[mseebach]

As it's completely meaningless to have the autopilot operate out of normal law (why would the computer operate the plane outside of the envelope the computer considers safe?), isn't it safe to assume that re-engaging the autopilot would have put the plane back in normal law?

[jodrellblank]

Isn't it also safe to assume:

- Pilots wouldn't be trained with marketing speak so they believe the Aircraft is uncrashable, and ignore 75 repeats of the STALL warning alarm.

- The change of modes between "can't crash" and "can crash" laws normally never happens, so when it does it deserves a huge and explicit attention grabbing ongoing alert of its own.

- The plane would never, ever, detect that it was barely moving forwards, nose pointing up, falling at hundreds of feet per second, and then switch the STALL alarm off.

- The plane designers would make it so one pilot has no clue what the other is doing with the controls, and if both offer conflicting instructions, the plane will not alert them, but just average the instructions.

- The "about to hit the ground" warning would be built to sound early enough that they could use it to avoid hitting the ground.

- The pilots would be trained so that if something goes wrong, seems weird, panic is setting in, they must stop what they are doing and cooperatively restate their assumptions and reassess the situation.

[boucher]

These are excellent points. I was amazed at the behavior of the dual input sticks; in what world would this be a useful feature of the airplane (other than, perhaps, a training scenario?) How is the switch to alternate mode not made painfully obvious to the pilots?

[RomP]

I'm not an Airbus engineer and I'm not privy to their research (undoubtedly many thousands hours involving scenarios we can't even imagine) and the reasoning behind this design. This catastrophe is rooted in human-machine interface and we should wait for the official investigation report, which will come very shortly and will include recommendations to aircraft designers (including UI aspects), training procedures and crew management procedures, to mention just a few.

My layman view is that the first step in principle "fly-navigate-communicate" could be accomplished by placing the aircraft into the "pitch an power" configuration: 5 degrees nose up + TOGA. This didn't happen. But this is my layman view: I'm down here in a comfy chair with a cup of tea, and they were up there, in a thunderstorm with flashing warning lights, frozen pitot tubes and 228 souls behind their back. We shouldn't judge them: we should only learn.

[gus_massa]

The fist error was to flight into the storm, and not avoid it like the other planes. (Perhaps it was due to a misconfiguration of the radar.)