News Air Asia flight from Indonesia to Singapore vanishes

[Greg Bernhardt]

http://news.yahoo.com/co-pilot-controls-airasia-plane-crashed-investigator-081344469.html

He said the captain sat on the left and acted as "the monitoring pilot".

You can't tell me the captain just sat there as the plane goes down :)

But I guess there could have been too much turbulence to get to his controls

 

[Borg]

You can't tell me the captain just sat there as the plane goes down :)

But I guess there could have been too much turbulence to get to his controls

I would think that a handoff during a crisis situation might not be the easiest or smartest thing to do.

 

[russ_watters]

I think that is the general assumption since the ascent was approximately 3 times its normal capabilities.

I wouldn't go quite that far. Yes, updraft/downdraft is very possible here, but the media is giving people the wrong impression of the "normal capabilities" of a jetliner. The bottom line is that while it isn't normal, it is within the capabilities of a jetliner to do that on its own (without assistance from an updraft).

I'm still leaning toward this mostly being an Air France style pilot error.

It is annoying though how they keep releasing little bits of disjointed information.

 

[russ_watters]

You can't tell me the captain just sat there as the plane goes down :)

Again: Air France. The plane has side-stick fly-by wire controls (the pilot can't easily see what the co-pilot is doing) so the pilot may not know he's doing the opposite of what the copilot is doing. And the confused airplane averages their inputs.

The Air France captain's last words were something to the effect of "What? No!" When the copilot revealed what he'd been doing, seconds before the plane hit the water.

 

[russ_watters]

I would think that a handoff during a crisis situation might not be the easiest or smartest thing to do.

That was indeed part of the problem in Air France 447: the pilot said he had the controls, but the copilot never let go.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Again: Air France. The plane has side-stick fly-by wire controls (the pilot can't easily see what the co-pilot is doing) so the pilot may not know he's doing the opposite of what the copilot is doing. And the confused airplane averages their inputs.

Airbus has had 6 years to figure out a solution, but nothing has changed?

 

[russ_watters]

Airbus has had 6 years to figure out a solution, but nothing has changed?

Such things happen slooooowly, and unfortunately the control stick location was a big part of the problem that can't easily be changed. And I'm not sure if any software chances were made...I need to go back through the report sometime.

Still, the copilot's error was so spectacularly bad I would have hoped all pilots would receive a day of training on it. Not sure if they did.

[Edit]. I said "see" above, but feel is equally important. If you are struggling with mechanical controls it is easy to see and feel when the pilots are fighting each other, but in a fly-by-wire system with no feedback, it takes almost no force to move the stick and you can't feel what the other pilot is doing or how the plane is responding. I think newer ones have feedback while older ones don't.