[wolvoleo]

Hmm I don't think it's as black and white as just blaming airbus. The pilots literally flew a perfectly flying plane straight into the ocean. And they had plenty of time to understand what was going on. But they didn't. They didn't willingly do it and the system misguided them but that wasn't the only factor.

I agree airbus shares the blame but it's not the only one. The pilots should have realised the situation they were in, their training should have been better, there were a lot of factors.

Admiral cloudberg has a good deep dive on it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...

[marcosdumay]

There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.

And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.

[Svip]

> Airbus didn't require them because of money

I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.

[delusional]

Separating "regulators" and "manufacturers" in such distinct categories is overly simplistic, I'm afraid. As we saw with the whole Boeing debacle, the manufacturers are the experts on what they build, and we expect them to give clear, levelheaded, and honest guidance to operators and regulators. That also means they must have some responsibility for the outcomes of that guidance.

Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.

[_DeadFred_]

It's a challenging problem. Going back to when I was in aerospace even just with the FAA we had FAA west and FAA east, and they were treated as different entities within our company because they had such different approaches/understanding and then the EASA which was from our experience a protectionist entity that would look for gotchas on American competitors and not a neutral safety focused party and refused to recognized treaty obligated acceptance of FAA certification (and it was a big issue that the US refused to step in on our behalf and require the treaty be followed because the US authorities put safety first even though the US had agreed we were safe and had demonstrated it).

[wolvoleo]

> Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.

Well they have to. Boeing showed what happens if they are not experts and they leave everything to the manufacturer. They'll just lie and scheme and even get away with it.

[etiennebausson]

They should be able to recall a plane for a safety flaw. In which case they have to pay for the upgrade themselves.

If the airline doesn't comply afterward, it would be on them.

But they didn't issue a recall, so they wouldn't have to pay for the fix, an over 200 people paid the price instead.

At least, that's how I read the blame distribution.

[ktallett]

Do we want airlines that only put in fixes for safety issues once they are forced to?

[PearlRiver]

The FAA and its international counterparts were created because airliners were constantly cutting corners or putting pressure on their pilot to do unsafe things.

[borisBigAi]

This is a real problem with the current FAA setup. The limited amount of legal liability seems like a major problem, even switching from 200k euros to 2 million or 10 million euros as the max penalty per soul would add a minor amount of heft to lawsuits against the airlines and manufacturers.

[WalterBright]

Fixes have to go through the FAA, which can be difficult, bureaucratic and very expensive.

[ktallett]

Well yes of course they have to be checked by a regulator, but you should still have the thought of, we must do this, no matter the cost as safety matters above everything else in this industry.

[iepathos]

That's right, Airbus is responsible for the faulty equipment onboard, not pilot training. Air France is responsible for its pilots' operational training and recurrent training.

[ktallett]

It's not that black and white. Airbus will be responsible for educating Air France too and giving appropriate training. These planes are not purchased by Air France without significant documentation and access to support.

[iepathos]

Ahh good to know, thanks for clarifying.

[marcosdumay]

The manufacturers literally write the manual. The regulators only approve or reject it. And yes, EASA approved it too.

[raverbashing]

As much as I understand the culture of blameless post-mortems and the fact that people in that cockpit don't get the benefit of hindsight, maybe those other companies didn't have an accident because they followed procedure (which was a simple one)

Yes there were UX factors. Yes training could be better. Yes distractions happen

But if I'm going to blame the companies I'm going to blame them on putting someone inexperienced and probably who did not have the right mindset in navigating the profession. And meanwhile companies waste time in making automations on top of manual processes that make things even more complicated

[foldr]

>There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Could you be more specific here? The article doesn't even say which problem Airbus are considered to be criminally liable for.

[marcosdumay]

The plane was prone to lose its airspeed sensors on some weather conditions.

[mlinhares]

Such an incredible write up, the piece about the importance of flying less technological planes to get a "sense" of what flying really is hits like a brick, specially in the world of LLMs producing code.

How do you get this "sense" of writing code and building systems by yourself if all you do is instruct some agent to do it? Are we all going to be like Bonin in the future where we just don't understand anything outside of the agent box?

This is both terrifying and sad.

[ottobonn]

I'm a software engineer and recently got my pilot's license, and the training for the pilot's license increased my (already-high) respect for the aviation profession. All pilots learn to fly basic airplanes and have to do everything by hand (often on paper, but an iPad is allowed) to show they know the basics. The result is that by the time you work up to more advanced planes you have climbed the ladder of abstraction and know what underpins the automation.

The other piece of the picture is that pilots acknowledge that their skills are perishable, and they have to commit to ongoing training. This would be analogous to writing code by hand and getting a licensed engineer to sign off on your currency periodically even if you use LLMs for work.

[altmanaltman]

But I mean flying a cessna vrs something that has fly-by-wire like Airbus jets, its not really about understanding abstractions or anything, since the plane is basically a fundamentally different machine no? Basic principles of gravity and physic apply sure, but the flying experience is 100% different and not like a levelling up thing right? Like i would not trust someone with a Cessna pilot license to fly the airbus i am on.

[OneMorePerson]

I'm not a pilot (someone correct me if I'm wrong) and I respect how hard it is to make split second high stakes decisions, however from my read the pilots had to ignore tons of basic sensors (including their own bodies). According to the crash report they were at a 35 degree upward tilt, which is super severe, and they thought they wouldn't crash because they had successfully recovered from a "low altitude warning" (which doesn't makes sense).

Point being it reads like following the sensors but ignoring what you can actually feel is happening, which is back to fundamentals.

I don't think people are saying a Cessna translates to flying an Airbus, more that NOT knowing the basics or forgetting them translates to dangerous gaps when flying the Airbus.

[wolvoleo]

Well, they were in IFR. It was dark and they probably couldn't see the horizon. The senses can play tricks on the body when you have no frame of reference. This phenomenon is trained for of course but it is hard to avoid.

However what I do think they should have realised is that whatever they were doing (pulling up) did not work and maybe they should stop for a moment and think about their assumptions. It's in fact hard to understand what situation the plane could be in for a hard constant pull up to be the right answer. The only thing I can think of is a loss of vertical stabiliser trim, a bit akin to what happened to that Alaska airlines crash off the coast of LA. Or a sudden extreme shift of cargo forward. But then that assumption could be checked.

But the mind can also get into a state of panic that makes such reasoning very difficult. That also is being trained for. But it is still very hard to overcome.

[WalterBright]

A Cessna has very different aerodynamic issues than a jetliner. Multi-engine also has its own issues (such as if one engine dies, the airplane tries to turn around it).

Setting a Cessna down on the runway is fairly strait forward. A jetliner, on the other hand, is quite complex to land.

[VBprogrammer]

I don't know if you can claim one is more straightforward. Sure a Cessna flies slower and has relatively simple aerodynamics. However, you could also be operating it out of a 400m sloping grass strip with a mountain off one end.

An A320 might be flying 3 times faster but is generally flying between relatively flat, straight runaways several miles long with approaches typically flown on a stable instrument approach from several nautical miles away. It's control laws mean flying straight or maintaining a particular bank is as simple as letting go of the control stick. If anything the stick and rudder skills in normal circumstances are much less involved. Systems management, obviously the autopilot, but also environmental, hydraulic, navigation an the operational concerns are obviously vastly more complex.

[defrost]

> you could also be operating it out of a 400m sloping grass strip with a mountain off one end.

Why? Not as a regular thing I hope, that's about 90m short of "tight".

If you're intent on proselytizing PNG at least get a PAC STOL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAC_P-750_XSTOL )

[raverbashing]

I see where you're going here but no

A Cessna an a big jet fly by the exact same principles and they stop flying due to the exact same principles as well

Sure the procedures and parameters and automations are different (as well as things like wing positioning, engine positioning, swept wings, number of engines, sure)

But you raise the nose of both of them enough they will both stall. If you lose speed they will both stall. They will behave similarly (or maybe weirdly) enough in curves.

And I think this is what was forgotten here. Having a fancy cockpit does not make it less than a dual-engine swept-wing fixed-wing aircraft. The principles are the same

[WalterBright]

Flying at near supersonic speeds at high altitude with a swept wing airplane is quite different from low and slow with a straight wing and thick air. Jetliners have a rather small envelope at altitude where the airplane will fly, things like overspeeding it will cause it to go out of control.

A fair amount of effort goes into designing the cockpit so it feels to the pilot like a low and slow aircraft, but it is not the reality.

For example, jetliners are unstable and require a yaw damper.

[thrownthatway]

I’ve flown a couple single engine aircraft.

I put it this way:

Commercial aviation pilots don’t really fly the plane as such. It’s more like a 1:1 real-time flight sim. They’re sort of up there having a LARP.

They’re flying in a similar sense that a DJ creates music.

[smcin]

But it wasn't at all just about Bonin: Robert and Bonin repeatedly kept trying to override each other; Robert was giving Bonin some information with which he could have figured out he was stalling (although Robert was also trying to climb); and Dubois had gone to deal with his sleep deprivation without designating either of them as PIC, and when Dubois finally returned (2:11:40, sounds still sleep-deprived based on his confusion) he didn't recognize the obvious stall or take control until they had lost almost all of their altitude.

It makes Air France look worse that all three pilots didn't react properly (or weren't trained or experienced), than just faulting Bonin. And at least two of them were sleep-deprived. But there were multiple systemic failures, not just the pilots.

[OneMorePerson]

I think this was a pre-LLM issue, but will be exacerbated. I've worked with some people who would be reading logging data and about to do some big intervention when it was clear that the logger itself was having an issue and the results coming out were not really possible.

[altmanaltman]

The irony of not understanding almost 100% of the code on modern airplanes is actually done by instructing a program to actually generate the code. It is neither terrifying nor sad. You expect humans to write millions of lines of code? At that scale, procedureally generating code is much safer and smarter.

[flohofwoe]

Those millions of lines of code can often be reduced 10x or 100x with just a bit of common sense, and with that also reducing the potential bug count by 10x to 100x.

Also unlike LLMs, traditional code generation techniques are deterministic.

[altmanaltman]

You think simulink code is not deterministic? And okay tell me how will you optimize an Airbus 320's software down to 10x or 100x? I'm waiting.

[hunterpayne]

I'm not flying anymore if that's the case.

[deepsun]

Novella "Profession" by Isaac Asimov.

[riffraff]

"Profession" is often cited with regard to LLMs, but honestly, in reminded more of (and scared by) "The Feeling of Power".

[cladopa]

Actually there are more planes flying today than ever and the number of accidents is very very low, thanks to technological planes and protocols that lean from mistakes.

So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.

[thrownthatway]

Boooo!

[pdpi]

> Hmm I don't think it's as black and white as just blaming airbus.

Then it’s a good thing they didn’t. Both Airbus and Air France were found guilty, and poor pilot training was specifically called out as a reason why Air France was considered guilty. It’s in the article.

[krig]

    --dangerously-skip-reading-the-article

[swores]

I mean, one doesn't even need to read the article to learn that the blame went to both companies - it's even in the title here on HN.

[404mm]

Is this the crash where the pilot failed to recognize the airspeed sensors had frozen up and he stalled the plane? I could see how this was an Air France fault since the pilot was not properly trained or experienced to fly this plane in these conditions. Not sure why Airbus is responsible.

[NooneAtAll3]

it's the crash where pushing nose of the plane down (correct enough-altitude stall response) caused alarms to activate, while pulling nose up caused alarms to silence

no wonder airbus was found guilty

[bombcar]

Airbus kind of embodies the "trust the computer" mentality; and if you're going to do that the computer damn hell better be right all the time - it must not have "backwards" failure modes.

Boeing, in similar situations "in the past" would just sound a "computer is giving the fuck up, fly this pig dog" bell and leave it to the pilots to figure it out.

[steveBK123]

As a computer person the airbus approach (and Boeing adopting some aspects of this in the max8) is terrifying

[tavavex]

Comparing Boeing's compliance hack and Airbus' system that's pushing 40 years now is very questionable. Airbus planes don't get in the way of flying, and there's extensive procedures and redundancies for everything that could go wrong. It's a proven system, and events like these are the exception proving the rule, especially since there was also a human factor here.

As another computer person, I'd trust aviation more than any other field, especially when it doesn't involve the modern US. Computers can't be perfect, but they can be almost always good at integrating and helping humans that remain in control. Advocates against including any fly-by-wire or computerization in aircraft at all fail to consider all the accidents that said computerization has helped avoid. Putting a billion steam gauges and blinking lights in front of pilots and asking them to correlate and understand everything themselves is actually not simpler, easier or safer.

[steveBK123]

The fly by wire as implemented by Airbus results in illogical states that are impossible in mechanically linked systems.

The most jaw dropping one is the stick input averaging.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/10w54e4/...

[actionfromafar]

You made me laugh out loud! Very well put.

[refurb]

While true, pilots aren’t trained to just “respond to the alarm” they are trained to fly the plane.

Once there were multiple alarms that made no sense at all (petty early in the event), the pilots should have ignored them as per the checklist.

But the most damning thing is the one pilot pulling the stick back and holding it back for almost the entire event. There aren’t any flying conditions where that’s an appropriate input. Not to mention being told to give up control and ignoring that request.

I agree Airbus has some blame in terms of the computer system not adequately communicating when it drops out of normal mode.

[PearlRiver]

Yeah the computer is never flying the plane it is always the pilots who have final decision. Which is ofcourse also why the computer will let you fly into a mountain if you want.

[cccbbbaaa]

> There aren’t any flying conditions where that’s an appropriate input.

It's the procedure for various GPWS cautions and warnings on Airbus planes, and can also be done in a windshear.

[refurb]

I stand corrected. But suffice to say it’s not an appropriate input when you lose airspeed at 35,000 ft.

I read the Admiral Cloudberg article again and saw that it was procedure for other scenarios as well.

It seem like the normal mode (protected flight envelope) is just encouraging bad habits? “Just go full stick back and hold it, don’t worry the computer won’t let you stall the plane…most of the time”

[cccbbbaaa]

> It seem like the normal mode (protected flight envelope) is just encouraging bad habits?

Maybe, but at the same time it helps avoiding crashes like Sriwijaya 182 or Flydubai 981. Airbus has shown that planes with fly-by-wire and any kind of flight envelope protection (A320 and newer, A220, B777 and 787, etc.) experience less fatal accidents and less hull losses than planes with traditional controls (A300, A310, B737, etc.), even today: https://accidentstats.airbus.com/fatal-accidents/

Unfortunately, these safety improvements mean that we only hear about cases where automation fail to help, like in the case of AF447, but not cases where it prevented an accident.

[exidy]

The behaviour you describe above only occurred after the pilot flying stalled the plane. There was a procedure for unreliable airspeed indication. Had the pilot flying performed it, the situation would have been resolved without incident.

AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.

[fweimer]

The article from this subthread contradicts this, though. Regarding recoverability of the situation, it says this:

> By now the airspeed indications had returned to normal, but the pilots had already set in motion a sequence of events which could not be undone.

That was before the prolonged stall warnings. But maybe this phrasing is just an embellishment?

But further down, the article is pretty clear that the training was inadequate for this type of unreliable airspeed indication:

> Although procedures for other phases of flight could be found in the manual, the training conditioned pilots to expect unreliable airspeed events during climb, to which they would respond with a steady nose-up pitch and high power setting that would ensure a shallow ascent. Such a response would be completely inappropriate in cruise.

[exidy]

Once the aircraft was stalled there was a narrow window to recover from it, which obviously did not occur. But the stall was entirely caused by pilot input of full nose up! The procedure for unreliable airspeed (which was in both the QRH and the FCOM) was simply to fly a known safe power / pitch from the tables provided in the QRH.

At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.

[fweimer]

I see. I assumed that given they were flying at 37,000ft, they would have more time to react. But the BEA report says that after autopilot disconnection, only two minutes passed until they reached this situation:

> Only an extremely purposeful crew with a good comprehension of the situation could have carried out a manoeuvre that would have made it possible to perhaps recover control of the aeroplane. In fact, the crew had almost completely lost control of the situation.

I had no idea that things could go wrong so quickly, even at that altitude.

[anonymars]

Thank you, this accident reminds me a bit of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, where the popular narrative of "be less of a dummy" is not really fair

Edit -- to wit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253931

[clickety_clack]

It reads exactly like "Ironies of Automation" by Bainbridge would predict.

[mrnicegu]

Yes, an autonomous plane would have worked so much better. Can’t wait for AI to replace stupid apes.

[anonymars]

A crash instigated by failure in software automation inputs would have been better handled by full AI software automation?

[brabel]

I actually think that is likely. Humans in these conditions have to make decisions under immense stress. Machines don’t, they just need to be able to understand that sensors may fail and are not completely reliable all the time. Though they would need lots of different input , just like humans, to be able to call out which part of its input is flawed.

[WalterBright]

There are always unanticipated conditions not accounted for in the automation. That's where pilot training comes in.

[anonymars]

Even the basic stall warning couldn't understand the situation given the faulty inputs