[JG52Krupi]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I know you're an engineer, and mine wasn't a take at the category (one of my best friend is a materials engineer for Airbus), my point was that the philosophy of Airbus is one of selling a product that meets a specific requirement: abating costs of all, pilot training as well.
Back in the days every machine had its quirks and syllabus, and getting a rating for a pilot was often a costly business: Airbus thought of a modular integration of the same systems on all their machines, with the intent of a cheaper training and an easier pilot type rating, so that an airline company can use their pilots' organic in a more cost effective manner.
There's nothing wrong in this, but they had to take certain shortcuts that are potentially very dangerous.
As I said before, the ultimate decisional power should stay with the pilot, not with the aircraft, because no matter how "smart", flight computers and their integrated systems lack of a very important thing: a complete situation awareness.



The accident of the Air France Airbus is a typical example of a chain of events which is all peculiar to Airbus.

The 737 holds probably the saddest record in aviation: it's the civilian aircraft with the highest number of unexplained air accidents. A study made by the FAA in the late 90s estimated that the majority of the inexplicable accidents were in fact caused by the crew, not by the aircraft. As you know, any structural issue found on an aircraft nowadays almost immediately grounds all the same models in the whole world until a fix is found. Considering the longevity of the 737, it is safe to assume that virtually pretty much every aspect of fatigue and design flaws has been monitored and fixed, so what really makes it a dependable aircraft is its operational life.

The weak link is not the machine per se then, but the quality of training and pilots. Taking decisional power off the crew though is not the way forward.

What emerges from the black box of the Airbus flight is scary not only because of the content per se, but because it emerges that the flight computers were following a cycle of action and none of the three trained pilots were situation aware, they did not understand what was happening.

+1 I agree it is shocking.

P.S.

I was under the impression that they could have survived once they eventually realized what was happening but then one of the pilot started to pull up again?