We typically steer clear of airline-related topics in General Aviation News. But for William Langewiesche’s feature – The Human Factor – on the Air France 447 in Vanity Fair, I’ll make an exception. As sophistication and automation in all aspects of aerospace has developed over the past few decades our role as pilots must be continuously evaluated. Langewiesche masterfully mixes re-telling the sequence of events that led up to the accident with airline industry analysis and inertia. As a pilot, the story wasn’t an easy read, but worth it. I hope you feel the same.
About Ben Sclair
Ben Sclair is the Publisher of General Aviation News, a pilot, husband to Deb and dad to Zenith, Brenna, and Jack. Oh, and a staunch supporter of general aviation.
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Adding an AOA indicator or its digital readout to a display in the cockpit is one of the best ideas to come along for commercial aviation in a very long time. With that alone the moronic pilots of AF447 with proper training in AOA and what its indications mean could have at least had that to govern their actions insofar as handling and recovering the airplane from the deep stall into which they put it. It was a case of the three stooge Mo, Larry and Curly at the controls.
The article while OK, was not that great but it will do insofar as an explanation of what happened in the cockpit with what had to be one of the most incompetent flight crews that ever manned an airplane. That said the author could have and should have deleted the last half of the final paragraph where his philosophy on training for the sake of eliminating the “Human Factor” in pilot error accidents in highly automated flying machines and the future of automation in airplanes wandered off into the twilight zone to put it mildly.