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Comment by lucioperca | Hacker News Reader

You can absolutely try switching to reverse at 200km/h in a manual transmission. car at cost of your tranmission and potentially your bones in you hand. If you do it while rolling forward it will make funny sounds.

Apart from that the pilot flying the aircraft was totally confused and pulled the nose up while having stall warning and actually stalling. That is quite some remarkable screw up not understanding to stall and thinking having your nose at an high attack angle while having 100% engine thrust will solve anything in this situation. Sure with non-independent joysticks the other might have called the non nonsensical maneuvers earlier and prevented it. But the lack of awareness in instrument flight of that pilot is quite remarkable.

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Can and should be able to are different things. I would imagine on a manual transmission they want things to be simpler so they have to make trade-offs and can't encode certain things without adding hardware.

But it's still not something anyone except the "I like direct control of the machine" types actually want, average users would probably prefer the safeguards.

Thing is, pulling the nose up silenced the stall warning. In the end, the flying crew was, wastly over-simplyfied, convinced to get out of a stall by pulling up. That alert behavior was changed by Airbus.

Blaming the pilots, or flatout stating that one design pholosophy is better than the other, is just ignorant. That's worse than all those soccer coaches knowing everything better on subdays, or whatever the US equivalent is, because at sport no lives depend on it.

And regardless of the latest Boeing fuck ups, everyone in aerospace knows that. And the people designing those planes and systems are fully aware of that, and know what they do.

Edit: The Vanity Fair piece also focuses on the stick behaviour and fly-by-wire systems. I cannot emphasize it enough, that pullong up silenced the stall alarm. The issue was that flight crew never realized that they were still in a stall. Pilot training aroubd that particular edga case, including simulator training, was ammended. As was the stall alarm behaviour. Fly-by-wire and stick behaviour had not much to do with it.

On a different note, for everyone blaming the pilots for being clueless amateurs (I exagerate, but I do get the impression): they died too on that flight. Inclusing the family of one of those pilots. Flight crew had as much skin in the game as possible. And before people start crying for remote controlled planes, how much risk does a pilot sitting in cubicle hubdreds of miles away from the plane actually take?

"Blaming the pilots, or flatout stating that one design pholosophy is better than the other, is just ignorant."

I work with safety, I study it. The Airbus was poorly designed. You want to have forcing functions in the hardware, not depend of operator training, the "software" in safety terminology. Airbus should have had the proper design philosophy so that the forcing function was in the "hardware", eg, the yoke of Boeing. The poor choice of having independent joysticks brought the plane down. Not certain why the FAA, which does know better, approved of the Airbus design. That alone is worthy of a study. Was it politics?

In summary, safety guidelines mandate putting safety in the "hardware" of real forcing functions and not "software" -- training. That is the reality. 447 crash occurred because of poor Airbus design and the FAA for approving this design that goes against safety principles.

Well, you lose height rapidly, on full engine trust and your nose up for quite some time. I do not know what other conclusion than stall you can make.

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