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A Germanwings (Lufthansa subsidiary) Airbus A-320-200 airliner has crashed in the French Alps. It is reported to have carried 154 people on board (including 6 crew members). Unfortunately, no survivors have been found so far. There were reports about the crew sending out distress calls shortly before the crash. The flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf was last registered on the radar at 6800 feet.
http://www.laprovence.com/article/actualites/3326948/un-airbus-a320-secrase-dans-les-alpes-de-haute-provence.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/24/us-france-crash-airbus-lufthansa-idUSKBN0MK0ZP20150324
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/german-a320-airbus-plane-crashes-french-alps
[Edit 16:35 UTC. janrinok. Source: BBC] The 'black box' has been recovered. The aircraft descent took place over a period of approximately 8 minutes, and communication between the crew and the French air traffic controllers was 'broken' when the aircraft was at an altitude of around 6000 feet. The TV pictures being broadcast show a large number of helicopters being deployed to a snow free landing-zone but the surrounding mountains have significant snow cover and there is a low cloudbase. French authorities have said that the recovery of the bodies will take 'several days'.
(Score: 1) by TK-421 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:53PM
I agree, the design is solid, no single failure you listed is a big concern. However, in my opinion, there is another source of the second failure, the pilots.
Now don't misunderstand, I absolutely believe humans should be in the cockpit and they should ultimately be in charge. However they absolutely can be the second failure.
A few examples:
1.) Birgenair Flight 301. A Boeing 757 crashed as the result of a single pitot tube failing while the other pitot tube worked perfectly. This resulted in two different indicated air speeds (IAS). By believing the wrong IAS the captain slowed the plane to the point of stall. The stall warning systems all told him he was in a stall and he totally failed to believe anything other than the faulty IAS.
2.) Air France Flight 447. An Airbus A330 crashed after all three pitot tubes failed and resulted in no IAS of any kind. Rather than configure their plane so as to allow stable flight in the absence of an IAS the air crew falsely believed they were flying too fast and flew the plane into a stall.
3.) XL Airways Germany Flight 888T. An Airbus A320 crashed after both angle-of-attack sensors failed as the result of being pressure washed on the ground. They worked fine until the water in the sensors froze. This one is interesting, to me at least. The sensors didn't "fail" to the point that the computers could disable them so direct law was never achieved. The sensors told the computers that AOA was low and the computers attempted to compensate by pitching the nose up. The air crew had to either manually drop to direct law or take extreme measures such as the trim wheel to get control. Why didn't they? Ah, great question. They were on a shake down flight. The plane was changing owners. The air crew was purposefully engaging all the safety features of the plane so they were purposefully putting the plane into situations that forced the computers to do their magic. The air crew were "expecting" silly crap to happen and didn't realize quick enough to determine that something serious was actually happening.
The air crew is sometimes the second failure that results in the big crashes. Fortunately in the third example there were no passengers but all three were total losses with no survivors. Computers fail but flight was happening long before computers. Air crews need to know how to fly their air planes and I can tell you without a doubt, there are air crews that rely too much on the computers. When the computers fail, the humans fail too sometimes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @05:00PM
In all those examples its interesting that the "computer as a third pilot" hasn't entered existing cockpit procedures.
There's a technical term for the operations/discipline of a pilot team WRT who does what, who says what, keeping each other informed, noise discipline no chatter during critical times, cooperate, checklists, formal discussion of who has control, and the pilots and copilots have been trained to do pretty well as a team but sometimes, some flight instruments and flight computers are almost a parody of the opposite of proper cockpit discipline. Like if the copilot was in a confused panic but refused to inform the pilot, or pilot decided to ignore all input from the copilot, everyone trained in cockpit discipline would be all over them, like what idiot trained that yahoo, how did he ever get past his check flight, who hired this moron, etc, but when computers misbehave as part of a pilot team, "eh, well, computers, you know, they just kinda do what they want".
The first example is a classic dude with one clock knows what time it is even if he's wrong, dude with three clocks can make a scientific estimate of the time, but dude with two clocks doesn't know much about the time other than he owns two clocks.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday March 25 2015, @10:53AM
I was just reading about a flight over Corsica in 1981 that clipped the summit of a mountain due to the ATC guy and the pilot both making (terminally incorrect) assumptions about the disposition of the aircraft (the ATC didn't have RADAR at the time), ultimately on the pilot who then chose to ignore the ground proximity warning costing 180 lives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inex-Adria_Aviopromet_Flight_1308 [wikipedia.org]
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