[dghlsakjg]

Pilot unions actively lobby against cameras in the cockpit. Some airlines would be in violation of their contracts if they bought more cockpit monitoring systems.

It isn’t an entirely unfair gripe. The AF 447 debacle was down to “pilot error” officially. The cause of the crash was that one pilot was commanding the aircraft incorrectly and the other pilots weren’t aware because the dual controls in an Airbus dont mirror each other like in all other aircraft. The real question for me is how do you design critical control systems so poorly that one person can be flying the plane in a configuration they aren’t aware of (the stick on an Airbus will react differently to the same input differently based on conditions) , and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this. This is a design issue.

[FabHK]

> and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this.

Presumably they would have seen it if they had looked. But they didn't feel it.

[dghlsakjg]

They would have had to have seen it over by the pilots knee, known that that stick was active, and known that the aircraft had switched automatically to ALT2 in the middle of trying to figure out the equipment problem that caused the initial instrument problem.

Normally a full back stick command wouldn’t have stalled the aircraft, but because the airplane entered ALT2 mode automatically the stick allowed the pilot to do something that normally wouldn’t happen. If the pilot had done exactly what he did 5 minutes earlier, the exact same command would have not led to a crash.

In other words, the main control device for the aircraft can do something different depending on circumstance.

This would be like a car steering wheel becoming twice as sensitive when the speedometer malfunctions.

The idea is that, yes, the pilots were trained on this, so it’s their fault no matter how complex the system is.