ayecarumba

30 years-ish (10 mil/20 airline) with 3 narrow body CA and 8 yrs wide body intl FO.

Langwiesche is a well known pilot hater, famous for throwing Sully under the bus to sell some books and make a name for himself. His opinion: Sully & Skiles deserve none of the credit for carrying out one of the few successful ditchings in history, the computer deserves the glory. With AF447, the instruments/computers deserve none of the blame, only the pilots. Sorry Lang, you can't have it both ways.

Let's throw his ass in the box at night, no horizon, no sleep, never flown with, etc...THEN add in the (IMO) worst scenario ever: conflicting information from your flight instruments. The other FO hadn't flown in 90 days (legal), the PF was (relatively) new and inexperienced, the CA was on break. Having flown through the ITCZ 100s of times, it is not a big deal. It can be, especially if your equipment is failing, giving bad information, your training didn't include the scenario, you're new, the other guy hasn't flown in 90 days, and the other guy is on his break trying to wring out a few precious minutes of rest hours off his home body clock time.

Like any accident, it's always a chain of events and circumstances. But to speculate, conjecture, and ultimately blame these 3 men for this accident is a disservice at best, and a slander at worst.

The pitot/anti-ice system suffers from a well known design flaw. As Lang states, the new pitot tubes were waiting to be unpacked and installed. Additionally I'm pretty sure, NOBODY was EVER training pilots for a high altitude, night, no horizon, conflicting instrument failure in the ITCZ. V1 cuts out the wazoo, but not this.

Perhaps the greatest homage we can pay to these pilots and their families/passengers, is the fact that NOW, pitch/power settings and stick/rudder are finally being spoken of and talked about.