![]() "Does the aircraft sound like it's going that fast? Our pitch is where it needs to be and so is the thrust." He extended the gear and we landed.ĭid I land on speed? Don't know. His indicator showed us still doing 280 knots. All was going well until I asked for the landing gear. "Of course I am," he said, "why are you asking?" I asked him to declare an emergency and get us back for a landing. ![]() I tapped the copilot on the shoulder and asked if he was okay. In my view, all three systems were suspect. The week previous to this flight, our mechanics drained a cup of water from the standby system's static lines and pronounced it fixed. It would work fine at first, but sometime after takeoff it produced nonsense. I didn't trust the standby system because it had been giving us problems for months. My airspeed indicator said we were in a stall, his indicator said we were doing 280 knots, and the standby was somewhere around 200 knots. I leveled the wings and considered our broken jet. He was frozen with a zombie-like stare, so I reached over and hit the autopilot enable bar, on his side of the cockpit, and that worked. I smashed the autopilot disengage button and nothing happened. I engaged the autopilot as soon as the flaps were up and it initiated a turn to the left. ![]() As we taxied out our primary Air Data Computer failed but our manuals said we could continue provided the autopilot was engaged prior to 200 knots. Most of our pilots had already found other jobs and I was paired with a contract copilot I had never flown with before. It is a Challenger 604 and this was to be my last trip with the company, Compaq Computer, before they were sold to Hewlett Packard. On September 10, 2002, I was flying this aircraft from Houston Intercontinental Airport, in Texas. Had the PF realized that anything more than a few degrees nose up at cruise will result in a loss of airspeed, the stall would never have happened in the first place. Had these pilots realized this, they could have saved themselves. I thought about it for a while and realized that just about every aircraft I have ever flown, cruises at altitude at nearly full thrust and just a few degrees nose up. I was more interested in the fact all three pilots couldn't understand (or believe) their aircraft was in a stall at 35,000 feet with the nose pitched 15 degrees up. When the accident report came out, the industry seemed to focus on the design of the aircraft's flight control system, which allowed each pilot to command an opposite pitch movement without the other pilot noticing. The aircraft was dropping 11,000 feet per minute when it impacted the ocean, less than 5 minutes after the initial loss of airspeed information.įor more about this accident: Case Study: Air France 447. The captain returned to the cockpit and witnessed the confusion but was unable to figure it out. The PF pulled back on the stick further to 16 degrees, even as the other pilot pushed forward. Then the second airspeed system came back, allowing the stall warning system to sound. The PF relaxed back pressure, allowing the nose to come down to 6 degrees momentarily, then right back up to 10 degrees. ![]() 29 seconds after the loss of both airspeed systems, one came back. The first officer, who was the Pilot Flying (PF), instinctively pulled back on the stick, pitching up to as high as 11 degrees, despite the other pilot's admonitions to lower the nose. The aircraft was at 35,000 feet, Mach 0.82, and the pitch was 2.5 degrees nose up. The autopilot disengaged and the flight director cross bars disappeared as a result. The captain was in back during an authorized rest break when ice crystals caused the airspeed indications to momentarily disappear from both Primary Flight Displays (PFDs). It was an overnight flight with a cockpit crew of three: a captain and two first officers. On Sunday, an Air France Airbus A330-203 departed Rio de Janeiro Galeão bound for Paris Charles de Gaulle.
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