Air France 447 Black Boxes Readable

An anonymous reader writes "It's not a lengthy press release, but it's good news: the memory cards for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Air France 447 crash in 2009, recently recovered from the sea floor almost two years later, are readable. The data was recovered over the weekend and includes the full two hours of cockpit recording. Apparently it will take weeks for analysis of the data, but it looks like the challenging recovery effort is paying off in a big way. Hopefully detailed answers about the cause of the crash will follow."

Comments

Re:I wonder if NOVA got it right.

[catchblue22]

This was a very interesting documentary. I was particularly interested in the inferences about the user interface approach of Airbus versus Boeing. In short, Airbus planes are controlled with joysticks that translate pilot intentions into actual executable commands to the control surfaces. If the pilot tells the computer to do something stupid, the computer won't do it. Contrast this with Boeing, where the pilots control the plane with a proper control stick that gives more effective feedback to the pilots. In a Boeing airplane, when the computer lowers engine power on autopilot, the engine control lever actually moves in a very visible way. However, on Airbus planes, the levers DO NOT move. The only indication to a pilot that the power has dropped is a small circular readout on a computer screen. The Nova scientists theorized that the pilots didn't realize that the computer had lowered power in anticipation of flying through a thunderstorm, or at least that they realized it too late. They theorize that for about a minute the pilots were flying the plane as if the engines were on high power, when they were actually on a much lower power setting. This, combined with a lack of reliable airspeed data may have caused the pilots to put the plane in an unrecoverable mode of flight. Or maybe it was different. We will know soon enough.

BTW, for those of you outside the US, the above video link won't work. I think the video is on bittorrent somewhere. It is definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it.