Airbus Faces Charges Over 2009 Rio-Paris Crash

mayberry42 writes "A French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges Thursday against Airbus over the 2009 crash of an Air France jet — opening a rare criminal investigation against a corporate powerhouse. The order from Judge Sylvie Zimmerman targeting the European planemaker centers on the June 2009 crash into the Atlantic of an Airbus A330 bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on board."

Comments

What happens if they're found guilty?

[MrEricSir]

Forgive me for not knowing much about French law, but what happens if a corporation is found guilty of manslaughter?

Can specific people be held accountable, is there a fine against the company, etc?

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[Anonymous Coward]

The management all go "moo" and tap dance frantically.

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[countertrolling]

Off with its cockpit!

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[cappp]

I'm assuming the French law is similar to the UK one in that the outcome is pretty much financial with a dash of policy change. Corporate Manslaughter in the UK is governed by the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 which notes that:

A court before which an organisation is convicted of corporate manslaughter or corporate homicide may make an order (a “remedial order”) requiring the organisation to take specified steps to remedy—

(a)the breach mentioned in section 1(1) (“the relevant breach”);
(b)any matter that appears to the court to have resulted from the relevant breach and to have been a cause of the death;
(c)any deficiency, as regards health and safety matters, in the organisation's policies, systems or practices of which the relevant breach appears to the court to be an indication.

There is however no personal responsibility assigned i.e. the employees aren't found guilty of aiding or abetting.

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[Anonymous Coward]

please say it is televised

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[arivanov]

First, it is not. French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". The Blair style playing fast and lose with it and declaring all management guilty until proven innocent in an H&S case as per UK H&S legislation is impossible there. No comment who exactly sponsored Blair to push that one.

Second, for the time being the charge is mostly a formality. This allows resources to continue to be allocated to the case. Otherwise it would have had to go on the cold case shelf. This way the French government can subsidize the search for the black boxes without getting into the usual Boeing vs Airbus or Air France vs the rest of the world subsidies debate. Granted the money in this case is 20-30M so it is a fraction of the usual sums discussed in the context of Airbus or Air France subsidies, but it is money none the less. Additionally, there are resources you cannot buy officially with money like military vessel involvement. This allows these resources to continue being allocated to the case.

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[cappp]

Found it. Seems the French are tougher than their British neighbours. According to the government memo I found the following:

Articles 131-37 to 131-39 of the Penal Code define ten types of penalty specific to legal entities:8 fine, dissolution (for the most serious offences9), prohibition to exercise certain activities for a certain period (especially for the offences of torture and barbarity10), placement under judicial supervision, closure of the establishment for a given period, disqualification from public tenders, prohibition to make a public appeal for funds, prohibition to draw unauthorised cheques or to use payment cards, and confiscation of the thing used or intended for commission of the offence or of the proceeds of the offence.

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[mdm42]

Can't really see the French government applying any of those against Airbus, can you?

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[AvitarX]

French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".

Those that I know from France, and those that I know that took goverment classes in French Universities (but were not French) say that their legal system is much less innocent until proven guilty than ours. Is England just that much worse, or am I misinformed? It is a fairly small sampling, but they are educated people.

Ours being American (in the USA sense).

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[laejoh]

Wel, avant as they 'd say, in the old days: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[mijelh]

their legal system is much less innocent until proven guilty than ours

People in Guantanamo may differ.

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[Coren22]

Isn't that a vagina?

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[Coren22]

There are US citizens in Gitmo?

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[AvitarX]

People in Guantanamo aren't in the system.

Note, I think that is bad, and should not be the case, but it is. The constitution applies to people within the nation, and I don't think that's where they were grabbed (this is the current interpretation, I personally think we should give them real trials, and with speed, as there has been plenty of time to fail to build a vase now).

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[mijelh]

It's full of them, and they are armed.
Now jokes aside, if you imply that it's OK to apply different legal systems to nationals and foreigners you are both reaffirming my point and scaring me.

Double engine?

[Compaqt]

The article doesn't say how many engines were on this plane.

Anyway, what happened is that the software failed and gave bad readings. This seems to be cautionary tale regarding the limits of human engineering, and, of course, it'll always be humans who are doing the engineering.

It also brings up the scary prospect of problems in the software and sensors of a nuclear power plant.

Re:Double engine?

[acid06]

It says it's an A330, a quick Wikipedia search will give you the answer you want.

By the way, they don't know what happened. They never found the black box or anything like that. So no scaremongering regarding "limits of human engineering", please. The first suspect is and always will be pilot error or mechanical failure (or a combination of the two).

Re:Double engine?

[zonky]

Operating too close to limits has long been the suggestion: http://trueslant.com/milesobrien/2009/06/08/the-coffin-corner-and-a-mesoscale-maw/

Re:Double engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

What may have transpired according to pbs which is the logical solution is that all three pitot tubes failed, they are used for determining the airspeed, hence making sure that proper aerodynamics are maintained. This is airbuses philosophy that as long as the computer is in charge of the plane, the humans can not crash it, except when the computer can not determine control. Well the only measurement of control was gone and the computer disengaged it self from the equation and tara!!! the spoiled pilots got information overload and ended up with the plane in the Atlantic. Does not take an aerospace engineer to solve that riddle or does it????

Re:Double engine?

[Rakishi]

Your point being? Everything has risk in it and it's always a question of where the failure prone human is. At a desk writing a program is one of the safer places.

The alternative in this case is to give more power to human pilots who historically are the leading cause of plane crashes. So yeah, the engineered solution may occasionally fail horribly but all the times it doesn't it prevents an even larger number of horrible failures.

Re:Double engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOVA had an episode on this crash and the investigation, and the plausible theory they seemed to come to was a combination of
1) Supercooled water in storm clouds icing over all of the pitot tubes, which they showed could happen very quickly in the right weather conditions
2) The human crew not responding quickly enough when the autopilot disengaged due to the pitot tubes being blocked. (pitot tubes measure airspeed, so the autopilot has to disengage when it has no readings)

      While the black box was never found, the on board computer did send a series of error messages to Air France before it went down which indicated that it lost all airspeed indicators and shut the autopilot off. They found evidence of similar issues occuring on other planes of that size on that route before, but the pilots had always managed to maintain control. They also ran it in simulators without telling pilots the error they were presenting and while it generally caught them off guard, they were able to regain control as well. As I recall, one of the keys was to manually increase the thrust. When the autopilot was engaged, it adjusted thrust without actually moving the manual thrust control the pilots use. Therefore, when it disengaged, speed would start dropping but they would have had no airspeed indicators to indicate that.

    It's also known there were storms in the area, and it's possible that if there were a smaller storm in front of a much larger storm, the smaller storm may prevent the on board weather radar from detecting the larger storm. They would have flown through the small front and been stuck in the large supercell before they even knew it was there.

    When you combine that all info with the "Coffin Corner" details as in Zonky's post, it seems pretty likely it stalled out, especially if they tried to climb over the storm.

Re:Double engine?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Likely the final cause of the crash was a helmet fire.

Re:Double engine?

[Kilrah_il]

So what you are saying is that the computer had a sensor problem so it disengaged itself, per protocol, and then the pilots couldn't fly the plane? That's your "logical" solution. What exactly is "information overload"? These people are trained to fly planes. That's their jobs. They should know how to handle all the information that is being given to them by all the sensors and dials in the cockpit.
If, as you say, they couldn't fly the plane, it was a pilot error. Maybe there was a software error that caused the sensor/computer to stop working, but the backup (i.e. pilots) should have taken over.

Anyhow, I am not saying this is what happened. I don't know (and IANAAE), but saying something like "computer disengaged it self from the equation and tara!!! the spoiled pilots got information overload and ended up with the plane in the Atlantic. Does not take an aerospace engineer to solve that riddle or does it????" is pretty stupid, IMO.

P.S.
Not to deride you or anything, but please consider using less '?' and '!', and more proper punctuations. It makes the post easier to read. And yes, I know that once I write something like this, you will find a grammar/spelling mistake in my post. My apologies :).

Re:Double engine?

[GooberToo]

Anyway, what happened is that the software failed and gave bad readings.

Before everyone jumps on the anti-AirBuss bandwagon, its important to remember, Boeing has had many such failures resulting in many, many deaths. Their hydraulic failure caused reverse rudder output from its given input. So for example, a pilot would apply a modest amount of right rudder, which would cause the plane to roll left. That's backwards in case you don't know. The pilot would then attempt to compensate for the reversed roll by apply yet more right rudder. The plane would then roll more rapidly left. Repeat the cycle until the aircraft goes inverted and then pile drives into the ground.

Originally it was thought this was a unique incident but further research by investigators reveals this accounts for three crashes in which "pilot error" was perviously attributed and likely explains another two. So in total, Boeing's failure accounts for what is likely five different plane crashes.

And in case you're interested, their fix is somewhat unsatisfying. They had two hydraulic rams which controlled the rudder. The problem is, one of the two would suddenly start running in reverse and over power the other. The solution was to add a third, such that a single failure can not overpower the other two. To date, they've never been able to completely recreate the failure and investigation of sensor logs indicated the problem occurred somewhat frequently even though the single failure wasn't always able to over power the other ram.

Hooray for quality engineering!

Re:Double engine?

[MichaelSmith]

I work as a software engineer in Aviation and I have done some user interface design work on air traffic control systems. One problem I see in many domains is a kind of cascading call for attention. Over time the people who specify the system look for new ways to attract the attention of the user. Usually this happens in the context of addressing a specific problem such as user X failed to recognise condition Y for Z seconds and the solution is to make the condition Z warning flash yellow for N seconds. Okay so thats that problem addressed (but not solved) but now condition Q s is being missed while the warning for condition Z is up so we had better make that warning red and so on.

I ride a bicycle to work. We get all sorts of patches to the environment which increase the cognitive load on bike riders, for example:

1. Left lane left turn only bicycles excepted
2. Bus lane, bicycles permitted where signed
3. Bicycle lanes colored in green at "attract attention"
4. Bicycle lanes delineated with tactile edging which by the way is deadly in the wet
5. Five or six types of bicycle lanes depending on where you are
6. ..and so on

You see everybody has their own little local solution but tracking and learning about them takes a lot of cognition.

My wife bought a new car recently. I wanted her to get a Honda civic hybrid and we test drove it but we settled on a VW Jetta. The Honda has a mess of colored LEDs around the instrument panel. The VW has a little monochrome LCD screen. Thinking about it later I can see that a lot of thought about UI design has gone into the VW. It is a very cool car to drive in the sense that it keeps out of the drivers way as much as possible. It doesn't grab your attention. The lights and wipers are automatic. Thats two jobs you don't have to worry about for a start. The interior looks as dull as hotblack's stunt ship but it draws your attention to stuff you need to know about and little else. Its like a well designed ATC UI. The way they used to be.

Re:Double engine?

[GooberToo]

The problem with "pilot error" determination is that maybe 50% (made up number of large percentage is accurate) of the time, it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the accident. Pilot error is sort of a catch-all for, "we have no fucking clue what happened and feel we must explain the crash if possible so pilot error is as good as any. Not to mention its very believable."

Re:Double engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also ran it in simulators without telling pilots the error they were presenting and while it generally caught them off guard, they were able to regain control as well. As I recall, one of the keys was to manually increase the thrust. When the autopilot was engaged, it adjusted thrust without actually moving the manual thrust control the pilots use. Therefore, when it disengaged, speed would start dropping but they would have had no airspeed indicators to indicate that.

More specifically, the simulation shown in the episode was conducted by two instructor pilots, whose first reaction to the loss of airspeed indications was to (as you mentioned) set a specific thrust setting (86%, IIRC), and to set a specific attitude (5 nose-up, IIRC), which, as stated in the episode, for the A330 will cause the aircraft to settle at a safe airspeed (too fast or slow = stall).

Other posts, and the NOVA episode, mention the compilation of singular issues that compounded to a fatal accident. Its interesting to me how often a simple procedure (such as a thrust & pitch setting) can negate the world conspiring against you.

Re:Double engine?

[sarahbau]

Since you mentioned PBS, I'm assuming it was the NOVA special. I watched that a few weeks ago, and while they did say the pilots might have had "information overload," they showed that in a flight simulator, trained pilots correctly followed procedure to avoid stalling in that situation.

Re:Double engine?

[Sky Cry]

It's not like one can't manage them. But rather they are extra things that you need to think about. And the more things you have to think about, the harder it is to concentrate on the important bits.

Re:Double engine?

[AvitarX]

If that's the safe default, I would think the autopilot should hand over control in that state.

Re:Double engine?

[Registered Coward v2]

The problem with "pilot error" determination is that maybe 50% (made up number of large percentage is accurate) of the time, it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the accident. Pilot error is sort of a catch-all for, "we have no fucking clue what happened and feel we must explain the crash if possible so pilot error is as good as any. Not to mention its very believable."

While I agree that "pilot error" can be a catchall it's often a proximate cause of the accident. Poor design or environmental factors can be major contributor, but in modern accidents human (i.e pilot) actions often worsen the situation or create it in the first place - hence "pilot error."

For example - attempts to land in bad weather rather than divert, especially when it's the second or third attempt. Or the NYC crash where the co-pilot overstressed the rudder which came off. Pilot's turning engines off in flight because of switch placement (they did a restart and went on normally). Poor or confusing design can lead to poor decision making. Accidents are the result of an often complex chain of events, in which an operator's decision played a crucial role in a negative outcome.

The real danger is, as you suggest, to use "pilot error" as an excuse not to discover other probable causes of an accident.

Re:Double engine?

[jamesh]

The problem with "pilot error" determination is that maybe 50% (made up number of large percentage is accurate) of the time, it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the accident. Pilot error is sort of a catch-all for, "we have no fucking clue what happened and feel we must explain the crash if possible so pilot error is as good as any. Not to mention its very believable."

Based on what i've read it seems that the airspeed inputs went bad, causing the computer to throw it's hands in the air and say "I can't do this. You fly it", and it did so in the middle of a fairly big storm. Given that the pilots relied to some extent on the same sensors as the computer (looking out the window to try and gauge your speed doesn't really help when the horizon, stars, and ground aren't visible), the outcome was likely to not be good.

So in this case it's pilot error because the pilot was in control at the time...

if (situation_seriousness() >= omg_were_going_to_die)
{
    set_autopilot(off); /* hand control over to the pilot - we don't want to get blamed for this mess */
}

Re:Double engine?

[perpenso]

They should know how to handle all the information that is being given to them by all the sensors and dials in the cockpit.

The problem is that the failure was in the sensors providing the pilots/instruments with data. When flying in instrument only conditions, at night over the atlantic with no visual references, the pilot's human senses can provide no information (or they provide incorrect information - part of instrument training is to ignore your senses and trust the instruments) and the pilot *must* have sensor data / instruments.

I think it is unfair to blame the pilots at this point. It may be more of a design error, a lack of a redundant/alternative source of flight data or some way to avoid the pitot tube failure. Upgrades being made to the pitot tubes suggest the later.

Re:Double engine?

[AlecC]

Not that the software gave bad readings: that the software reacted badly when hardware gave it bad readings, possibly because of stormy weather. The suggestion is that the air speed readings were faulty, and the software throttled back until the aircraft fell out of the sky.

And an A3330 has two engines. But it is not the engine control software which is suspect, but the main flight control software, which may have ordered the engines to reduce power when it shouldn't.

Re:Double engine?

[perpenso]

More specifically, the simulation shown in the episode was conducted by two instructor pilots, whose first reaction to the loss of airspeed indications was to (as you mentioned) set a specific thrust setting (86%, IIRC), and to set a specific attitude (5 nose-up, IIRC), which, as stated in the episode, for the A330 will cause the aircraft to settle at a safe airspeed (too fast or slow = stall). Other posts, and the NOVA episode, mention the compilation of singular issues that compounded to a fatal accident. Its interesting to me how often a simple procedure (such as a thrust & pitch setting) can negate the world conspiring against you.

I believe the episode also showed an arguable design flaw. IIRC the manual throttle control levers are not automatically repositioned as the autopilots changes the thrust. Other aircraft do so, this particular aircraft does not. So the levels could visually seem to be at an 86% setting while in reality they are at a lower setting recently set by the autopilot prior to its disengaging. I'm not sure if the flight simulator recreations included the maneuvering around weather that may have left the controls in the visually erroneous position.

Re:Double engine?

[AlecC]

That is because the pilot is the ultimate catch-all for errors. There is a general presumption that, if the automatic systems fail, the pilot will fix the problem manually. And if, by hindsight, we can show that there is something the pilot might possibly have done and didn't, then pilot error is a contributing factor.

Re:Double engine?

[avgjoe62]

I saw that too, but at this point I can't remember if the simulation took into account all three pitot tubes (airspeed indicators) being faulty. I would think that God himself would have a hard time flying a plane in that weather with faulty airspeed readings.

Re:Double engine?

[angel'o'sphere]

In this particular crash it is speculated that the speed meter was the problem/cause for the crash.

Speed is measured with a tube, where the fair wind/slip stream creates pressure. Higher pressure -> higher speed.

The particular speed meters in that plane where known to make trouble. They had the tendency to accumulate ice, narrowing the diameter of the tube.

So the speed meter measured a to low speed.

A possible cause for the loss of this plane is that the autopilot or the pilot decided to go into a steep dive down course to regain speed. However he got to much speed in that and the plain simply dismantled in flight and crashed.

This particular model of speed meter got meanwhile world wide replaced by all airlines.

Nevertheless, the stuff above is only an "speculation" as the black box is not found yet, we have no clue what really might have happened.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Double engine?

[acid06]

As you've said - it's speculation. Lately the media has be trying to speculate about a lot of things they shouldn't. They should report the news, not try fabricate the missing bits of news.

Re:Double engine?

[marcosdumay]

What? The A330 series has two engines.

Every once in a while we discover a new problem on airplanes. Normaly people use that discover to make the planes safer, and normaly there isn't an accident when the discover is made. There wasn't an accident when people discovered this problem at the A330. But, unfortunately, due to the result of some risk analysis, Airbus didn't use the discover to make the plane safer, altough some countries oblied the A330 owners to fix the problem. If the plane was brazilian, it would be fixed.

Re:Double engine?

[Wyatt Earp]

Airbus A330 is a twin engine wide body that can carry 335 people in a two class configuration.

Air France 447, registered as F-GZCP, had a total of 228 people aboard, and had two General Electric CF6-80E1 engines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Re:Double engine?

[Rich0]

I don't think the bad readings originated in a software failure. The sensors froze up - so any airspeed indicator design would have bad readings. The computer just pointed out that they were bad, disconnected the autopilot, and gave the pilots full manual control of everything with no safeguards (since the computer knew that it couldn't do a better job than a pilot).

The pilots failed to notice that their throttle was too low. This may have been exhasperated by the airbus throttle control design, although conceivably the same could happen in a boeing if nobody looked at the setting.

Once the stall happened in a boeing I would think that a pilot would be more likely to reach for the throttle and push it forward - and not just leave it at the 100% auto setting on an airbus (which to a pilot not thinking clearly might SEEM like full power but it isn't except on takeoff/etc).

Re:Double engine?

[David Greene]

Remember that the pilots were also dealing with a massive storm and associated turbulence. It was not a stable situation. Plus the A330 doesn't have the physical feedback of the throttle controls moving as the autopilot adjusts speed. I can easily understand how the pilots could be confused.

The big question I had coming out of the NOVA program was, "why doesn't the computer automatically put the plane in a 5% pitch, 85% thrust configuration when it loses airspeed information?"

Re:Double engine?

[filthpickle]

The A330 is twin engine. There is a good episode of NOVA about this crash. It would probably be more correct to say that the sensors failed, and the software did what it was programmed to do.

Re:Double engine?

[Shotgun]

A case that might make Sky Cry's argument a little clearer.

Most of the light planes carry their fuel in the wings. It is easy to make a big tank there, and they are close to the center of lift, so that as the fuel is used up it doesn't move the aircraft's center of gravity in relation to the center of lift by much. The problem is that there are two wings. Experimenter builders continuously run up against how to design for fuel management. The "certified" way, used in nearly every production aircraft, is to have a valve that selects between one tank or the other. Forget to periodically switch tanks, and the plane starts wanting to fly sideways (I accidentally did this one during training.) Sure, it is only one more thing to do...but IT IS ONE MORE THING TO DO. Pilots have landed and even crashed with quiet engines, because they forgot to switch tanks. You can call it pilot error, but I would prefer to call it design deficiency. Creating a poor interface, and then blaming it on the user is disingenous.

I chose to build a design that only has one tank. I'll never forget to switch tanks in that airplane.

Re:Double engine?

[filthpickle]

I recall that they set it up the same way as what was suspected in the accident. But I also remember that they were instructors...and I don't recall whether they said this or not....there is no way they weren't prepped for what was going to happen. Even if they weren't "NOVA is gonna be here...we're going to have you try to fly thru an unknown situation in the simulator" would have told an experienced A330 pilot what was in store.

Re:Double engine?

[aaarrrgggh]

The theory at the time of accident was that the pitot tubes that sense air speed had iced over or otherwise given false airspeed readings. There are at least three sensors, and I understand they use voting logic to determine a good reading. (There could be significantly more than 3.) Knowing your air speed is essential to know if you are creating too much or too little lift. You regulate lift with the engine thrust and the angle of attack on the flaps.

If you think you are going too slow, you would increase thrust to avoid hitting the stall speed. If the plane still thinks it is going too slow, you need to speed up more. Ultimately, you hit the limits of the airframe and it will break apart in the air.

If you think you are going too fast, you decrease thrust, and keep doing so until you hit your stall speed. Unless you recover, which is difficult because you don't know where to set the flaps or how much thrust you can tolerate, you will drop and break up when you hit the ground.

Gross oversimplification, but it goes back to garbage in-garbage out.

Re:Double engine?

[Wheely]

Im not a pilot but I would rather hope that when an auto-pilot disengages, it would leave things as they are rather than releasing the thrust!! You cant just let a plane stall because the auto pilot disengages. At the altitude these planes fly at, there isnt much leeway between stall speed and "bits of plane falling off" speed so you REALLY want to know what speed you are travelling at relative to the air around you and dont want that changing without a very good reason.

Given there were storms in the area I guess airspeed would have been jumping all over the place as well as altitude. If the computers couldnt fly it, Im pretty sure the pilots couldnt either because even in clear blue sky you cant tell your air speed from looking out the window.

My understanding is that the pitot tubes icing up is a very bad thing and if you cant get down to warmer air to de-ice them, youre in trouble.

Furthermore, I dont think anyone knows for sure if the messages received from the plane are the cause of the problem or a result of a completely different problem.

I hope they find those black boxes though and they are still in a fit state to clarify what happened to this plane.

Re:Double engine?

[sjames]

Pilot error is also popular since often the pilot is dead and so can't defend himself.

Re:Double engine?

[toddestan]

So, should you be driving if you can't handle a manual choke? The point is to remove some of the minor distractions so that the driver can concentrate on actually driving.

Forcing to answer questions

[jhoegl]

It seems that this is more a way to get the company to recover the black box and/or answer what really happened to cause the plane to crash.
It has to be, because they don't even know what caused it.

Does it?

[MrEricSir]

It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?

Granted at this stage of technological process it seems a bit far fetched, but that may not be the case in the future. If computers are driving cars and winning game shows, there could be some point where computers can not only initiate engineering tasks, but solve them and perform QA as well.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

And then seeing no more need for humans, they'll optimize the whole process by just removing us from existence.

Re:Does it?

[manoweb]

To whom will they sell their newly engineered products?

Re:Does it?

[MrEricSir]

As a resident of California, I lived through the era where the Terminator was elected governor and tried to do this.

Eight terms later? He was mostly unsuccessful.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

They'll simply make machines that buy their products.

Re:Does it?

[nathanh]

It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?

If a human wrote the AI, then the human performed the engineering, not the AI.

If you mill a block of steel in a CNC you wouldn't say the CNC did the engineering. Programming the CNC is the hard work; the CNC just did the boring labour.

Similarly if an AI one day designs and builds a bridge, the human who wrote the AI did the hard work. The AI just did the boring labour of turning the human vision into steel parts.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

By that logic the human didn't do anything either. Humans are after all in the end just some DNA. No different from that AI.

Re:Does it?

[nathanh]

By that logic the human didn't do anything either. Humans are after all in the end just some DNA.

Dawkins says something similar in the Selfish Gene.

Re:Does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, boring labour. I see what you did there!

Re:Does it?

[h4rm0ny]

It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?

Well once, we programmed in Assembly. These days people are doing things in Python and so much is happening automatically to turn their generic hand-waving into stuff the processors can understand that it boggles the mind. You're just talking about climbing up the tree a little further. The question, as usual, is how to precisely define your problem. I could formally specify a design in Z that was mathematically proven to be correct and design a comprehensive test suite to check adherance. Of course the test suite would need to be formally specified and tested as well, and then all the stages turning my high-level code into low-level code tested as well. It could be done, but it would take a long time. At any stage, the problem is defining exactly what you want something to do and what you don't want it to do. I've never worked in avionics, but I imagine it's pretty complex.

For me, without knowing much about this case, the concern is a court determining where the distinguishing line between negligence and accident lies. Software like this must be difficult and large and specialised. Is a court qualified to come in and say: you needed an extra programmer - this is manslaughter or it's unfortunate no-one caught that these packets weren't properly terminated according to the protocol and it was an accident.

Re:Does it?

[ghjm]

With current technology or any plausible extension of current technology, it will remain impossible for an automated system to troubleshoot its own failure. So these future computers will certainly be able to perform many tasks related to design, engineering, production and QA. But if anything goes wrong, you will still have to bring in humans. ...barring an as-yet-unknown breakthrough in AI technology, of course.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

Not really. I simply pointed out that everything we are is written in our DNA and that DNA was created by a specific process. We are machines created for a purpose.

So by your logic the AI and humans are the results of the evolutionary process which created humans. That process is in turn the result of the physical parameters of the universe. We're not quite sure what that is the result of but the specific parameters are quite likely random (cue anthropic principle). Which in turn means the whole argument has no point.

Re:Does it?

[nathanh]

Not really. I simply pointed out that everything we are is written in our DNA and that DNA was created by a specific process. We are machines created for a purpose.

As I said, Dawkins makes a similar argument in the Selfish Gene.

So by your logic the AI and humans are the results of the evolutionary process which created humans. That process is in turn the result of the physical parameters of the universe. We're not quite sure what that is the result of but the specific parameters are quite likely random (cue anthropic principle). Which in turn means the whole argument has no point.

Except for the last sentence (which is a non-sequitir) you are talking about determinism. Which as I've already said, is a question we are unlikely to have answered in our lifetimes.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

As I said, Dawkins makes a similar argument in the Selfish Gene.

No, that's the argument made by every biologist out there. It's called evolution.

Dawkins was merely pointing out specific quirks of evolution and what drives it (propagation of genes rather than individuals of a species). He didn't make an argument but simply popularized various scientific theories.

So are you in fact denying evolution? If so then in what way? What's your counter-argument to my claim other than saying "Dawkins said something similar"?

Except for the last sentence (which is a non-sequitir) you are talking about determinism. Which as I've already said, is a question we are unlikely to have answered in our lifetimes.

Sigh, so basically you're arguing that humans have a soul and AIs won't? Or consciousness or qualia or whatever your fluffy way of avoiding the term is. Sigh, god please don't tell me you're one of those who believes in atom level human identical philosophical zombies.

Re:Does it?

[nathanh]

No, that's the argument made by every biologist out there. It's called evolution

If you haven't read Dawkin's Selfish Gene you really should. It's an excellent book.

Dawkins was merely pointing out specific quirks of evolution and what drives it

Because it's quite clear you haven't read it.

So are you in fact denying evolution?... so basically you're arguing that humans have a soul ... please don't tell me you're one of those who believes in atom level human identical philosophical zombies.

Now you are just being foolish. Be serious or be quiet.

Re:Does it?

[Rakishi]

If you haven't read Dawkin's Selfish Gene you really should. It's an excellent book.

Because it's quite clear you haven't read it.

I've read, been a while, it's an old book and most of it I've seen in other places long before I read it. Unlike you I have in fact studied biology more deeply than reading one forty year old book. So, again, your point being?

That is all immaterial to the simple fact, which is all I mentioned, that humans are the end result of evolution which function at the level of DNA. Nothing to do with Dawkins but simple biology. You are muddying the argument. Either answer my point directly or admit you have no counter-argument.

Re:Does it?

[NikeHerc]

It doesn't *have* to be humans that are doing the engineering, does it? Couldn't we, at some point in the future, have AI performing engineering?

Granted at this stage of technological process it seems a bit far fetched, but that may not be the case in the future. If computers are driving cars and winning game shows, there could be some point where computers can not only initiate engineering tasks, but solve them and perform QA as well.

human contestant: "What is the 1920s?"

(wrong answer)

watson: "What is the 1920s?"

(wrong answer)

Yeah, I really want AI or computers to perform engineering in the future.

Re:Does it?

[AlecC]

But AI may be taught, rather than programmed. Google Translate "learns" by taking known translations of documents (particularly EU directives for which machine-readable versions in several languages are available) and correlating two versions to find out how to transform one language into another. If it mistranslates, is it the fault of the programmer, who need not necessarily have spoken either of the languages concerned? Is the computer "doing the boring labour" of a task the programmer was incapable of?

Re:Does it?

[angel'o'sphere]

Then it is not an AI in the sense of the word, but only an expert system.

An AI as the mere mortal understands it is a "conscious" thing as intelligent as a human and knowledgeable in certain things. That does not imply that the crafter of the AI has any knowledge about the things the AI has.

Your claim is like claiming that Boris Becker never won Wimbledon because he was trained/coached by Ion Åiriac, so the true winner of Wimbledon is Tiriac, sorry, that is bullshit.

angel'o'sphere

P.S. granted ... we have no "true" AIs yet so the discussion is kinda moot

Re:Does it?

[NikeHerc]

(watson error)

I hate to reply to my own reply, but I didn't consider watson's biggest error:

Final Jeopardy category: U.S. cities.

watson: Toronto

Our metal masters haven't yet arrived. They are twenty years in the future (and always will be).

Re:Does it?

[GameboyRMH]

This all assumes robots with human-like motivations and instincts (that possibly need to be overridden), are you all brainstorming Asimov fanfiction or having a serious discussion?

Re:Does it?

[adamofgreyskull]

Did you just discover your parents' computer?

Percentage of Internet discussions which conclude with:
"I see now that I was wrong, and you have won me over with your arguments. Thank you for the lively, spirited debate." : 0%

Watch the NOVA episode

[$RANDOMLUSER]

NOVA ran an episode recently about the all manner of crazy coincidences piled on top of each other - one storm hiding behind another, supercooled water plugging all the pilot tubes, fly-by-wire software that wasn't quite ready for a "no airspeed" input, pilot tube upgrades scheduled but not yet performed...

Sometimes airplanes crash. Proving criminal (I'm assuming negligence) behavior is going to be tricky, at least until they find the black boxes and can prove what caused the crash.

Re:Watch the NOVA episode

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction, one of Nova's allegations was that the problem was with the piTot tubes freezing up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitot_tube)

Ultimately the pilots failed to recognize the issue and come up with a solution (drop power to ~ 85%, pitch up the nose of the plane to 15% [I forget]).

Human error caused this tragedy, hope the airlines do a better job at training pilots and hope that Airbus does a better job at making their throttle quadrant MOVE while in auto pilot [Nova episode mentioned it doesnt].

Re:Watch the NOVA episode

[Rich0]

The software issue is obviously going to be a big one here. The logic in the design was that in the absence of reliable input the autopilot should do nothing, and the fly-by-wire should accept any manual input and not try to override the pilot, since this could not be done reliably.

I'm not sure there was really any safe alternative. You don't want a computer overriding the pilot when the machine has no idea what the airspeed is, and at least the pilot can tell if the wings are about to be ripped off or whatever.

The only real solution is more redundant pitots.

The fundamental problem is that airliners fly very close to the edge of the flight envelope to make travel economical. When they're on approach at moderate speed there is lots of room for error, but on landing approach or during cruise they're very close to the edges. Large airliners are also very difficult to recover from stalls/etc - they're just so big and heavy relative to their control surfaces when compared to smaller aircraft.

When over the middle of the ocean the situation is even more complex (though I wouldn't say this was really over the middle of the ocean - not like a flight to hawaii or whatever). An aircraft can't simply fly lower or slower to make things easier, because at that those operating conditions the range won't be sufficient to reach land.

Incremental improvements can of course be made, and will be made. The only fundamental solutions to these kinds of problems would probably make air travel uneconomical. If airliners were built so that they could cruise and land much further in their envelopes it would make manual flight in these conditions much easier. However, it would also limit weight and range most likely, compared to what you could get if you pushed the envelope. It is very hard to justify that economically.

Re:Watch the NOVA episode

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link. I used to design controls software for military jet engines, and it's hard for me to imagine that the software wasn't able to cope with failed airspeed sensors. Perhaps the commercial software is less rigorous in this regard than military software (having bullets/missiles fired at you greatly increases the chance of sensor failure, so it's more important for military control software to anticipate that situation).

Also, sorry to be a pedant, but what you are calling pilot tubes are correctly called pitot tubes.

Re:Watch the NOVA episode

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody already filed a bug report?

Re:Watch the NOVA episode

[AmiMoJo]

Coincidences or not it boils down to one thing. Airbus and the pitot tube manufacturer knew that they could get blocked by ice and stop working. In fact another manufacturer already made a version with a heater built in to prevent that from happening and the problematic ones were being replaced slowly. Given that Airbus developed the software and the aircraft, and knew that the problem existed and was telling airlines to replace the pitot tubes it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that there might be a case to answer.

Goddamn autopilot kicked the rudder too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Snapped the fucker right off, just like in Queens. This carbon fibre crap sucks...

and for cars?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be interesting to apply the same politic to car constructors

Maybe... it gets heavy.

[MrEricSir]

You have to ask though, what if AI improves the AI? Is that different than if a human does it?

If AI programs are capable of identifying, solving, and verifying the solution to a problem, how is that different than humans doing the same thing?

Sure, you could say "well that's still the work of humans." But isn't that just as fatalistic as saying that *human* destinies are predetermined?

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

You have to ask though, what if AI improves the AI? Is that different than if a human does it?

An AI is just a machine in abstract form. If an AI "improves" an AI it's not different to a human making a machine to build a machine. The human is still the ultimate cause.

If AI programs are capable of identifying, solving, and verifying the solution to a problem, how is that different than humans doing the same thing?

Because the AI only exists within the confines of the programming that the human creates. It is therefore only a tool of the human mind. Just like a screwdriver is a tool of the human hand.

Sure, you could say "well that's still the work of humans." But isn't that just as fatalistic as saying that *human* destinies are predetermined?

Determinism is a separate discussion. One that probably won't be answered in our lifetimes.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[h4rm0ny]

An AI is just a machine in abstract form. If an AI "improves" an AI it's not different to a human making a machine to build a machine. The human is still the ultimate cause.

I disagree with that. A man can cause a child, but that doesn't mean that the actions of that child are no different to if the man had done them. Cause is only cause. It does not mean that a piece of code that self-modifies without the continued action of its creator is no different in principle to code that doesn't. That "continued action" is critical to the nature of the thing. When something does not require continual action, we now call that independence.

Because the AI only exists within the confines of the programming that the human creates. It is therefore only a tool of the human mind

When code becomes self-modifying, it can go beyond the human mind. Much like a child can grow beyond its parents, learning more, doing more, changing in unexpected ways, so could that code. Your argument assumes that the only input (and thus cause for development) of a progeny AI, is its creator. But the qualitative difference between the progeny AI and the dead code, is that the former can change in relation to the world around it, not only its creator. And as the world around it is more than its mere creator, then it can be influenced and go beyond its mere creator - it has become its own thing.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

I disagree with that. A man can cause a child...

"Ultimate cause" has a specific meaning in philosophy. It doesn't have the same meaning as "create" or "conceive". A man is not the "ultimate cause" of a child. But a man is the ultimate cause of a machine.

When code becomes self-modifying, it can go beyond the human mind

Code can only self-modify within the confines of parameters set by the human programmer. Therefore the ultimate cause of the modified code was the human.

It's the same as creating a sharpened rock as a tool, then using the tool to sharpen a stick into a hunting spear. The rock didn't create the spear. The human did.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Rakishi]

"Ultimate cause" has a specific meaning in philosophy. It doesn't have the same meaning as "create" or "conceive". A man is not the "ultimate cause" of a child. But a man is the ultimate cause of a machine.

And as I pointed out in another post the ultimate cause of humans is evolution and DNA. Not a specific individual creator but a creator of sorts nonetheless. We have a cause but you seem to claim we are separate from it, why?

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

And as I pointed out in another post the ultimate cause of humans is evolution and DNA.

And I already replied to you.

We have a cause ...

A "cause" is not the same thing as "ultimate cause". I've also pointed this out in another post.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Rakishi]

And I already replied to you.

Nonsensically. Unless your knowledge of evolution and biology is in fact that lacking but I'm assuming otherwise.

A "cause" is not the same thing as "ultimate cause". I've also pointed this out in another post.

Then please define "ultimate cause" specifically and exactly. You are arguing semantics without defining it except with vague references.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

Then please define "ultimate cause" specifically and exactly.

It's a standard term in philosophy. Your ignorance is not my problem.

www.google.com.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Rakishi]

I did, google provides ambiguous results none of which are from philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also provides no definition as far as I can tell.

So once again, what is the definition you claim for the term? You are being very avoidant of defining what you claim is a simple term.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

I did, google provides ambiguous results none of which are from philosophy

Ambiguity is a defining characteristic of philosophy.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Rakishi]

No, the attempt to remove ambiguity is the defining characteristic of philosophy. Specifically, one finds the source of ambiguity (the axioms or definitions that do not agree) and attempts to see if they can be shown as invalid.

Assuming one is of a logical mindset and uses said logical mindset when performing philosophy. That is considered the proper mindset last I checked except for frat boys taking philosophy classes for easy As.

So you are in fact saying the definition is whatever you want it to be so that it says you're right and any attempt to argue otherwise you'll simply say you meant a different definition of the term? That is not philosophy, that is shoddy logic and cheap bar room rhetoric.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[nathanh]

So you are in fact saying the definition is whatever you want it to be so that it says you're right and any attempt to argue otherwise you'll simply say you meant a different definition of the term?

Yes, you've got me, your dazzling intellect has uncovered my shoddy logic. I am actually a moon child who believes that my soul is formed in the hearts of the atom-god, and "ultimate cause" is actually the name of an anti-evolution cabal, of which I am the grand zombie. Our mission is to destroy philosophy with cheap bar-room rhetoric. And I would have got away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids.

Bravo, good sir. You are a worthy adversary. I tip my hat to you. Now run along and find other foes to slay with your wit and charm. I am vanquished.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Rakishi]

Amazing, you can make interesting posts that don't make you look like an Eliza script. I was afraid I'd utterly misjudged you. Now if only you could have them be 80% content instead of 100% sarcastic junk.

Seriously, I ask you to define your argument more precisely and not be pointlessly enigmatic and this is your response? I figured you actually had an argument somewhere in there, well balls to that it seems.

So yeah, go and wank off to your lovely sarcastic and utterly worthless rebuttal to me. I suspect you're smiling and think you're were always right while I was some stupid buffoon. God, to be young and ignorant. At least, when I insult people I have the decency to have an argument behind it.

See, now I'm actually sad, I was hoping for an decent intelligent discussion where I'd learn something and I get this. Bloody let down to be honest.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldnt expect a 4 digit id to be a troll, but you seem to be aiming for that.

Your one line, terse answers to well worded questions, and hiding behind semantics and then outright vague statements all contribute to that feeling.

(Posting as AC cause I am too lazy to register, yeah yeah, you may judge that however you wish)

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

So is arrogance it seems.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[avgjoe62]

I was hoping for an decent intelligent discussion where I'd learn something...

You don't hang around these parts much, do you? ;-)

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[h4rm0ny]

Ambiguity is a defining characteristic of philosophy.

Ambiguity is not a defining characteristic of philosophy. You don't read Karl Popper's 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery' and say: "this is not ambiguous, therefore it is not philosophy', or conversely say 'this is ambiguous and therefore may be philosophy'. A 'defining characteristic' is a characteristic which helps distinguish whether something falls into a category or not. And ambiguity is not such a characteristic of philosophy. Indeed philosophy strives to avoid ambiguity in all cases I can currently think of.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[h4rm0ny]

Yes, you've got me, your dazzling intellect has uncovered my shoddy logic.

Uncovered? More like scaled it and sat on it!

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[h4rm0ny]

Code can only self-modify within the confines of parameters set by the human programmer. Therefore the ultimate cause of the modified code was the human.

Which completely misses the point that my post was entirely showing that "cause" was not a limiting factor. Your notion that something must be bounded by its originator would suggest that mankind must still be grubbing for roots in forests because no generation can develop beyond the capacities of the previous.

It was explained simply, and thefore I can't do much more than repeat or re-phrase it: dead code can only change in accordance to the people that create it, therefore exists within the bounds of those people's limitations. But self-modifying code can change in accordance with the world beyond those people, and therefore is not necessarily bound by those people's limitations. In short, it can experience for itself.

Re:Maybe... it gets heavy.

[timeOday]

"Ultimate cause" has a specific meaning in philosophy.

What is that meaning? "Ultimate cause" implies something that does not itself have a cause, which makes no sense.

IMHO the reason humans tend to attribute ourselves as the "ultimate cause" of things is very simple: 1) we're egocentric, and 2) we don't understand ourselves.

It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[FlyingGuy]

This is the result of a computer controlled fly-by-wire airplane having a cascade failure.

Glass cockpits are pretty and they really take a load of the pilot for a lot of things, but there is such a thing as to much of a good thing

If it is every factually determined what little chunk of silicone or line of code brought airplane down it will be studied in depth and hopefully they designers will learn something. But one thing is clear, in their rush to make everything digital and get those damn pesky analog instruments the hell out of there, they have taken away many of the pilots most reliable tools to do the one thing they are there to do which is fly the fucking airplane!

There are two ways to fly an airplane, by reference to the ground or using instruments.

In the middle of the night, over the ocean, in a storm you do not have reference to the ground so you have to use your instruments, that is if they work.

To keep a plane in the air, without reference to the ground / horizon a pilot needs a very few things and the are:

• Attitude Indicator aka an Artificial Horizon
• Altimeter
• Air Speed Indicator

Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting. The attitude indicator tells you climb and dive left or right bank and the altimeter is obvious. With everything else dark, a pilot should be able to keep a plane in the air.

My educated guess is that when the whole interconnected and interdependent system went down they lost the ability to control the engines and the ability to move the aircraft's control surfaces and after that it was just over.

This is why Boeing for years always ran a hybrid system. The basic control over the airplane was not interdependent on anything and were separate systems that would accept input from the flight computer and make things like autopilot and all that possible while still keeping everything independent from all the other systems. It made for a pain in the ass system but the flight computer taking a shit would not keep the pilot from controlling the engines or other critical systems.

Unfortunately pilots listened to anymore and neither are engineers. MBA's are running airlines now and all they care about is reducing the head count, cramming more people into the planes and increasing the buck made per mile so they can get 8 figure salaries. This is why Boeing's trusted and proven hybrid system is in it's last throws or is gone completely because AIRBUS sells the bling baby and no CEO wants to be caught short on bling baby!

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[ikono]

"Unfortunately pilots listened to anymore and neither are engineers." Why the hell am I seeing crazy sentences like this more and more? Am I just stupid, and this is natural sentence structure? Is it a positive bias that I'm noticing? Or are people just stupider these days?

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Richard_at_work]

This issue has nothing to do with fly-by-wire or glass cockpits, it has everything to do with false and misleading information being presented while the aircrew is in a situation where they cannot easily determine that said information is false, nor determine the correct information.

Take for example Birgenair Flight 301, a Boeing 757 (which is non-FBW, non-glass cockpit - a traditionly controlled aircraft in every sense of the word) - during a routine wash before the flight took off, a ground crew member taped over the pitot static ports to prevent damage. However, he never removed the tape before handing the aircraft over to the air crew, and they never spotted it during their preflight walk.

The aircraft took off, but it wasnt untila couple of minutes into the flight that the errors in the information compounded themselves, resulting in errant readings being presented to both the pilots and the autopilot - the autopilot eventually gave up and disconnected, and the pilots could not orientated themselves even when presented with obviously wrong information (their airspeed indicators gave a speed of 200 KIAS and falling, even with increased application of throttle).

5 minutes into the flight, the aircraft crashed into the sea.

The flight was a night flight - the aircrew had no external points of reference to fix on, and thus could not orientate themselves as to the correct pitch, yaw or speed of the aircraft. They were essentially doomed once they took off.

This Airbus crash is very similar - a pitot static system with known flaws (already identified by Airbus and due to be changed out by Air France) failed at a time when the aircrew had no external reference points (they were in a dense storm front, they had no horizon or other reference points) and the computer systems gave up.

Note that even with Airbus aircraft, the computers can be overridden - and they themselves know when they are talking bollocks, and will regress into various modes of flight control assistance. One of the messages given out by the aircraft over the maintenance link was that the aircraft systems had regressed into Direct Law - or in other words, the computers took themselves out of the decision making process and started acting as a direct messenger between the control inputs by the pilots and the flight surfaces.

Your "Boeings system is trusted and Airbuses is not" is common fud and bullshit in the aviation industry and the aviation enthusiast following - its not absolutely no basis in fact and Airbuses control system can fail safe in just the same way as Boeings - the difference is that in standard control law (Normal Law), Airbus provides several flight protection measures, including alpha protection, bank protection and airframe stress protection. Boeing also provide these, but to a lesser extent - however, both systems can either fail back to or be deliberately put into a direct stick-to-surface control mode.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Jester99]

There was a NOVA episode about this crash (an earlier commenter linked to it, but here it is again: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html).

I won't go into the findings of the NOVA team, but I will point out that your educated guess is completely wrong.

The airbus does have a considerably more advanced and automated autopilot system than Boeing provides. However, that only is engaged during "Normal Law" flight. When any of the sensors on the plane detect a fault, an alarm chimes, and the system informs the pilot that "Alternate Law" is engaged. In Alternate Law mode, the pilot is allowed to use the full control capabilities of the plane, not the restricted range that the sensors believe to be safe.

After alternate law engaged, the pilot can control the engines, and all control surfaces to whatever degree of capability he'd like. The plane in question definitely switched to Alt. Law mode; this fact was radio broadcast back to the Airbus HQ shortly before the plane disappeared. There's a high probability that the pilot was mislead by weather radar readings that said that he could shoot through a "hole" between two storm clouds, but which masked the fact that there was a third (much larger) storm further beyond. Once he was stuck in the middle of all those storms, it was game over.

The pilot and the passengers were not at the mercy of an autopilot that refused to allow corrective action; it is probable that bad data presented to the pilot did not allow him to correctly act.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[CaptainZapp]

Yeah, the plane that Captain Sullenberger landed on the Hudson without any engines didn't have a glass..

Er, wait!

That was an airbus 320, er, nervermind.

But the GP's icing on the cake is the introductory statement:

This is the result of a computer controlled fly-by-wire airplane having a cascade failure.

Er; right. Theories abound and nobody has any hard facts, except, aparently, the GP dude.

Sounds like a Boeing shill to me.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Richard_at_work]

Just a note on your comment - Airbus aircraft have several levels of control law:

1. Normal Law - the every day flight is done under this set of laws
2. Alternate Law - there are two alternate laws which apply, both of which have decreased level of protections but the flight computers are still in control
3. Direct Law - this is the law where a pilot has direct control of everything through the flight computers, no protections are given
4. Mechanical Law - the flight computers are completely out of the loop, pilot inputs go directly to the control surfaces

By all accounts, the A330 in this situation had regressed into Direct Law (not either of the Alternate Laws), meaning the computers knew they were making unreliable decisions and removed themselves from the decision making loop, allowing the pilots to make all the decisions.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Richard_at_work]

There was a cascade failure - the aircraft was sending maintenance messages to its maintenance base at the time of the crash, which told Airbus quite a bit of information, including the fact that the computers had decided to exclude themselves from decision making (which is extremely serious).

Another thing to note is that the Hudson A320 was still in Alternate Law when it ditched (none of the failures were severe enough to push the computers to take themselves out of the loop, and neither pilot took the measures necessary to do that manually) - the pilots had assistance from the computers to land the aircraft and they still managed to land their plane safely! How could that be if the Airbus system is so unsafe?

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[petermgreen]

It looks to me like he simply missed out the word "aren't". It's pretty easy to skip words accidentally if you are posting in a rush and your typing speed is slower than your thinking speed.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Boeing for years always ran a hybrid system. The basic control over the airplane was not interdependent on anything and were separate systems that would accept input from the flight computer and make things like autopilot and all that possible while still keeping everything independent from all the other systems. It made for a pain in the ass system but the flight computer taking a shit would not keep the pilot from controlling the engines or other critical systems.

Unfortunately pilots listened to anymore and neither are engineers. MBA's are running airlines now and all they care about is reducing the head count, cramming more people into the planes and increasing the buck made per mile so they can get 8 figure salaries. This is why Boeing's trusted and proven hybrid system is in it's last throws or is gone completely because AIRBUS sells the bling baby and no CEO wants to be caught short on bling baby!

Just FYI: Airbus has ever since it introduced its first FBW aircraft in 1988 had a better safety record than subsequent Boeing models.The benefits of it were quite well stated by one of the pilots of the Qantas A380 whose engine exploded, from this interview: "Now comparing that to other types I have flown I am sure that Boeing types would have been equally flyable, but they would have been a lot more difficult, I’m sure."

Now, your "educated guess" isn't even a guess since before making a guess, you should have looked up more than three basic terms so that you could refer to hydraulics, FBW, autopiliot and FADEC when formulating your guess so that it would actually be comprehensible.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[tweak13]

the aircrew had no external points of reference to fix on, and thus could not orientate themselves as to the correct pitch, yaw or speed of the aircraft.

Bullshit.

Let's assume a complete and total failure of the pitot static system. That takes out 3 instruments: airspeed, altimeter, and vertical speed indicators. Everything else would be fine. Yes, it's true they had no direct measure of the aircraft's speed but they still should have had a working attitude indicator. That would have given them pitch and roll information, and I'm sure there would have been at least some form of skid/slip indication which would have provided yaw information. Engine instruments should have also continued to work normally.

Now, let's talk about how the information they had was enough to keep them alive even in zero visibility. Since their engine instruments were indicating normal performance, and they had pitch and roll information from the attitude indicator, all they needed to do was place the aircraft in a typical climb attitude. This would have resulted in a normal climb, with an airspeed indication that was decidedly not normal.

At this point, it's up to the pilot to decide which of the instruments depicting this impossible situation are wrong. Their situation was also complicated by altimeters that were also not indicating correctly, but the method of resolution should still be the same. Increase throttles to climb power, maneuver the aircraft to a normal climb attitude, then troubleshoot. The pilot's reliance on the least reliable instruments and fixating on them rather than try to use secondary indications of the aircraft's speed (cockpit noise, control surface responsiveness) were what caused that crash. They were in a bad situation, but were in no way "doomed once they took off."

I've personally experienced an airspeed indicator failure while at the controls of a light aircraft at night. Mine was caused by a failure of the instrument itself, but it was still the only direct speed indication in the cockpit. Shortly after takeoff, the airspeed indicator suddenly stopped increasing. I pitched down to accelerate, but saw no change in the gauge. It became clear that it was impossible for me to have pitched down so far and not increased speed, so I checked the other instruments and found I was in a shallow dive and actually losing altitude. I returned the aircraft to what I knew to be a standard climb attitude and returned to the airport without incident. In the beginning, I was far too focused on the failed airspeed indicator, and should have not let things escalate to the point that I was slowly descending at low altitude. I certainly understand how it's tempting to focus in on that and not step back and consider the big picture, but it's what needs to happen in such a situation.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Registered Coward v2]

Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting.

Except angle of attack controls airspeed, not the throttle. Throttle controls altitude.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[subreality]

This is common objection to flight envelope protection systems. People's gut reaction is that in an emergency, they'd rather be in total control than have some computer "interfering" with them. But the statistics are on the other side: Pilot error is more common than computer error.

China Airlines Flight 006 is a prime example. They had a mechanical failure, and while the flight crew was distracted, the plane ended up in an ugly dive. They pulled it out after exceeding 5 Gs, badly damaging the airframe, and losing a considerable amount of altitude. Manual-control advocates say this is a good example of why you don't want a computer imposing limits on you - they had to do drastic things to save the plane. I disagree - if they were flying an Airbus, the computer would have prevented the situation from ever occurring.

The second argument in favor of flight envelope protection is that it actually enables the pilot to push the plane harder in an emergency. Consider this scenario: you're landing in low visibility, still a good ways out. Everything looks fine, but as you break out of the clouds, holy crap there's a skyscraper. You have a split second to evade it. With mechanical controls, you have to roll hard, but not *too* hard, or you'll ( break the plane | spin | exceed max angle of attack | etc). In a modern Airbus, you slam the stick over, and the plane will roll as fast as it can within its mechanical limits. Perhaps that's not as fast as an experienced military pilot could in a familiar plane which they regularly take to its limits, but a commercial pilot probably hasn't been over 2 Gs in a while, and in that split-second emergency, the computer will let them fly it harder than they ever could on their own.

So it's time for a car analogy. I have two cars I drive regularly: one has antilock brakes; the other does not. The mechanical limits are similar: light cars, good sticky tires, brake pads with plenty of bite, etc. On a good day, my stopping distance is similar between them, +/- a meter. But I've been put in emergency deer-avoidance situations with both cars on multiple occasions. In the ABS car, that means stomp on the brakes, burn off as much speed as possible in a straight line, and swerve at the last minute once the deer's finally decided which way to dart. In the non-ABS car, I'm pretty good at braking on the track, but both times it's been for a deer, my response was the same: ease into it, feeling where the limit is; crap locked up a wheel, let go for a moment and ease back into it to try to get just shy of the limit again; and occasionally letting off to steer early, because my ability to manage my grip budget is too taxed to get it perfectly right at the last minute. I haven't hit a deer yet - but that's only because I drive the non-ABS car slower.

The difference is very noticeable: when taken by surprise, the computer can stop faster than I can, AND it lets me focus on the situation instead of the limits of the machine. I believe the same is true for flight control systems, and statistics agree: they prevent more accidents due to pilot error than they cause due to computer malfunction. Note that there's not much difference between Airbus and Boeing these days, but Airbus pulled ahead in safety until Boeing started equipping their planes with flight envelope protection systems. Both brands are considerably safer than they were in the full-manual days.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[MMerc]

The pilot's reliance on the least reliable instruments and fixating on them rather than try to use secondary indications of the aircraft's speed (cockpit noise, control surface responsiveness) were what caused that crash.

As truly interesting as your story is, it appears you're conclusion is derived by directly mapping personal experience to what happened on the Airbus. While tempting, it's probably flawed. Kudos for quick thinking though.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I haven't' flown big planes really. But the little planes i fly, all the instruments (gyros etc so turn indicator and artificial horizon) are all run from air from pilot tube. If all pilot tubes where blocked, I would only have a altimeter --but then again on the one larger aircraft I was in, that used a hole on the side of a pilot tube (pressurized cabin) as well.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

First: WTF is a hybrid system? Hydraulics?

Second: If all that is true, would you mind explaining why Airbus FBW aircraft have a better safety record than Boeings from the same period of time?

Third: Boeing went FBW with the 777 in 1995 and now 2011 Boeing will also have flight envelope protection when the 787 finally enters service (if there are no more delays, I'm not holding my breath, though). Airbus had that in 1988 so if you think Boeing somehow does it because "MBA's are running airlines now", they move fairly slowly...

Fourth: Safety depends infinitely more on the practices of the airline than it does on its choice of aircraft. That is, do mechanics cut corners to save costs or do they follow proper maintenance procedures, do pilots get proper training and have enough time to rest between flights... Those are also the factors which cost more than anything else.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[perpenso]

Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting.

IIRC this particular aircraft does not reposition the manual throttle controls as the autopilot changes thrust. I can not image why it is designed to work in this manner. There is a theory that while maneuvering to avoid weather the autopilot reduced thrust below what the levers were visually indicating.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[joe545]

Hate to be a grammar nazi but it's "shouldn't have" not "shouldn't of"

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[necro81]

If it is every factually determined what little chunk of silicone...brought airplane down it will be studied in depth and hopefully they designers will learn something.

Yes, I hope they will learn that humungous, unrealistic breast implants can be distracting.

Or did you mean silicon?

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[JamesP]

I'm not sure if Birgenair or another similar crash caused by a wasp nesting inside a pitot tube made the message "IAS disagree" mandatory.

Anyway, that's why when you block a static or pitot port there's a BIG RED TAPE on the protection

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

Should the ground crew member of Flight 301 be criminally charged? If fouling the pitot tubes is such a simple way of destroying an airplane then any negligence regarding these tubes should be a very serious infraction.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest factor in this case was the air traffic controller. The pilots deduced correctly that their instruments were failing. However, the tower had a transmitted altitude as well, which was stable and realistic according to the ATC. The ATC did not know that this altitude also originated from the faulty altimeter. This is what caused the crash: the tower reassured them they were plenty above sea level, the pilots trusted the tower, and this was their doom.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[fotoguzzi]

Some typos are really not acceptable. To me, a pilot tube must be how the captain gets through a long flight without getting up and going back to the loo.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[angel'o'sphere]

Even if you as a pilot have some clue, I would not start a post with "Bullshit".

You flew a one engine propeller machine I asume? With what speed? 150 - 200 nautic miles?

The airbus in this case flew roughly 500 nautic miles.

So if you have airspeed indicator failure you can not cause your plane to fly to fast ... as your engines and propeller simply don't have the power for that. More interesting: you realized you have an airspeed indicator failure.
The airbus pilot likely did not realize he had an airspeed indicator failure but simply trusted the indication.

So when the indicator told him he has only 200 miles speed in 30k feet hight he likely made a climb down manoeuvre and gave more throttle. In fact he was not flying with 450 miles which is the typical cruise speed (while the airspeed indicator showed perhaps only 200 - 250 miles) but he was meanwhile flying perhaps 650 miles fast, and accelerating.

The aircraft did not crash because of a stall. It crashed because it just fell apart in mid air.

angel'o'sphere

P.S. that is what I gathered from the news, that is not my interpretation

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[fotoguzzi]

Thank you! I had not heard about this. (Not that I necessarily agree with your conclusion, but it must surely have been a significant factor.)

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[fotoguzzi]

I haven't read about Birgenair. Did the pilots know their speed going down the runway?

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to think that a modern aircraft like the A330 cannot show at least the GPS data to the aircrew. GPS provides position, altitude, orientation and speed. This should be enough to reach, at a lower altitude, a manually sustainable stable flight condition in less than about 6 minutes (the time the AF447 seem to have taken to fall into the sea).

The fact that the aircrew failed to do so, tend to indicate that there faced something more critical than an unusable speed indication that disabled the autopilot. This is probably why it's so important to fully understand this accident.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[fotoguzzi]

It's a pitot tube and it's, than. (And it shouldn't have happened.)

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

, the computer can stop faster than I can, AND it lets me focus on the situation instead of the limits of the machine.

I'd like to add to this.

I freaking HATE the ABS in my car. It engages early and on surfaces where it really shouldn't and it pisses me off everytime .... EXCEPT in those situations where I slammed the breaks out of shock and it did its job and kept the car under control and decelerating as quickly as possible.

I'd like to think I'm an intelligent rational person, but I would still remove the ABS if it was a simple matter (its too tied into the rest of the cars systems to simply turn it off in this case), and I'm glad it isn't easy to disable, as its probably saved my car if not my life and my wifes life on a couple of occasions.

When functioning properly in an emergency situation its worth ever other pain in the butt quirk it has. I'm glad my wishes are ignored in this case cause in an emergency its pure logic is far faster and better than my instinctual reaction. I've had this car on the track and I know how far I can push it ... WHEN I'M IN THAT MODE, when I'm in a situation where I know I need to be ready for the unexpected, I can do just fine.

When it exceeds is just like you said, when I'm not in an ultra alert mode ... such as driving home from dinner with the wife, in that case, it whips my ass on reaction and performance.

I still dislike ABS. I'd still rather be in direct control. I will not buy another car without ABS for normal daily driving. What I WANT and what I NEED are two entirely different things in that case.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[DissociativeBehavior]

And what's even more dramatic: another flight crashed for the same reason a few months later. See the video here

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[FlyingGuy]

Actually just half asleep. Although it would be nice if /. had the ability for the OP to edit something after they hit post, but alas Taco and Crew are to busy writing bad code to add a decent feature.

I guess the proverbial, "There, fixed that for ya." is reserved for sarcasm.. Sigh...

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Rary]

But the little planes i fly, all the instruments (gyros etc so turn indicator and artificial horizon) are all run from air from pilot tube.

Are you sure about that? In the little planes I fly, the gyros are powered by air from a vacuum pump, not the pitot tube. This means you can lose the entire pitot-static system and still have an attitude indicator, turn coordinator, and heading indicator. It would not be wise for all instruments in the six-pack to be powered by the same system.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

The nova episode other repliers are referring to also made a point of saying the speed envelope on a jetliner at cruise is very small... 20mph higher and shockwaves cause a stall, 20mph lower and there's not enough lift to stay up. The episode further went on to note that in simulators and similar real incidents, crews are very slow to take command of engine thrust after the autopilot has relinquished it.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same failure, hornet in my pitot tube!
You are correct, all instruments back each other up and we are trained to recognize bad readings and use the other instruments that are good to fly the plane.
In addition the GPS gives airspeed and alititude, a great sanity check.

All instruments can be cross checked using the other instruments.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Rich0]

I think you're mixing up pitot vs vacuum air.

The pitot is an external sensor, that is only needed for speed-related measurements. Closely related is the static air sensor which usually gets lumped in which is needed for altitude and speed measurements. You can lose one without the other, and on a sophisticated aircraft I suspect the instrumentation will give the pilot as much info as it can.

Vacuum air powers SOME of the gyros - it is more of a power source than anything else. Usually the attitude indicator uses vacuum air, and the turn coordinator uses electrical power. This is done to create some redundancy since either system can fail independently and the two intruments provide somewhat redundant information.

All involve air, but for different reasons. Only the pitot and static sources are exposed to the outside and could theoretically ice up. The pitot is most susceptible to this, since it has to open forward. The static sensor needs to be exposed to air, but it can't be exposed to moving air per se - usually it is a sensor inside a tube along the bottom of the plane or something like that, and since the tube doesn't face the airstream it isn't very prone to icing. It also need not be a small opening. It is vulnerable to bad mechanics and duct tape like anything else.

Disclaimer - I'm not a pilot at all, but am a flight/sim enthusiast.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Rich0]

I don't think this is a glass cockpit issue.

If your pitot tubes freeze, your airspeed will be wrong, period. In fact, a glass cockpit lets the computer factor in input from multiple sources and provide the pilot with the best indications possible given the sensor data available. It could also detect an unreliable airspeed and just red out the display or strongly hint at unreliability to help avoid confusing the pilot. A conventional gauge just gives a reading most of the time (maybe with a big X dropping in or something).

The one airbus-vs-boeing issue that was highlighted in the NOVA episode I saw was the somewhat unusual throttle control design on airbuses. However, if the pilot doesn't move the handle, the outcome is the same on either a boeing or airbus design. Perhaps on a boeing it might be more obvious that the throttle is fairly low if that is where the autothrottle left it.

Disclaimer - I'm not a pilot but a flight/sim enthusiast, and have flown PC-based simulations of boeing and airbus airliners with fairly realistic implementations of their throttles/etc, and some of their failure modes. I can't say I tried flying into a thunderstorm with a pitot failure, or that the multiple inputs would have been well-modeled.

From the NOVA episode it seemed like the airspeed would have been marked as invalid in the pitot failure situation. So, the pilots were informed that they couldn't trust the measurement.

Of course, this is a difficult situation to handle, and it isn't surprising that sometimes even good pilots don't handle it right. Commercial pilots actually are very experienced at what they do, but many things can go wrong, and a situation like this demands a near-perfect response.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[FlyingGuy]

Turn in your pilot certificate or go back an re-read your POH before you get behind the controls again for god sake.

Attitude indicator is run off vacuum which is why there are electrical, static and vacuum operated instruments, hence the term and ability to fly IFR with a partial panel!

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[FlyingGuy]

I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow

Damn good thing you are not a pilot.

Your parroting a landing idiom, "Pitch for speed, throttle for altitude" not a good thing to do when trying to fly level, descend or climb.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Registered Coward v2]

I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow

Damn good thing you are not a pilot.

Your parroting a landing idiom, "Pitch for speed, throttle for altitude" not a good thing to do when trying to fly level, descend or climb.

Actually, I was pilot. For a given AOA (assuming constant weight) you have a given airspeed. Thrust (power) controls altitude by matching drag to power. If I add throttle, the excess thrust converts to altitude and I climb. I may need to adjust my position relative to the horizon but my angle of attack is the same and I climb at a instant airspeed. Similarly, if I cut the throttle I push the nose down to maintain a constant AOA and airspeed, and I descend - at a constant AOA / airspeed even if my nose is now below the horizon. Remember AOA is a relative, not absolute measure that depends on the airflow over the wing. climbing and descending changes that airflow and hence aka and airspeed unless you pitch up or down.

In a worse case scenario, all the throttle in the world won't help you if you are in a nose up attitude (unless you have so much thrust to ascend ballistically) - you'll just do a power on stall and learn the four fundamentals of flight the hard way - stall, spin, crash and burn.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's true they had no direct measure of the aircraft's speed but they still should have had a working attitude indicator. That would have given them pitch and roll information,

Not if you stall, idiot. Tends to happen at the coffin corner.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

all they needed to do was place the aircraft in a typical climb attitude. This would have resulted in a normal climb,

Only if the aircraft is in a normal air mass. In a thunderstorm, they could have been in a massive downdraft and thus descending even if their attitude and power settings suggested they were climbing. With no altimeter or VSI, they wouldn't be aware of this. (A radar altimeter might have told them -- I'm not sure how well they work in the middle of a thunderstorm (electrical and rain interference) over rough seas (scatters the return signal).)

Increasing throttles to climb power also increases your fuel consumption -- something you might not want to do halfway across an ocean.

--Alastair

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Shotgun]

The only think I would add to what you said is that they would need some sort of turn and bank indicator. The EFIS would probably supply this, or they could pick it up from the magnetic compass. You didn't say it wasn't needed, but it wasn't clear from your post that it was.

Hold the nose of the plane to a particular heading...any heading...then put the controls into a shallow climb configuration...you will eventually climb above the clouds or run out of fuel. Hopefully, the pilots would have enough sense to choose a heading that gave them some nice landing options.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Shotgun]

Turn in your pilot certificate or look around at a few more planes.

One of my attitude indicators is run off electrons.
My T&B is run off vacuum.
The other is run off external lights (look out the damn big window in front of you).

I've flow planes that only has the last option.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Shotgun]

Have you never ridden in an airliner? Can you not detect the difference in sound when the plane speeds up/slows down?

The pilot should know his machine without any instruments, whether it is a 35 Vso Piper Cub or a 120 Vso Boeing 747. If the instruments tell you that your are near or below stall speed, but you hear the wind speed, hear the engine whining normally and don't feel a stall buffet, you cover the airspeed indicator. It is lying to you.

One of the perils of technology is over reliance to the exclusion of low technology indicators, which are often more reliable "in aggregate".

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Shotgun]

Actually, I am a pilot.

Everything controls everything. In a light plane, adding power changes your AoA (increase propwash). Modifying pitch changes the load on the engine, changing power. An airplane is a concert of parts flying in tight formation, with constant battles as the various parts jockey for position. The successful pilot is a conductor that manages to get the parts to play in harmony.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Registered Coward v2]

An airplane is a concert of parts flying in tight formation, with constant battles as the various parts jockey for position.

Very true. That's why I chose to learn how to jump out of them as well.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Registered Coward v2]

It's a pitot tube and it's, than. (And it shouldn't have happened.)

Ahh, the beauty of using speel cheekers... And failing to propely qoute the GP

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[adamofgreyskull]

I was more concerned by your reference to "blocked pilot tubes". OUCH! ;)

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[FlyingGuy]

Well i guess we are all pilots then. I am a current one myself.

So here is one to twist your noodle. In balance flight you AOA is always 0 (zero ) no matter the angle of the nose to the horizon.

Which is only to say that your AOA is only greater then zero if the wings angle relative to the direction of flight is other then zero.

In a worse case scenario, all the throttle in the world won't help you if you are in a nose up attitude (unless you have so much thrust to ascend ballistic) - you'll just do a power on stall and learn the four fundamentals of flight the hard way - stall, spin, crash and burn.

ROFLMAO

And the 2nd engine is for???

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Anonymous Coward]

so when system fails is more dangerous flying at night? even worse if on the ocean?
are plane crash more likely to occur at night?

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Registered Coward v2]

Well i guess we are all pilots then. I am a current one myself.

So here is one to twist your noodle. In balance flight you AOA is always 0 (zero ) no matter the angle of the nose to the horizon.

Which is only to say that your AOA is only greater then zero if the wings angle relative to the direction of flight is other then zero.

Well, since in coordinated flight you are heading in the direction you are pointed that makes sense. Since AOA is a relative measurement, the horizon is immaterial to it. IIRC, wings need to be at zero incidence as well and the decallage takes care of the balancing moment.

ROFLMAO

And the 2nd engine is for???

It of course, carries you to the crash site.

Double standard

[Anonymous Coward]

On one hand, if it turns out to be gross negligence, then someone (or I guess in this case, the company's finances) should be held responsible. On the other hand... flying somewhere is probably safer than taking the bus there. Do they hold a manslaughter charge every time there's an incident with a bus?

Re:Double standard

[Locke2005]

No, but bus drivers that hit bicycles have been charged with manslaughter. But then, I don't think the bus companies ever have been.

What if they were treated like real people?

[mykos]

Do like you would with real people. Give the company "jail" time. Don't let them buy or sell for three years.

That's Idiotic.

[LordHaart]

Yeah, that's really fair on all the employees who are now jobless through no fault of their own.

Re:That's Idiotic.

[mykos]

Just like it's unfair to kids to lose their dad to prison amirite

Re:That's Idiotic.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think we should send all Airbus employees to prison? Sorry, just taking your ridiculous argument to the same extreme you to the GP's.

Anyway, this decision looks like just about every other descision France makes when prosecuting over aircraft disasters - place the blame on every party except any that are French. Look at the results from the recent inquiry into the Concorde disaster - no French people to blame, despite the fact it happened on a French runway (that wasn't swept as it should have been, by French airport staff) to a French plane. No siree, it was the fault of the airline who's plane took of before it!

Re:That's Idiotic.

[perpenso]

Anyway, this decision looks like just about every other descision France makes when prosecuting over aircraft disasters - place the blame on every party except any that are French.

Airbus is a subsidiary of EADS, EADS is part French and IIRC the French government owns part of this. Air France is, as its name suggests, French. I'm a little confused as to how the French are blaming others with respect to this Rio/Paris flight, I don't see the parallels to Concorde.

you can't punish inanimate objects

[petes_PoV]

When will people stop making the fundamental mistake of anthropomorphizing companies and institutions ("we must punish the banks ...")

It's as crazy as sentencing a statue to prison time. It might make the more credulous citizens, and their frenzied tabloids, feel that justice has been served (jail_population += 1) and gives them a baddie to focus on, but in reality it's a pointless exercise and achieves nothing.

Companies are made up of employees - right up to the top, and shareholders. Impose a penalty on a company and the employees will suffer (both the tiny minority - usually 1 or 2 - who did something wrong) and the thousands of "innocent bystander" employees who were only guilty of being on the same payroll. The shareholders will generally take a slight, tax deductable, loss and carry on as if nothing had happened - or, since most shareholders are pension companies - everyone's: yours and mine, pensions will be slightly lower as a result.

Of course, it's still not as stupid as fining a public body: who's income comes from government in the form of the taxes we pay. That's just money going round in circles. Where nobody wins except the lawyers on each side. What we need is strong, forensically reliable audit trails for every policy and decision. Discover the names of the people who made and approved them, then send them to jail. After all, they're the ones making the big bucks, it's time they started carrying the responsibility their getting paid so well for.

Re:you can't punish inanimate objects

[AlecC]

What we need is strong, forensically reliable audit trails for every policy and decision.

The problem is that in many cases of corporate manslaughter, is is lack of decision which is the problem. Nobody thought to run the tests which would have found the fault. And that may be up to a corporate structure which split responsibility so that everybody thought somebody else was taking care of it. That is why an offence of Corporate Manslaughter is useful. Often, it is impossible to say which individual made the mistake that caused the death, but it is possible to say that the corporation as a whole was flawed in a way that caused the accident,

Consider the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster: the ship, shuttling backwards and forwards several times each day, had six captains. Each has probably taken up the flawed working practice from predecessors who had been doing it for years. The Director of Safety at corporate level had only had responsibility for three weeks since the company had take over the ships. Tracking back to who originated the dodgy practice years ago would probably be impossible. And they never thought they were doing anything unusual, so there was nothing to write down to be audited.

Manslaughter is vary often a crime of omission. Somebody didn't think through what they were doing. And audit trails are bad at catching omissions.

Discovery process not liability process yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

The consensus on the PPRuNe forum is that this amounts to a discovery process.

The sub-thread starts on this page.

There are some long and technical discussions of the flight leading to no more conclusions than we've seen out of the BEA. A thorough reading, however, gives you some appreciation for the problems BEA is facing given the paucity of information that is available. There are two threads if you go looking. One got too long and was retired. It contains some interesting weather data I've not seen elsewhere.

{^_^}

Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven ...

[perpenso]

French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".

Those that I know from France, and those that I know that took goverment classes in French Universities (but were not French) say that their legal system is much less innocent until proven guilty than ours. Is England just that much worse, or am I misinformed? It is a fairly small sampling, but they are educated people. Ours being American (in the USA sense).

Wikipedia seems to have a decent overview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_law

It seems that both Napoleonic and Common Law declare a suspect innocent until proven guilty. According to the wiki article the guilty until proven innocent charge seems to be made due to the ability to hold someone in custody prior to trial when the charge is serious, ex murder. To be honest I am a little confused as to how this differs from the US legal system where a murder suspect may be denied bail. Perhaps it has to do with the right to a speedy trial? I'm just guessing. Maybe its merely anti-Napoleon propaganda from centuries ago? Maybe its really a reference to the reign of terror during the French Revolution (if so that's a shame since Napoleonic Law seems to prohibit such abuse)?

Bonuses, dividends, stock must suffer ...

[perpenso]

The only thing that reliably motivates behavior is the structure of incentives. Senior management's bonuses must suffer and shareholder dividends and investments must suffer when a corporation commits serious criminal offenses. Yes some shareholders may be innocent "widows and orphans", retirees, etc but the risk of losses should make them a little more careful about where they invest. Perhaps the risk will incentive shareholders to pressure the board of directors to do its jobs of oversight, representing the shareholder's interests. Regarding employees, perhaps fines could only be paid from bonus pools, retained earnings, etc and not operating funds where payroll normally comes from -- yes I'm not quite sure how to implement this particular concept, accounting tricks to work around this would need to be criminalized.

They have diagnostic messages from aircraft ...

[perpenso]

By the way, they don't know what happened. They never found the black box or anything like that.

Actually they do have something "like that". The aircraft computers automatically sent diagnostic messages including alerts of various system failures to Air France via satellite. Think of it as text messages. I believe these messages document pitot tube flight data failures and the disengaging of autopilot and autothrust systems. This led investigators to construct reasonable theories of loss of control and to replay these failures in a flight simulator to evaluate crew responses and standard procedures.

It appears that the software worked fine

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

It appears that the A330's software works fine. The indications and reversions that the software reported over the data link are consistent with a mechanical failure (possibly caused by freezing) of the Pitot-static system.

Without airspeed data the A330's autopilot and auto throttle disengaged, and the flight control system reverted to a mode known as "Alternate Law" where most of the restrictions are eliminated. We know that this happened because the aircraft reported it over the data link before the crash.

The unfortunate reality is that the reversionary modes on the Airbus flight control system are dangerous because they tend to occur at the worst possible times - when there are multiple sensor or computer failures or when the sensors give readings that are outside the operational limits of the control system. In this situation the flight crew has to react quickly and they are often faced with inadequate, contradictory, or confusing instrument readings.

It is possible to maintain a safe airspeed in an Airbus without the Pitot-static system. The problem is that the pilots need to notice the issue (loss of airspeed data) and react before things get out of hand. It appears that the Air France pilots were unable to do so.

Re:It appears that the software worked fine

[GWRedDragon]

It sounds like what is really needed here is for the computer to have some way of telling the pilot which instrument(s) it believes are not working correctly. Maybe a red background or something.

It seems that if the computers have already figured out with pretty good certainty what has failed, and what is probably still working, that information would be very useful to the pilot.

Sigh x 1000

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, Slashdot is over a day late on news. Imagine that.

Get your act together. Slashdot used to be THE source for tech related news. Now it seems more like a RSS feed of other news sites, but hours late.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[e70838]

I am french. What is a speedy trial ?
In France, we have slow trial, very very slow trial and almost never ending trial.
We have also trial that ends because suspects death before the end of the trial.

Apropos corporate manslaughter

[petes_PoV]

Yes, finding the person who didn't make a decision is hard. What's I'd suggest is a "buck stops here" approach. Where the top person carries ultimate responsibility - they go to jail, unless and until they can demonstrate the failure was with a lower, named individual. Then that subordinate is subjected to the same process, recursively until the least senior person who is at fault (or partially at fault - it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing issue) is identified

It's a bit like car ownership.If my car is involved in a crime (someone gets killed by it, right down to a speeding ticket) I am held responsible for that action until I deliver up the person who was driving it at the time. Sure, it's a guilty until proven innocent approach, but the whole innocent until found guilty thing is essentially a myth and has always had many, many loopholes, exemptions and workarounds.

What that "buck stops here" approach would mean is that the people at the top would have a very strong motivation not to be found liable, either by direct action or inaction - or even the "I was not aware of what my deputy was doing" defence.

Re:Apropos corporate manslaughter

[AlecC]

So, in the case of Airbus, it would be the CEO of EADS which owns Airbus, which at the time of the accident was two political appointees, one French and one German, who probably know little about engineering. Or possibly the heads of state of France, Germany and Spain which have controlling shareholdings in EADS. And in the case if the Herald of Free Enterprise, a CEO who had had responsibility for the ship for three weeks, when the ship had been operating /apparently/ safely for many years.

Nice for vengeance to see such a suit going to prison, but in terms of preventing future disasters, it will mean only that competent people will refuse such jobs out of fear of taking the blame for a disaster they could not prevent, and be replaced by less-competent chancers who will take high pay in the hope that no disaster will happen on their watch, thus increasing the likelihood of problems.

Re:Apropos corporate manslaughter

[Anonymous Coward]

What that "buck stops here" approach would mean is that the people at the top would have a very strong motivation not to be found liable, by throwing their subordinates under the bus.

FTFY.

Companies are like people

[acomj]

At least in ths US companies are like people, they have rights, can make political donations. The main difference is that public companies have a legal obligation to make as much money as possible, people don't.
The same rules that give companies free speech let them be held liable for things.

Scott Walker school of accident investigation

[Latent Heat]

Yes, I am basing my opinions pre-official investigation on the PBS NOVA program. Their explanation at least gives a plausible context for the accident if perhaps not the final word on the cause.

For starters, even though the flight-recorder black boxes are not found, there was telemetry of the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging. There also were numerous incidents with the A-330 prior to the accident where the airspeed sensing pitot tubes iced up, resulting in the same syndrome in the autopilot and other controls.

As to the trained pilots in the simulator, these were a pair of instructor pilots -- sort of like the squadron leaders rather than the line troops. And yes, there is a procedure to follow -- the stream of messages regarding the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging is to be recognized as the syndrome for the pitot tubes being plugged, and you are supposed to fly the airplane by pitching the nose up and by adding power in prescribed amounts. This wastes fuel, but the airplane is stable that way without having to know your air speed.

So in a perfect, crash-free world, the A-330 would have pitot tubes that don't ice up. Or when the pitot tubes ice up and the computer program senses that airspeed is gone, that program would automatically apply the procedure of nose high and add throttle. Or instead of bombarding the pilots with alarms, a soft male voice would announce, "I believe we have lost the airspeed indication, Dave. I am sorry Dave, but I am disconnecting the autopilot. Please pitch up 5 degrees and set power at 85%."

Or the pilots would have had more intensive training on responding to this type of failure. The training syllabus spends lots of time on engine failure, and a pilot who cannot respond to engine failure gets flunked out of a license and a job. Do line pilots get any simulator practice on this kind of instrument failure or is it "look these fault codes up in the manual when they happen"?

Finally, this scenario is just NOVA's interpretation. Maybe right after the autopilot disengaged, the pilots were blinded by a lightning flash and could not see the flight instruments. We just don't know.

But just like the Wisconsin Governor and allies ragging on public employees, it is so easy to make judgements about other people and how they are supposed to do their jobs. There is a vocabulary for this: union members "feel entitled", Airbus pilots are "spoiled." Opinions are expressed on what others ought to do. Slashdot posts ought to use standard punctuation. I, for one, say this name calling ought to stop . . .

Re:Scott Walker school of accident investigation

[Kilrah_il]

First, thanks for the informative post. As I cannot, obviously, mod you up, I will instead urge others to do so.
Second, I didn't mean to take the easy route and just say "The pilots suck, off with their heads!" (which would be pointless, right now). I also understand that "pilot error" is not something used to ridicule pilots, but just an understanding that we, as humans, can make mistakes. Believe me, as an MD, I understand the concept of human errors causing death and disability very well. However, I was responding to the OP's comment that made it look like such a no-brainer: "and tara!!! the spoiled pilots got information overload and ended up with the plane in the Atlantic. Does not take an aerospace engineer to solve that riddle or does it????" (And WTF is 'tara'? I'll go ahead and guess he meant 'tada').
Since I did not see the PBS NOVA show (and I don't have the qualifications), I can't comment on the theory itself, although from how you present it, it does sound reasonable. Ultimately, what you said and what the OP (an AC) said are pretty much the same, but from his explanation it sounded less convincing (as my quote above shows).

Oh, and BTW, great punctuation :)... !!!???!??!?!?!!!1!!!

Pilots express preferences

[Daevad]

I know no plane design is perfect, and all manufacturers have had their share of crashes but I will never forget the bumper-sticker-sized signs on the two pilot's bags on a flight to Japan (in a Boeing 777): If it's not Boeing, I'm not going

Re:Pilots express preferences

[xenobyte]

A friend of mine has the exact opposite opinion. After flying Airbus he flatly refuses to go back to flying Boeing... It's the old YMMV I guess...

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[AvitarX]

It's stuff I've heard from recent times from people in France, so I doubt it has anything to do with propaganda.

Perhaps there is less protections equivalent to our 4th and 5th amendments, and as you said holding before what may not be a rush to get to trial.

I just assumed it had to do with burden of proof, as that's where I think of innocent until proven guilty.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[marcosdumay]

How luck of you.

In Brazil we have the almost never ending trial and the versions where trial ends when the suspect dies, or the trial ends because the crime prescibes (the latter one restricted to people that can pay good lawers).

How does one gets to implemnt the slow version of trials?

Criminal charges?

[Locke2005]

That's all very well and good, but shouldn't this be a civil matter, not a criminal one? Especially since there is no evidence of gross negligence on the behalf of Airbus?

Huh?

[xenobyte]

Has it been determined with any certainty that the crash was caused by something Airbus did or didn't do?

There are some theories floating around but they are vague at best and does NOT point to any errors in manufacture or design that Airbus knew should have been different in some way.

My best interpretation of the theories point more to pilot failure in face of a technical malfunction. Sure the autopilot might have been nonoperational and some instruments gave incorrect information but that shouldn't prevent a decent pilot from manually flying level and straight until either the malfunction fixed itself or they got some visual bearings. They were flying east so as soon as they got out of the storm they should see the beginning daybreak straight ahead.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[perpenso]

Maybe this was not the best translation, and maybe these phrases have a cultural meaning that is not apparent, but the codes seem to lean in favor of the defendant:
"... the juror's oath explicitly recommended that the jury did not betray the interests of the defendants, and took attention of the means of defense ... and mandated the court to appoint the defendant a lawyer if the defendant did not have one (failure to do so rendered the proceedings null)."

That said it does not seem as explicit as "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", but hey, I'm just looking at a wiki article.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[AvitarX]

As I read the translation it essentially says "Defendant was given an opportunity to defend, and the defense was at least thought about"

I'm curious if they need unanimous or simple majority, and what the actual burden is (but not enough to look into it). I'm also curious about the ability to not self-incriminate.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[AvitarX]

OK, I did look into it briefly, it actually looks like presumption of innocence (and by extension the ability to not testify against oneself) is actually a French concept.

So I guess when people say it's different there, they are really referring to less right to a speedy trial, or some slight less protections during the investigation phase (note, this was pre 9/11), which reads the same as here in the USA.

Either over-site, or probable cause (defined as an immediately present witness right after the crime) is needed for search or arrest. Trials presume innocence.

Interestingly in France defendants and their family cannot be put under oath (which i don't know if it means they can lie, or that they cannot testify, or it is like in the US, but poorly described). Answers to unanimity and burden of proof are not answered (in the US there are many different burdens of proof, with "beyond a reasonable doubt" being used for criminal proceedings, but "preponderance of the evidence", and "Clear and convincing evidence" being used in the civil system. Also, simple majority, vs super majority, vs unanimous is not addressed, which is also kind of key.

Re:Napoleonic Law declares innocent until proven .

[Lorens]

I think you forgot the kind of trial that ends when all the *witnesses* die...