AF 447 The real causes...

Sure one can blame the bean counters for throwing up roadblocks to the replacement of the pitot tubes but no one really knows if the new pitot tubes had they been installed would not have iced over also.

One can blame a pilot for taking a rest break but I'd sure prefer an well rested pilot be at the controls during the later and more demanding portions of the flight. It is certainly clear that the pilots in the cockpit for fully qualified and experienced.

The real cause is that the pilots were simply not capable of deciding which instruments to rely on and which to mistrust. The pilots were simply too dependent on a mind set of trusting their instruments and relying on a computer to keep the airplane from stalling. Once it went into Alternate Law they lost Angle of Attack protection.

The airspeed was indicated as very low. They should have rejected that data but didn't. However, that is forgivable. They added power and with the engines slung low under the wings of course they shot up real fast into a nose up position and gained altitude.

The pilot may have become distracted by a non-silenceable stall warning horn. Well, its a critical situation and its probably good that it can't be turned off. The trouble is that any pilot knows to get the nose down instantly and to add power in or near a stall attitude. Yet the pilot kept the nose up and allowed it to go even higher and higher and although power was initially set to TOGA, they quite promptly lowered it to flight idle and although it takes time for a jet engine to spool down, they were soon at fifty-five percent power when they should have stayed at Take Off/Go Around power.

Even when the airspeed suddenly indicated a more comforting value of 215 they were keeping the nose up and lowering power.

Its simple. Pilots who've done nothing but input commands into a computer were unable to suddenly start flying the plane. They didn't know what to accept and what to reject. They didn't know that buffeting in a low speed stall and high speed stall is pretty much the same thing. They didn't know to lower the nose and add power. They were overwhelmed by a flurry of error messages and unreliable instruments when the static air port was iced over and the computer put the nose up but soon detected too great a discrepancy between the data from the two pitot tubes and suddenly turned the plane over to the pilots without warning.

Pilots who deal only with computers and don't learn to actually fly the airplanes become too reliant on instruments and don't know how to actually fly the airplane themselves. They had three minutes to learn how to fly, but they seem to have forgotten the lesson every student pilot learns on his third flight: lower the nose immediately and add full power immediately.