What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

[BERNIE MOSFET]

if you can't see, 630 going straight down feels just like 630 going forward or backwards for that matter.

Or sitting perfectly still, for that matter. Body only senses acceleration, not velocity.

[JP135]

What a stupid, completely preventable accident/loss of life.

I taught a course with some pilots where we used that video.

The pilots told me a pilot joke.....

"What's the difference between an Airbus and a chainsaw?"

Answer: About 5,000 trees per minute.

That's damned funny.

[CJ]

I had watched a couple documentaries about this incident, and now that the black box has been recovered it is really sad to read what actually happened. Originall through the broadcasted data the assumption was the air speed indicator was frozen over the entire time, and pilots were trying to recover the entire time. They believed they had failed to maintain the proper thrust and fallen out of the envelope and crashed. When actually now we know they only had intermittent air speed indicator problems, and they simple didn't know how to fly the plane at altitude in manual mode. Very sad.

[JimD]

Nova put on a pretty good documentary about this event, pretty interesting. Sad that those douchebags lacked the training to actually fly the jet.

[68RR]

26 years with AA.. 16 years of it as a "Systems" mechanic on DC-10's, 767's and the A-300. Very familiar with the A-300 flight controls and their rigging. Never heard of "slowing" the flight controls, but know of "Limiting" the travel in relationship to airspeed.

Bill