Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
Index,
CRM has improved safety. It is my opinion the biggest improvement has been active pilot monitoring.
Point of fact, Delta pilots had the exact same failure on more than one occasion and dealt with it. MD88 pilots seem to have that kind of failure every couple of weeks or so.
My criticism of the article was that the author, credible as he may be, went far beyond what those in the air safety community would consider a scientific consideration of objective findings. The article was written to entertain. That sort of subjective voyeurism isn't really helpful.
It is maintained the reason Air France and Delta's similar systems failures had much different outcomes came down to training and experience. (thanks to our stagnation, we are tremendously experienced
)
Was there a CRM failure and a systems failure? Yes, those too. Like many accidents there is a long list of things of contributing factors and had not those links in the chain come together we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Interesting change of spin. I noticed that you have now added "
training" to your rationale. That's not what you said initially. You claimed that under similar circumstances DAL pilots avoided the AF result due to "
experience" alone.
Even so, training and experience can NOT always prevent mistakes or accidents. I don't think you can extrapolate such a conclusion based on one incident from each side--AF bad, DAL good.
The fact is we are all human. We are all subject to fatigue, complacency, misinterpreting the situation, etc... The AF pilots had been droning along for hours. In the span of seconds ice crystals formed in the pitot tubes causing erroneous a/s and altitude indications. The a/p automatically disengaged, thrust lock mode engaged, and the a/c reverted to ALT LAW. The quiet dark cockpit suddenly became noisy with aural alerts with ECAM messages galore. All in a matter of seconds. I'm sure it was an overwhelming event. Things snowballed quickly. Virtually all of us in aviation have experienced an event or two (or more) where things got rapidly out of hand. Obviously we all survived or we wouldn't be posting here. Was that due to "experience"? Good judgment? A little (or a lot of) luck? You know the old adage about good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.
But my point is this. In roughly around a minute the a/c went from stable flight to out of control. It's easy in hindsight to diagnose the mistakes made by this flight crew. It's obvious what those mistakes were. I just think it's wrong of you to boast that DAL wouldn't make the same mistakes under the same circumstances because we're "experienced" and the AF pilots were not.