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Air France 447: was it deep stall?

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The release of preliminary flight data and cockpit voice recorder data from the miraculously recovered "black boxes" of Air France Flight 447 opened the floodgates of press and online discussion. Amid all this chatter, the term "deep stall" often popped up. Did Flight 447 experience a deep stall? (www.flyingmag.com) Mehr...

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jkabradley
jkabradley 0
From the article: "It remained in this unusual attitude not because it could not recover, but because the pilots did not comprehend, in darkness and turbulence and amid a tumult of conflicting warnings of mysterious system failures, the actual attitude of the airplane."

I like that wording. Like so many aviation accidents, this was a truly perfect storm of circumstances (weather, pitot, pilots, a/c systems all played a role) with a very sad and tragic outcome.
yock
Michael Yockey 0
I saw this in my inbox this morning as well. Forgiving the link-bait title (the author discards the notion of a deep stall in the first line not previewed in the summary) I still find the article lacking in explanation. What I wanted was a correlation between the aircraft's angle of attack to the angle of attack necessary for a deep stall on this aircraft. He skipped over that part and cited the confusing sequence of alerts in the cockpit. Those alerts may have very well led to a loss of situational awareness, which ultimately caused the crash, but that doesn't mean that the airplane wasn't ALSO in a deep stall.
indy2001
indy2001 0
I believe the whole point of this article is that the A330 is not even capable of a deep stall. As he stated, the only airliners that are susceptible to this phenomenon are the T-tails, which rules out all Airbus models. That means there is enough control surface and/or thrust authority to exit any stall, if only the pilots or computers recognize the situation and exercise that authority. If they had only recognized that they were in a stall, it is likely the nose down and full thrust that we are taught in flight school would have worked. If it had been a true deep stall, even that would not have saved them.
yock
Michael Yockey 0
See, I missed that entirely from the article. I didn't even know that the A330 wasn't a T-tail. I suppose that my own knowledge gap, but it would have been nice if the author would have pointed that out. Of course, I may have just missed it when I read it too.
preacher1
preacher1 0
Per indy2001, after reading the article and looking at some of the other comments on it, it kinda sounds like that the term "DEEP STALL" is used or thought of in several different ways and the true meaning distorted by some as just meaning a particularly mean stall rather than it actually is.
That being said, I got to go back to the tail end of Justin's comment up here in that it was a perfect storm of lights, warnings, and bad information that just totally overwhelmed the crew. I have already said this a time or 2 in other comments but there are more bells and whistles in cockpits now, with fewer crew members, than there ever have been and in answering all those when they sound and trying to follow the emergency procedures for each one, where is the time to fly the plane???? This is evidenced by the Quantas engine blowout a couple of months ago; As luck had it, there were 5 senior captains on that flight. Either 3 or 4 of them did nothing but answer alarms and somebody was available to fly the plane, otherwise, the results may have been the same as AF447.
preacher1
preacher1 0
Go into POPULAR SQUAWKS and down to the AF447 article. There are 93 current comments. Lot's of armchair quarterbacking and bunches of Pilot comments with experience in TYPE
Tom42
Thomas Venditti 0
As a retired airline pilot I have one comment. Teach pilots to get out of the automation and hand fly! They had no idea what to do when all the whizz-bang gadgets quit. How do you hand fly an airplane with a side stick? (I'm an old Boeing 727/737 guy.)

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