Lost: The Mystery of Flight 447

You’re right about the practical impossibility of a recovery in those circumstances. The attitude of the aircraft on impact and the consequent indication of near-recovery seems to show incredible airmanship on the part of the pilots.

You’re right Dan, it is part of PPL training and its even part of a regular check flight aswell. Im sure that airline pilots also do stall training though – I recall the Cathay Pacific B744 DVD by ITVV where they demonstrated a stall in the simulator where they showed how the stick shaker can alert the pilot to the stall.
I agree with you that no visual aids is what would of been the biggest problem regarding their stall recovery.

Assuming their theory is right about the pitot freezing up and simulataneous system failures I can imagine the last few minutes were filled with a mass amount of confusion and i’d take a guess they probably would wonder if any instruments were giving reliable readings or not, and with no visual references it may of been relatively easy to fall into a stall, it probably would of been difficult to verify by looking out due to it being dark and that would of made any sort of recovery practically impossible.

Of course its all still guess work.. lets hope they do find the black box and CVR.

The BBC programme last night proved the saying ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ to be true. Could the fitting of some vital flight instruments in the cockpit i.e not computerised, have helped in this terrible situation?

Well, in their scenario, the only instrument that failed was the airspeed indicator. The root of the problem was the pitot tubes had frozen. Even the non-computerised ASIs of light aircraft wouldn’t function in this rare case.

EGTC, I also couldn’t understand what they were getting at with the lack of stall training idea. Stall recovery is taught at PPL level isnt it? It’s the basic emergency situation. I think what was more important was the lack of ASI and no visual references to aid with the recovery.

Non computer flight instruments?

The BBC programme last night proved the saying ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ to be true. Could the fitting of some vital flight instruments in the cockpit i.e not computerised, have helped in this terrible situation?

I also found it quite informative.
What I didnt really agree with was when they made a vague suggestion that pilots dont seem to train for stall recovery or something to that effect. Thats incorrect.
Apart from that it was quite an interesting programme.

I actually said “oh F**k off!” aloud

Sandy I’m shocked!!!:eek: However I largely agree with your poins.

The one thing that did not sit well with me was the intimation by that training pilot and narrator ona few occasions that such a situation would be even less recoverable in aircraft from other manufacturers
I actually said “oh F**k off!” aloud when the training pilot gestured the action of pulling back on a yoke while saying the pilot would be restricted with such a control.

But aside from these little remarks, I found the documentary very informative and can believe that the eventual final report will more or less agree with the scenario stated as being most likely.

A very well done piece of TV I thought. Informative and devoid of sensationalist rubbish. As stated in the programme the evidence seems to support the theory that the aircraft was close to recovery at the time of impact. Hopefully the missing recorders will be found and the data can be used to learn from this tragic accident and just as importantly to bring closure to the families and friends of all those who died. May they rest in peace.

It is a fascinating article, but incredibly sad, especially the part which suggests that because of the nose-up and wings-level attitude of the aircraft when it hit the water, the pilots were close to recovery. Obviously they ran out of altitude, but would not have known that.

looks like it will be worth watching.

Out of interest the daily mail did a very good article on this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1282367/Air-France-crash-The-truth-disaster-killed-228-people.html

Makes for very good reading

Thanks for that info.:)