Read this article first: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technolo.... (Essentially, three pilots flew a perfectly good jetliner into the ocean from 37,000ft two years ago, killing everyone on board. Weather was initially blamed; but, with the recovery of the flight data recorders from the bottom of the sea, the truth is much more unsettling: they didn't know how to fly. -- Picture the cashier at McDonald's when the register goes haywire and her brain melts down: that's what happened.)

http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P....

Billy Beck wrote..

"What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447"

"Endarkenment" is a very broad and deep concept.

...I am not kidding when I say that human thought is coming to a halt.

It was always horrifying enough, to me, to picture that airplane flat-plating down like that with full aft-stick input. See, I've done that in my own flying, in order to understand what happens. All airplane types behave from slightly to fairly drastically differently in those conditions, but one thing is common to all of them: air moving over the wing (Angle-of-Attack, kids: read your Langewiesche! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_La....) is all the difference between an airplane and a brick, no matter the differences in how they look. Pointing the nose down must -- early in any flight training -- become virtually instinctive. It must be the first idea to be considered in any attitude-recovery crisis, and will almost always be the solution. It has to crawl up the pilot's spine like the instinct of a dirt-track racer to kick the ass of the car out into the turn without even thinking about it.

I fully understand that these guys got themselves in a box with queer flight data flashing at them. That pilot system on those airplanes has been a gold-plated cluster**** all the way along. https://www.google.com/search?num=50.... This, to me, would almost beg the question of what they were doing there in the first place, but everybody's gotta eat and some people fly in order to do that, so off they went, in an airplane system that was doing a great deal of their thinking for them.

It's astounding that they fell for miles with the stick full-aft, which is horrifying enough for me to picture. They just never figured it out. Then; I have to read about an airplane system in which two pilots can hold opposite pitch inputs and not know what each other is doing.

That just about tears it.

Thank you Bezzle for that terrifying story. The concept of “Endarkenment”, leading to a cascade of bad decisions, is especially interesting….it actually sounded like economists were flying that aircraft…..”in a system in which two pilots can hold opposite pitch inputs and not know what each other is doing”.

I’ve watched many episodes of “Air Crash Investigation” and had some interesting experiences whilst aloft. On my last flight the 747 hit a massive air pocket near Guam and dropped a ‘long’ way, engines screaming, causing about 100 passengers to wake up and start screaming as well…..there was a lot of tension in the air….everyone suddenly realised at the same moment that they were in a metal tube travelling at 500 knots at 40,000 feet….. and going down…… and thinking…. “Why does this sh*t always happen to me?! …. Why do I always end up in the slow lane at the supermarket?!” … Well, maybe some of them.

Anyway, I’ve concluded that the only solution (if you must fly) is to book a seat in the cockpit where you can monitor the flight crew…..it’s the only way to be sure.

There's a particular set of idiocy that had to occur for this crash to unfold.

That's...... nuts. Not physically linking both sticks is even more so.

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Not physically linking both sticks is even more so.

If not physically, at least provide an electronic link...force feedback joysticks are $30 for god's sake.

Force-feedback isn't enough. You want the POSITION (not just "pushback") to be linked. Basic ergonomics here -- you have to "break the mind-mold" in a situation like this; the guy who's (correctly) pushing forward has to have the stick GO THE WRONG WAY, not just resist his pushing (which he could simply interpret as aerodynamic "feedback" from the system and thus push harder!)

You need ONE of the two pilots to break his mental state. If either does, everyone lives. If neither does, everyone dies. The design of the system precluded that from happening since both pilots THOUGHT they were commanding and having accepted by the aircraft what they perceived as "right" and as a result everyone died.

Dumb. And not fixable without MECHANICALLY linking both sticks.

Just another reason to not fly

Thx for digging that up Bez, never researched it to conclusion.

Cockpit management; "I have the plane".

In other av news, I dug into Tuesday's (12/20) New Jersey crash of a TBM 700 and found the flight track.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N731C....

In my amateur opinion; the guy flew into possible 'known ice', reasonable assurances thereof, and tried to maintain altitude right into a stall. Witnesses report steep dive and in-flight breakup.

As an amateur I throw out a couple questions to the seasoned pilots here.

- Isn't it prudent, even required, to engage deice prior to entering an environment of potential icing ? 0celsius and vis moisture ?

- Is it possible he engaged deice too late ? There is atc recording of him querying wx conditions shorty before.

- Why the hell did he try to maintain altitude or climb at such a slow speed ?

- If pitot/static went to ****, wouldn't the heaters quickly shed ? more quickly than flight surfaces ??

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Just another reason to not fly

If you think it's safer to drive (or take a boat) you're definitely mistaken.

-Uwe-

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Thank you Bezzle for that terrifying story. The concept of “Endarkenment”, leading to a cascade of bad decisions, is especially interesting….it actually sounded like economists were flying that aircraft

Given that at "economist" is invariably a bull****ter attempting to skate through life without doing anything actually productive while lending an air of exceptional competence in a seemingly arcane subject -- that's an apt analogy.

Air France hires pilots who want to let a machine do all the work, then collect their check -- and all the while put in as little conscious thought as possible.

These pilots were in their mid to late thirties, and didn't know how to fly.

Popular Mechanics wrote..

Just then an alarm sounds for 2.2 seconds, indicating that the autopilot is disconnecting. The cause is the fact that the plane's pitot tubes, externally mounted sensors that determine air speed, have iced over, so the human pilots will now have to fly the plane by hand.

Note, however, that the plane has suffered no mechanical malfunction. Aside from the loss of airspeed indication, everything is working fine. Otelli reports that many airline pilots (and, indeed, he himself) subsequently flew a simulation of the flight from this point and were able to do so without any trouble. But neither Bonin nor Roberts has ever received training in how to deal with an unreliable airspeed indicator at cruise altitude, or in flying the airplane by hand under such conditions.

Incompetents at the helm. Incompetents doing the training. Incompetents doing the design.

Endarkenment.

And you know what else? I say that training has nothing to do with it. Any kid who's ever watched birds in flight understands the rudimentary mechanics of flight: climb = slower; dive = faster. -- About the only thing a pilot needs to know about his airplane in order to not to continue trying to climb to the moon while the STALL warning is screaming is that his vehicle is not a rocket with unlimited thrust.

A stall-warning means your ****ing plane is stalling; and that happens for exactly one of two reasons: not enough throttle, or too steep of angle-of-attack. Yet Bonin has his stick full-aft virtually throughout the ordeal.

These guys failed at basic intelligence -- they were chimps masquerading as humans. Neither of them had any business entering flight school, let alone graduating after presumably passing many tests (the unstated purpose of a test is to weed out idiots).

Popular Mechanics wrote..

The plane has climbed to 2512 feet above its initial altitude, and though it is still ascending at a dangerously high rate, it is flying within its acceptable envelope. But for reasons unknown, Bonin once again increases his back pressure on the stick, raising the nose of the plane and bleeding off speed. Again, the stall alarm begins to sound.

Still, the pilots continue to ignore it, and the reason may be that they believe it is impossible for them to stall the airplane. It's not an entirely unreasonable idea: The Airbus is a fly-by-wire plane; the control inputs are not fed directly to the control surfaces, but to a computer, which then in turn commands actuators that move the ailerons, rudder, elevator, and flaps. The vast majority of the time, the computer operates within what's known as normal law, which means that the computer will not enact any control movements that would cause the plane to leave its flight envelope. "You can't stall the airplane in normal law," says Godfrey Camilleri, a flight instructor who teaches Airbus 330 systems to US Airways pilots.

But once the computer lost its airspeed data, it disconnected the autopilot and switched from normal law to "alternate law," a regime with far fewer restrictions on what a pilot can do. "Once you're in alternate law, you can stall the airplane," Camilleri says.

It's quite possible that Bonin had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

How long has it been since basic IQ tests were a feature of employment? Forty years? Fifty? We're now at the point where manifest retards are in charge of hiring and education.

= = =

"My super electro-computerized cash-register takes care of arithmetic for me, but now it's making funny noises and I don't know what to because I don't know how to count nickels and pennies anymore! And, and, ahhhhhh.... <brainmelt>"

Cashiers are "conducting" airliners now, looking polished in their spiffy uniforms so long as their incredible machines stay on the rails -- precluding the opportunity for them to start twisting knobs and pulling levers at random in a belated attempt to hurriedly learn-on-the-job before looming disaster.

The 32 year old pilot at fault had his wife on board. Their 2 children were orphaned.

I want my pilots to have a little grey at the temple.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-....

I'm just a lowly PP, ASEL, IA and I think I could've figured out what was going on. And I haven't flown in years, sadly.

Bez wrote..

A stall-warning means your ****ing plane is stalling; and that happens for exactly one of two reasons: not enough throttle, or too steep of angle-of-attack.

Remind me not to fly with you, Bez.

-Uwe-

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A stall-warning means your ****ing plane is stalling; and that happens for exactly one of two reasons: not enough throttle

So sailplanes are by default 100% stalled 100% of the time?

Yeah, you guys are havin' fun, aren't yeh?

If an airliner had a thrust-to-weight ratio in excess of 1:1, it could not stall (because it'd be a missile at that point). Angle of attack would no longer matter (save for fuel efficiency).

Figure it out.

Two words: accelerated stall.

Or in a wee bit more detail, it ain't airspeed, but alpha that causes stalls. If thrust/weight >1:1 eliminates a stall, why does a modern day fighter have a sustained (or accurately, instantaneous) turn limit?

BTW, you are correct if you are assuming a non real-life concept of 100% steady-state 1-g flight. In real-life though, stuff happens, maneuvers, turbulence, t-storms...

(BTW, that be a mighty big If you have there)

Bez, an extreme amount of thrust might keep you from losing altitude even if the wings are fully stalled, but no amount of thrust will prevent a stall per se.

-Uwe-

A car "stall" is when the engine quits.

Not so with jets.

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In itself, this was a problem which could have been dealt with, but the co- pilots had failed to deal with a high-altitude stall.
The terrifying end of Flight 447 involved a three-and-a-half minute plunge.
All those on board - who came from 32 nations, including five from Britain, three from Ireland, and two from America - died after the plane hit the sea at a speed of 180 feet a second.

The pilots ignored normal procedures and raised, rather than lowered, the plane's nose when it lost lift or, in technical parlance, 'stalled'.
An aerodynamic stall is a loss of lift, and not a stall of the engines, which investigators said had operated and responded throughout.

I think there's something else even more dangerous at work here, which hasn't been mentioned.

People getting lost in, and hypnotised by, the interface. You see it a lot in MMO's, especially with people using interface mods. Sure, they are great for making things easy, but in a large scale PvP fight (zerg vs zerg as some call it), they can't cope with complex (why some people hate large scale fights, imho, because their connection to the 'interface' is incapable of coping with anything but small scale problems).

You see people playing healers, for example, surrounded by dead and dying, and a winnable fight going down the tubes, because unless their info is presented to them via the interface, it doesn't exist, and they will all too often not rez or heal the most important players in the fight (those actually doing the right things, which is why they need the heals and rezzes). They do not have their pulse on the action, they are not aware enough to see those people that are doing the right things, or headed towards threats to counter, sudden opportunities to exploit, etc.

I have seen 'where did everybody go' from people that have been completely unaware of just how many people have been dropped all around them. It's why I like to solo as a healer, and why I haven't used an interface mod since Ultima Online.

It seems to be all too easy to acquire a complete lack of awareness of what is going on outside of just 'one' interface.

Now how many interfaces does a modern flight deck have to lose a pilot in, again? It's a lot more than one each, isn't it?

By way of contrast, a fighter pilot is surrounded by a bubble of reality (the big cockpit window) which dominates the interface 'illusion' to the extent it is much harder for the interface to become superimposed over reality (though I am sure it is even capable of happening there too).

I honestly think blaming the pilots is distracting attention away from the real culprit here, and more of these incidents will happen, until this whole hypnotic 'interface' aspect is addressed.

In a straight logical sense Bezzle is correct. You people are throwing in all kinds of other things into what he said. I really don't know why you are doing it other than just to say he is wrong.

Ribbit, Bonin had the stick pulled all the way back while the Stall warning was blaring.

The pilot did not know how to fly.

Bonin been trained that this airplane wouldn't let him stall. Under most circumstances, that's correct; it won't.

I know a guy who's the chief test pilot for a specialty airplane manufacturer (twin-engine "bush" planes, not airliners); I don't think I should name the company. Before that he was the chief flight-safety guy a major international relief agency, which will also remain nameless. About 6 or 7 years ago, he was down here letting us do some testing on his mildly exotic car (a 12-cylinder VW!). We were chit-chatting about flying, and he was lamenting the state of pilot training among the overseas airline crews, especially those in Asia. He basically said, "Many of these guys don't actually know how to fly." He also the predicted that at some point, an airliner full of people would be lost, with the chain of events that caused the accident being traced back to a blown fuse that caused the auto-pilot to trip off.

OK, the crew was French rather than Asian and the auto-pilot tripped off due to iced up pitot tubes rather than a blown fuse, but....

-Uwe-

Krzelune wrote..

In a straight logical sense Bezzle is correct. You people are throwing in all kinds of other things into what he said. I really don't know why you are doing it other than just to say he is wrong.

A few points...

1) I disagree with your initial sentence. A large amount of thrust may negate the harmful effects of a stall, but does nothing in regards to stall prevention. The one and only method of preventing a stall is to keep the angle of attack below the stall alpha.

2) Bez has frequently berated others (and not nearly so politely) for making similar errors in facts/logic/deduction. Why should he be immune to a response in-kind?

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1) I disagree with your initial sentence. A large amount of thrust may negate the harmful effects of a stall, but does nothing in regards to stall prevention. The one and only method of preventing a stall is to keep the angle of attack below the stall alpha.

If thrust exceeds the weight of the aircraft, then wings are no longer necessary for lift-generation (they simply become control-surfaces on an ersatz missile, as is in some military fighters, although lift as a property is retained of course because it is vastly more fuel-efficient in an atmospheric medium).

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2) Bez has frequently berated others (and not nearly so politely) for making similar errors in facts/logic/deduction. Why should he be immune to a response in-kind?

Your last sentence contains the smuggled-premise that you are correct when you have yet to demonstrate that. The best you're going to gin out of it is an obtuse, hyper-specific definition of "stall" from some source or another while shamelessly and hypocritically trolling the thread with ad hominem logical fallacies.

Let's tear apart a ready example of this type of ankle-nipping behavior: I had written: "A stall-warning means your ****ing plane is stalling; and that happens for exactly one of two reasons: not enough throttle or too steep of angle-of-attack." Uwe chimes in by bold-facing "not enough throttle" with a grin smilie. Now, I like Uwe;, but sometimes his humorous asides pave the way toward further track-jumping by sideliners who've no apparent actual interest in the topic at all, but rather over who is participating in it and whether on not now's-a-good-time-to-dive-in-for-a-cheap-shot. Perchance, someone like you.

Uwe, by highlighting one phrase of the sentence, lent it more gravits than the other (the phrase following the "or"), as well as (unconsciously on his part) smuggling in a fallacy of the excluded middle in which the two listed quanta on either side of "or" are treated as distant (e.g., "oil and water") rather than on a varying scale (e.g., "soap and water"), which is what my follow-ups regarding thrust-to-weight attempted to rectify. With said introduction gravits, the way was paved for a none too bright channel-flipper to hastifly get the wrong impression with a quick glance....and lo! One stepped forth....

So, you dogpiled in to requote Uwe while chopping off one end of my sentence ("...or too steep of angle-of-attack"), which he'd actually requoted for you right above, and behaved as if you hadn't seen it even though it was plain as day right in front of you.

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So sailplanes are by default 100% stalled 100% of the time?

But even though I'd already accounted for the question's answer, you asked it anyway as if I hadn't by shaving off that which addressed it: the reference to angle-of-attack. -- Obviously if you point a glider's nose toward the heavens and keep it there (assuming your model lets you), you're going to crash on your tail.

= = = =

The real subject of the thread (as is plain in the OP) is the concept of "Endarkenment". The circumstances of the crash are simply data-points. (But un an interesting twist of irony, your off-topic trolling become an object case of exactly what I was referring to: the declining ability to think.)

"The declining ability to think..."

If redefining technical terms to suit ones needs is thinking, then I would rather not think.

It is quite clear to anyone that is conversant with aerodynamics and aircraft performance that the "smuggled in premise" is correct. As the prof would put it (or the textbook writer), it is an exercise for the reader...

The "or" in your case states quite simply and clearly that if one has T/W>1, one cannot stall a plane. A rather silly assessment that ignores the basic definition of what a stall is. It is easy to stall a planes wings even with T/W>1. All that is required is an idiot that pulls back on the stick hard enough that the angle of attack exceeds the stall angle of attack. This is entirely independent of the amount of thrust available. BTW, this is likely to be in a dynamic condition, where the load factor is >1 (that is, assuming that D isn't also >T or ~T).

Bez, you have certainly stepped in a small pile of "oops" this time regarding your comment about the negation of stalling a plane having a relation to the thrust capability of the plane. That said, I agree with you about the basic cause (the "pilots" were not in fact competent pilots). There is also the "Airbus" factor, as Airbus has a quite different approach to how the pilot interacts with the flight controls than does Boeing. BTW, I have (or had) no connection to either Airbus or Boeing, although I am a practicing aerodynamic engineer with ~30 years experience in aircraft design.

Bezzle, addressing the matter before it is even posed by someone who could not be bothered to read it, wrote..

If thrust exceeds the weight of the aircraft, then wings are no longer necessary for lift-generation (they simply become control-surfaces on an ersatz missile....

Endarkenment poster-child wrote..

Bez, you have certainly stepped in a small pile of "oops" this time regarding your comment about the negation of stalling a plane having a relation to the thrust capability of the plane

What angle-of-attack upon a Tomahawk's wing would too excessive, prompting a stall?

Your answer here: ____________