Faulty data misled pilot in 2009 Air France plane crash: Report

July 6, 2012

Pilot_error

Le Bourget (France), July 6: A combination of faulty sensors and mistakes by inadequately trained pilots caused an Air France jet to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 people aboard in the airline's deadliest ever crash, French investigators said on Thursday.

Investigators are urging better instruction for pilots on flying manually at high altitudes and stricter plane certification rules as a result of a three-year investigation into what happened to Flight 447.

Airbus, manufacturer of the A330 plane, said in a statement that it is working to improve speed sensors known as pitot tubes and making other efforts to avoid future such accidents. Air France stressed the equipment troubles and insisted the pilots "acted in line with the information provided by the cockpit instruments and systems. .... The reading of the various data did not enable them to apply the appropriate action."


But the Bureau for Investigations and Analysis' findings raised broader concerns about training for pilots worldwide flying high-tech planes when confronted with a high-altitude crisis.

The report also could have legal implications: A separate French judicial investigation is still under way, and Air France and Airbus have been handed preliminary manslaughter charges.

The bureau's analysis lists a combination of "human and technical factors" behind the crash. The plane flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris slammed into the sea during a nighttime thunderstorm on June 1, 2009.

Some families of victims felt investigators didn't focus hard enough on the equipment problems, saying the two pilots at the controls were doing what they could while faced with a barrage of inaccurate information.

Ice crystals that blocked the pitot tubes were the "unleashing event" that set off the plane's troubles, chief investigator Alain Bouillard said. The plane's autopilot shut off and the co-pilots had to fly manually, while a succession of alarms were going off. The captain was on a rest break.

In one fatal decision, the report says, one of the co-pilots nosed the Airbus A330 upward during a stall - instead of downward, as he should have - because of false data from sensors about the plane's position. Mr Bouillard said that was an "important element" of the cause of the crash.

He said the two pilots at the controls never understood that the plane was in a stall. He said only a well-experienced crew with a clear understanding of the situation could have stabilized the plane in those conditions.

"In this case, the crew was in a state of near-total loss of control," Mr Bouillard said.

Robert Soulas, who lost his daughter and son-in-law in the crash, says investigators said the flight director system indicated the "erroneous information" that the plane was diving downward, "and therefore to compensate, the pilot had a tendency to pull on the throttle to make it rise up."

However, the plane was in a stall instead. A basic maneuver for stall recovery, which pilots are taught at the outset of their flight training, is to push the yoke forward and apply full throttle to lower the nose of the plane and build up speed. But because the pilot thought the plane was diving, he nosed up.

Some families of people who died in the crash showed sympathy toward the pilots, saying they were dealing with bad equipment in an exceptionally challenging situation.

Mr Soulas noted that manufacturers had known for years about problems with the plane's speed sensors freezing over, but didn't order the faulty models systematically replaced until after the crash.

Pilot Gerard Arnoux said, "A normal pilot on a normal airliner follows" the signals on the flight director system, which tells them to go left, right, up or down.

Central to this accident is the fact that when the automation failed, the pilots were presented with conflicting information which was obviously incorrect, said William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. But they were unable to look through this and understand what the aircraft was actually doing.

"Pilots a generation ago would have done that and understand what was going on, but (the AF447 pilots) were so conditioned to rely on the automation that they were unable to do this," he said.

"This is a problem not just limited to Air France or Airbus," Mr Voss said. "It's a problem we're seeing around the world because pilots are being conditioned to treat automated processed data as truth, and not compare it with the raw information that lies underneath."

The final report included a study of the plane's black box flight recorders, uncovered in a costly and extraordinarily complex search in the ocean depths.

Lais Seba, the mother of 31-year-old victim Luciana Clarkson Seba, said "it's going to be forever difficult" for survivors to deal with the loss of their loved-ones.

"We are surviving," she said. "We live one day at a time, with lots of pain, and always missing her."



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News Network
June 25,2020

Ottawa, Jun 25: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took his son out for ice cream on Wednesday in his first family outing since Canada started easing out of its pandemic lockdown.

It was also Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec province.

Wearing masks, the Canadian leader and his six-year-old son Hadrien were cheered at Chocolats Favoris in Gatineau, Quebec.

According to a pool report, Trudeau said the shop tapped into a federal emergency wage subsidy and business loan in order to weather the pandemic, and "avoid being frozen out of the frozen treat market."

Hadrien is said to have bounced with excitement, settling on a vanilla cone with a cookie topping while dad bought a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate for himself.

Father and son then headed out to the patio, where they doffed their masks to eat their cones.

Canada's provinces and territories declared states of emergency mid-March, closing schools and non-essential businesses in response to the pandemic.

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Agencies
May 26,2020

Sheikhupura, May 26: Younus, the brother-in-law of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy by a Pakistani court, was killed in Sheikhupura city of Punjab province in Pakistan on Monday.

According to the FIR, Younus had gone to his farms on May 24 and did not return home at night. His body with throat slit was traced in the farm the following morning.

It is believed that, hailing from minority Christian community, Younus was killed in a rivalry.

This is not the first time that somebody associated with Asia Bibi has been murdered in cold blood.

In 2011, Salman Taseer, the influential governor of Punjab was assassinated after he made headlines by appealing for the pardon of Asia Bibi, who had been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Prophet Muhammad.

A month after Taseer was killed, Religious Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who spoke out against the laws, was shot dead in Islamabad, underlining the threat faced by critics of the law.

Asia Bibi is now living in exile after the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted her based on insufficient evidence in October 2018.

Recounting the hellish conditions of eight years spent on death row on blasphemy charges but also the pain of exile, Asia Bibi recently broke her silence to give her first personal insight into an ordeal that caused international outrage.

French journalist Anne-Isabelle Tollet, who has co-written a book about her, was once based in the country where she led a support campaign for her."You already know my story through the media," she said in the book.

"But you are far from understanding my daily life in prison or my new life," she said. "I became a prisoner of fanaticism," she said. In prison, "tears were the only companions in the cell".

She described the horrendous conditions in squalid jails in Pakistan where she was kept chained and jeered at by other detainees.

Pakistan's blasphemy laws carry a potential death sentence for anyone who insults Islam. Critics say they have been used to persecute minority faiths and unfairly target minorities.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan defended the country's strict blasphemy laws during his election campaigns. The status quo is still in place.

No government in Pakistan was ready to make changed to the blasphemy law due to fears of a backlash.

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News Network
June 10,2020

Islamabad, Jun 10: The World Health Organization has told Pakistan it should implement "intermittent" lockdowns to counter a surge in coronavirus infections that has come as the country loosens restrictions, officials said.

Since the start of Pakistan's outbreak in March, Prime Minister Imran Khan opposed a nationwide lockdown of the sort seen elsewhere, arguing the impoverished country could not afford it.

Instead, Pakistan's four provinces ordered a patchwork of closures, but last week Khan said most of these restrictions would be lifted.

Health officials on Wednesday declared a record number of new cases in the past 24 hours. The country has now confirmed a total of more than 113,000 cases and 2,200 deaths -- though with testing still limited, real rates are thought to be much higher.

"As of today, Pakistan does not meet any of the pre-requisite conditions for opening the lockdown", the WHO said in a letter confirmed by Pakistan officials on Tuesday.

Many people have not adopted behavioural changes such as social distancing and frequent hand-washing, meaning "difficult" decisions will be required including "intermittent lockdowns" in targeted areas, the letter states.

Some 25 percent of tests in Pakistan come back positive for COVID-19, the WHO said, indicating high levels of infection in the general population.

The health body recommended an intermittent lockdown cycle of two weeks on, two weeks off.

Responding to the WHO's letter, Zafar Mirza, the prime minister's special advisor for health, said the country had "consciously but gradually" eased lockdowns while enforcing guidelines in shops, mosques and public transport.

"We have to make tough policy choices to strike a balance between lives and livelihoods," Mirza said Wednesday.

Punjab's provincial health minister Yasmin Rashid, who received the WHO's letter, said the provincial government had already given "orders to take strict action against those violating" virus guidelines.

Hospitals across Pakistan say they are at or near capacity, and some are turning COVID-19 patients away.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that 136,000 cases had been reported in the previous 24 hours, "the most in a single day so far", with the majority of them in South Asia and the Americas.

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