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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The are guilty of letting these terrible pilots fly humans over oceans. Sometimes the driver is bad and yet we point at the car and say it should have been designed "better". I have read a lot about this flight over the years and I have my obvious opinions.
IIRC it seemed like that pilot was having some kind of nervous breakdown because he surreptitiously held back on the stick all the way from 38,000ft until the crash.
3) Manslaughter charges initially recommended in 2011
4) Accident report released in 2012
5) A long time with a lot of lawyers arguing about whether or not the charges should be heard in court
6) Charges dropped in 2019
7) However, public prosecutor announced proceeding with prosecution in 2021
8) Trial began in 2022
9) Both Airbus and AF acquitted in 2023
10) Prosecutor lodges an appeal in 2023
11) Trial begins in appeals court in 2025
12) Appeals court finds both companies guilty in 2026
Basically - these are two huge companies in France, they have a _lot_ of well paid lawyers, and a lot of political heft, but then there was a large amount of public outrage - and so the debate about whether or not to actually prosecute the case continued 2012 through to 2021 - the prosecutor reopening the charges in 2021 was due to intense public pressure.
Cruically once it actually went to trial, it only took 4 years to reach a conclusion including with appeals, which is quicker than I'd expect - and something I noticed is that the appeals court was able to find them guilty, I'm not sure how it goes in other common law country judiciaries, but in my country, if this had gone to an appeals court, they don't have the power to find you guilty, but they could overturn the previous ruling, and direct the lower court to begin the trial again - so it would have been even slower.
I guess that's an aspect of civil law judicial systems that might be considered an advantage.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Do we want airlines that only put in fixes for safety issues once they are forced to?
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.
Fixes have to go through the FAA, which can be difficult, bureaucratic and very expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 )
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.
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.
Boooo!
Novella "Profession" by Isaac Asimov.
"Profession" is often cited with regard to LLMs, but honestly, in reminded more of (and scared by) "The Feeling of Power".
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.
I'm not flying anymore if that's the case.
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.
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
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.
You made me laugh out loud! Very well put.
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.
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.
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
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.
It reads exactly like "Ironies of Automation" by Bainbridge would predict.
Yes, an autonomous plane would have worked so much better. Can’t wait for AI to replace stupid apes.
A crash instigated by failure in software automation inputs would have been better handled by full AI software automation?
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.
There are always unanticipated conditions not accounted for in the automation. That's where pilot training comes in.
Can I commit manslaughter now and pay a one-digit percentage of my income as a fine?
My cousin was one of the pilots. I heard he was a great guy, but I never got to meet him.
RIP
The are guilty of letting these terrible pilots fly humans over oceans. Sometimes the driver is bad and yet we point at the car and say it should have been designed "better". I have read a lot about this flight over the years and I have my obvious opinions.
Stark contrast between Boeing (US) never been guilty of anything vs Airbus (EU)
Not so stark when you realize that both airbus and air france were acquitted years ago. And then the prosecutors appealed! I find that terrifying.
Boeing literally pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges. https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-fraud-justice-...
Manslaughter for not having enough training during a specific malfunction, one crash
Vs
Fraud for two crashes caused by knowingly having unsafe planes (and two whistleblowers conveniently die)
Ah, off by one error.
They have, just not criminal penalties. No one will go to prison. The nearly $19 billion in losses to the value in Boeing is chump change ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
It's really a miracle that the black box was found.
Hearing this in the news reminded me of William Langewiesche's great piece in vanity fair about the cause: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...
What portion of blame does the pilot who yanks back on and holds the side stick without understanding the situation deserve? This is flying 101.
How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots? That's the blame component for AF.
IIRC it seemed like that pilot was having some kind of nervous breakdown because he surreptitiously held back on the stick all the way from 38,000ft until the crash.
It is indeed very sad that all they had to do is let go of that stick for a moment.
Are you type rated on any Airbus models?
Do you need to be to understand that nose up is not how to recover from a stall?
I’m not a pilot. Zero experience except remote controlled airplanes.
But IIRC, it happened by night, over the ocean. If the instruments fail you, this is really hard to “perceive” your speed and orientation.
I remember reading about this 10-15 years ago. How is it possible that this almost took decades to resolve?
1) It crashed in 2009
2) Flight recorders weren't recovered until 2011
3) Manslaughter charges initially recommended in 2011
4) Accident report released in 2012
5) A long time with a lot of lawyers arguing about whether or not the charges should be heard in court
6) Charges dropped in 2019
7) However, public prosecutor announced proceeding with prosecution in 2021
8) Trial began in 2022
9) Both Airbus and AF acquitted in 2023
10) Prosecutor lodges an appeal in 2023
11) Trial begins in appeals court in 2025
12) Appeals court finds both companies guilty in 2026
Basically - these are two huge companies in France, they have a _lot_ of well paid lawyers, and a lot of political heft, but then there was a large amount of public outrage - and so the debate about whether or not to actually prosecute the case continued 2012 through to 2021 - the prosecutor reopening the charges in 2021 was due to intense public pressure.
Cruically once it actually went to trial, it only took 4 years to reach a conclusion including with appeals, which is quicker than I'd expect - and something I noticed is that the appeals court was able to find them guilty, I'm not sure how it goes in other common law country judiciaries, but in my country, if this had gone to an appeals court, they don't have the power to find you guilty, but they could overturn the previous ruling, and direct the lower court to begin the trial again - so it would have been even slower.
I guess that's an aspect of civil law judicial systems that might be considered an advantage.
In the french system an appeal is basically a re-trial since the appeal court can confirm, infirm or modify the lower court verdict.
Welcome to Greek style justice.
The Greeks really wallow in 17 year long court cases?
That seems a bit far fetched.
It's just usual justice when the defendants have a lot of very expensive lawyers.