Final AF447 Report Suggests Pilot Slavishly Followed Flight Director Pitch-Up Commands | Aviation International News

Final AF447 Report Suggests Pilot Slavishly Followed Flight Director Pitch-Up Commands

French BEA report said that the pilot flying kept pulling the stick and this caused the Airbus A330 to stall and prevented a recovery.

The flight data recorder on board Air France Flight 447 was not able to record fligth director behavior. Accident investigators had to "rebuild" data to learn what happened.

By Thierry Dubois • Writer

July 8, 2012

In its final report into the loss of an Air France Airbus A330 over the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009, French air accident investigation agency BEA (Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses) has managed to explain most–but not all–of the pitch-up inputs by the pilot who was flying the aircraft at the time of the accident during the last minutes of Air France Flight 447. The report, published on July 5, said that the pilot flying (PF) kept pulling the stick and this caused the Airbus A330 to stall and prevented a recovery.

In a tense press conference held last Thursday at Le Bourget Airport in Paris BEA director Jean-Paul Troadec and his team pointed at human-machine interface issues that made the situation extremely confusing for the crew. All 228 occupants died when the aircraft, flying from Rio to Paris, crashed at night while negotiating a region with heavy thunderstorm activity. BEA had published an interim report in July 2011.

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Airbus A330

Airbus

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