents have in common (hint: it's not the airplane and not the crew). And that's why my main concern is with Air France's lack of safety culture and by extension their pilot training.
This in a nutshell is why I never completed my Private Pilot training. As I got close to taking my checkride I began to think about finances going forward. And I realized that I probably couldn't afford to fly often enough to keep my skills sharp and a dull pilot is a dangerous pilot.
25 years later I'm still alive so I think I made the right decision :-)
Airbus 320 pilot told me there is a light that comes on when inputs dont match.
Now reread the transcripts with the assumption that the right seater might not have the best intentions.
But also isn't the right seater the first officier, surely he should obey a repeated direct order from the captain.
Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "[Expletive] I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[29]
Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[73][32]
He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back.
The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.
--
So in an Airbus this situation is unambiguous - the plane tells you plain and simple: Both pilots are trying to fly at the same time. With a mechanically linked set of controls, you don't necessarily know whether you're fighting the other pilot or the plane.
This incident was at 1670 ft. My reading of the article is a P and CP being twats:
"During the go-around on the Air France flight, the captain was making nose-down inputs, while the first officer was pulling back on the controls."
I'm just a simple civvy but I was an air cadet and learned enough about flying in a single engine trainer to know that only one person should have control. You literally say "I have control" - "You have control" - "I have control". These muppets didn't seem to do that:
"It took until 07:52:06, for the captain to become the only person making control inputs."
In the very guarded language of accident review I would say that is a damning indictment of the behaviour of the pilot and co-pilot as being completely reckless and bloody stupid.
This was not AF447 so what on earth happened? I'm guessing inadequacy of some sort and that's on the industry as a whole.
If company culture doesn't strictly enforce callouts 100% of the time, it's easy to get into a routine of everything being just fine 100's of times until it isn't.
Really these sorts of things show there should be a failsafe mechanism that provides tactile/haptic feedback to the pilots if the other inputs are "fighting" theirs.
Even an audible alarm isn't enough, as you'll likely get more than a few of those during events where it matters.
Proper CRM of course should make this "impossible" - but in high stress moments any more layers of swiss cheese you can add the better.
Two drivers
I have no idea why the pilot-monitoring would have taken his controls. Or why the pilot-flying wouldn't have called him out for it. Possibly a seniority issue - we've seen similar issues before. Hopefully the french aviation authorities can determine the root cause.
That transcript is so sad.
Well, yes, but these kind of incidents keep happening at AF. Everyone talks about AF447 because it ended in the ocean, but there have been many incidents with AF since AF447, involving serious pilot error which nonetheless ended in a safe landing. So you have to look a bit beyond the "muppets" in the front seats and start to wonder about company culture and training.
They probably assumed that is what was going on. That the other pilot was doing something obviously wrong is not a natural assumption, when there is an alternative.
It seems like Air France has got some procedural drills to work on. One would have hoped that happened already. Somebody should check, this time.
This factoid will not die on HN. Conflicting inputs on an Airbus are handled by averaging and an audible "DUAL INPUT" cockpit warning.[1]
In the case of AF447, the co-pilot used his "Priority Takeover" button which meant only his control inputs were in effect.
If you wanted to say there is no physical feedback, then you would be correct.
[1] https://safetyfirst.airbus.com/app/themes/mh_newsdesk/docume...
If you're trying to fly the plane, but your buddy is also doing it — it should light up / make noise "hey y'all can't fly the plane at the same time"
That's surprising: this seems to be a simple check to implement and a very useful one too!
It seems in this case there was maybe some additional confusion about automation thrown into the mix; the pilots perhaps thought they were fighting the aircraft rather than each other. This is worrying, since if you want the autopilot disconnected, it would be typical to disconnect it, rather than try to override it (the autopilot will disconnect if manual inputs are made beyond a threshold, but that's not a typical way to disconnect it).
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
P.s. Tangent: apropos the air france 447 flight, 99% invisible did a solid episode on it some years back, including a bunch of discussion on the terrible HMI: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
It shows there is a huge problem with the control systems. Am I the only one who sees it?
It used to be (did it? I am not an engineer) that the controls were hydraulic and connected. So if you tried opposing moves it was immediately apparent. With "fly by wire" not so much.
A good thing the aeroplane landed safely. Others have not
This is a pretty clear example of pilot error; they had all the information needed to understand what was going on (and, unlike on an Airbus, the additional information of needing to fight each other physically through the controls), and failed to process that information into a correct understanding of the situation. The fact that these type of events keep happening at Air France tells you it's not the individual pilots, but rather a training / company culture issue.