Air France AF447

A couple of years ago, an Airbus 330 aircraft went down in the South Atlantic with everyone on board being lost: Air France flight AF447.

Recently, the main part of the wreckage has been discovered, but not - yet - the "black boxes". So we still don't have any better idea of what happened to the plane.

There have been a lot of theories and ideas and talking heads and bloggers and all sorts of people with all sorts of thoughts.



What I find interesting is that, among the public experts, it seems the flight crew had some knowledge of the situation of the plane, but not full knowledge. In other words, they may not have known what the plane's attitude was, they may not have known what their altitude was, they may not have known their speed, and so on. One thing that does seem clear is that the flight systems and computers on the flight desk were going crazy and throwing up all sorts of alarms and messages. On top of that, there may, or may not, have been doubt about what the instruments were showing.

I believe there were only two crew on the flight deck when whatever happened happened. Plane shaking, buzzers, alarms, alerts, flashy lights, computer screens, instruments, recorded voices and, perhaps, even lightning from outside the plane. All in all, I would have turned into a glob of quivering jelly.

Move on a few months, and an Airbus 380 aircraft has taken off from Singapore's Changi airport and is heading for Australia when one of its engines has a "hissy fit" and bits fly in multiple directions. Again, on the flight deck, same sort of situation with buzzers, alarms and so on. On this occasion, not only was the weather more benign, but the flight deck has five (I must check that) experienced Captains present. After a little time, the plane landed back at Changi and everyone was safe. In the meantime, everyone who was on the flight deck had a task to do and did it.

The point to all this is that I wonder if the crew in the Air France flight were simply overwhelmed by everything that was happening, and just didn't have the time to digest all the information, clear all the messages and "work the problem". On the other hand, the Qantas crew, more of them and more experienced, were able to "work the problem" and get the plane down.

Please note, I do not intend to demean the AF crew in any way. The situations were very different. I am simply saying that perhaps they, the AF crew, didn't have the resources available to them to do what they needed to do when they needed to do it.

And we still don't know what caused the problem/s in the first place.