Re: Pilots will soon only be needed for taxiing
He said described how the computer got the point where it could no longer make sense of all its inputs, so simply gave up and dumped the whole mess on the poor pilots
That's not the case for AF447, if tyhat's what you were talking about.
The pitots had frozen, meaning that the autopilot had no reliable way to measure airspeed. Under these conditions, it mode-switches from "primary" rules to "alternate" rules. The biggest difference between these is in attitude control - under primary rules, the aircraft pitch is automatically constrained such that airspeed cannot be reduced to the stall point. With no pitot readings, that's not really possible, so the controller switches to altenate rules - informs the pilots of this - and then does the best it can.
who had even less information to go on than it did
They knew they had a pitot problem. Standard practice in such a situation is to fly straight-and-level for 60 seconds. They failed to do that.
But significantly worse, they simply failed to monitor their instruments. The stall warning sounds for the entire descent - that's a loud voice saying "stall, stall". I do not understand how they could have possibly ignored it, yet they did.
Vic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
