Quote:
Originally Posted by jwzimm
Not really. An airplane can fly at any altitude (up to it's ceiling of course). AF447 went down because the pitot probes iced up. Those probes are used to determine air speed. The airplane started getting conflicting numbers from it's three pitot probes and the autopilot basically said "F this" and turned it over to the pilots. The pilots reacted incorrectly and tried to troubleshoot the air data malfunction rather than just flying the damn airplane. This resulted in them putting the airplane into a stall and start losing altitude. It got away from them to the point where it was completely unrecoverable and it pancaked into the ocean.
Classic example of pilots becoming over-reliant on the automation and losing their basic stick-and-rudder skills unfortunately.
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First I will say there are a lot of very good pilots and I know some personally so the following comment is not an attach on all pilots it is more about the industry as a whole.
Most of the flying public are unaware of the fact that many pilots today do not understand the basic concepts behind flying. Most pilots fly by the book or what they been trained to do. Unlike US military pilots who have science, technical and engineering backgrounds understand the physics behind a plane and flying where as most pilots in commercial airlines lack these basic understanding. Many of these pilots graduated college with business or liberal arts degrees and signed up for pilot flight training with one of the major airlines in the past 30 yrs and learn to fly plans by the book.
99% of the time this perfectly fine, but when things happen which the book does not cover or you do not have time to go through all the check lists before the plane hits ground this method fails. Even time the FAA cites pilot error for these occurrence this is why, they lack the understand to assess the situation and figure out what to do. Most flying by the book attempts to keep pilots from ever getting into those situation in the first place the reason I pointed out about, but as we see things happen.
I have an engineering background and spoke with pilots who are friends of mine, and had discussion with them about science the behind flying and how things work and you can tell immediately they do not understand the physics.
Simple example, the stupid Mythbusters story about can a plane take off if it is on a conveyor belt going the opposite way as the plane. Most will tell you it can not since you can not get enough ground speed. Some how most think the wheel on the plane is what drives the plan down the runway similar to a car.
In this case, if the plane was taken over as some people are theorizing, the next question is did the plane get into a situation where book did not cover the situation. I do not know the specific of the two pilots other than the one had his own flight simulator in his home and practice flying all the time. But Rote Memory flying does not make you a good pilot per say.