AF447 Circumstances but not causes:

The French have announced the information to be released tomorrow will give "Factual elements on the operation of the flight that will establish the circumstances of the accident but not the causes" to correct "The partial and contradictory information published in the media".

I am all in favor of establishing circumstances and certainly think it should be done prior to laying any blame. However, dealing with forty to fifty major alarms in a four minute sequence is inherently dangerous particularly at night near turbulence in a situation that is neither taught nor simulated during the pilot's training. Pilot Error is one term that should often be prefaced with the phrase Design Induced. In the case of AF447 it should be Design Induced and Training Re-inforced Pilot Error.

The French announcement implies that the plane had already entered turbulent air prior to the throttle being reduced and the nose pitching up based on instructions derived from the pitot tube data. This has not necessarily been established. Partial and contradictory information is often the fault of the authorities, not the journalists.

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What fools these journalists are! The press statement was just more incomplete data with obvious omissions.

Why do journalists keep discussing the fact that the chief pilot was on a rest break. So what? Each of the two pilots in the cockpit was a fully qualified and experienced pilot. The Chief Pilot arrived back in the cockpit about one minute after the event commenced but wisely did not immediately assume command of the aircraft.

Today's statement focused on actions taken by the Pilot Flying but never once compared those actions as to whether they were proper for what the instruments displayed or what was actually happening. A pilot immediately adding full power when he thinks there is a stall is fine and dandy. Student pilots learn that by their third lesson. Yet the pilot simultaneously commanding a nose-up pitch increase? In a stall? Of course the essential point is that a pilot for Air France is only trained on low altitude stalls at low power. Yet any pilot should know to get the nose down not up. Perhaps it was a question of which instruments to believe and which to disregard but soon each pilot agreed that they had "no indications" (of speed). They never escaped a deep stall and it seems never went to a sixty degree bank in an attempt to escape the deep stall. They were doing what they had been trained to do if they were "low and slow" and inadvertently stalled the aircraft. Everything in their training revolves around the FlyByWire system that will not allow the pilot to stall the aircraft but once the wildly divergent pitot sensor data caused the computer to trip out, the plane was in Alternate Law mode and while some protections are in place, stalls are quite possible. Computer control over the stabilizer trim tab is lost upon entering Alternate Law but pilots appear not to have known that which is understandable since they never really train for Alternate Law.

So weather really played no role in this as they made a simple deviation around the weather, it was the non-turbulent icing that was a problem for them. They had erroneous indications of dangerously slow speed and then no reliable indications of speed at all. The initial climb of several thousand feet was due to the added thrust when they went to TOGA power, this also increased the severe nose-up attitude due to the pilot's failure to consider stabilizer settings being now manually controllable but not computer controllable.

The first incident was icing of the pitot and static air sources. Soon thereafter the computer became aware of unreliable data. The problem is that at the point in time wherein the static air source became iced and therefore the airplane's speed supposedly fell from 275 to 60, it is clear that such an event could not have taken place without some sort of deceleration forces having been applied. Prior to sending a series of critical warnings to the pilot, how about a critical warning to the computer: airspeed is clearly erroneous so make no immediate adjustments.

The pilot seeing such an abrupt air speed change should have known it was erroneous and probably related to static air data and the pilot hearing the stall warning should not have assumed that it was already a stalled aircraft. The FlyByWire system had pitched the nose up but not gravely, speed was decaying but not gravely.