AF447, again

The June 6, 2011 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology contains more information about AF447 than was available in my last post. There, I concluded that the crew had acted correctly, but the airplane didn't. Based on what I read today, I was wrong. The pilot flying continued the nose-up stick inputs for quite some time. That's not the right thing to do.

We forget that accidental stall is insidious, like a lot of other problems in aviation. The other day I was playing with a Flight Training Device, evaluating it for use in IFR training and Instrument Proficiency Checks. We were fooling around telling jokes, and I wasn't looking at the instruments. With the FTD there are no cues like slipstream to let you know that the speed is too low. When I looked back at the instruments the airspeed was low and and the nose was high. STALL! I jammed the yoke forward, but the stall still broke, hard, and I started to try to use rudder to keep the wings level.

There wasn't enough room to recover. Stall, spin, crash, burn, die.