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Comment by epups | Hacker News Reader

An excerpt:

> The captain then acted, most probably by reflex action, on the control column to reduce this pitch attitude without taking back the controls and making the procedure call-out, based on the principle of only one pilot having the controls. The two pilots then simultaneously made inputs on the controls. The pitch controls were desynchronized for 12 s due to opposing forces

It sounds like Air France has still not trained their pilots on proper cockpit discipline. This already proved fatal before (AF 447).

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One of the impressive things about flight 1549 is how quickly captain Sully declared “my aircraft” which was immediately acknowledged by copilot Skiles.

Well it seems that in this case the problem stopped immediatly after the captain said my aircraft. The problem if I understand the report is that before that he was applying inputs even though he wasn't supposed to fly.

Even without training, I don't see how the pilots could make this error, I am sure every pilot at Air France is very much aware of how AF447 happened. I am a bit puzzled how they managed to basically replicate it.

Doing the right thing once is fairly easy, doing the right thing 100,000 times is vastly harder. The issue is the UI around dual inputs not lack of training or awareness.

Friend of mine is a commercial airline pilot, she says it's like driving a bus nowadays.

People say this to downplay what flying an airliner is like, but driving a bus is hard! They're huge, have lots of inertia, you've got dozens of lives in your hands, some systems complexity, schedule pressure, a percentage of whacko passengers (and no crew to help) and that's on top of the day-to-day lunatics with whom you have to share the road. I'm sure your friend is being humble and is perhaps romanticizing the stick-and-rudder days; I still think it says more about how difficult it is to drive a bus rather than how easy it is to fly an airliner.

As a passenger, the real problem with flying nowadays is that it's quite a lot like riding the bus.

Still, why was it off course and at an unexpected angle? The captain reacted wrong, but what caused the reaction? There was another problem before.

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