Originally Posted By: RuhRoh
IIRC, the Air France crash happened during a demonstration, the pilot intended to do a dirty slow pass, and when he hit the power to pull out, the computer got confused because it felt they were in a perfect landing position and thought he should continue the landing, so did not initially apply the requested power. If you listen in the video, you can hear the engines eventually spool up, too late after it goes into the trees

To me, the takeaway is you should have one system in charge at all time, be it human or computer, but it is not a demonstration of the non-safety of fully automated systems. It's just a poorly implemented shared-responsibility autopilot.



A good analysis but it wasn't even that "automation related". I was once a captain and check airman on the A320 and have since spent a quarter of my life flying the 737-500 through -900ER. You would think that the two could not be more different. But actually the A320 demo crash could just as easily have happened in the 737 (but perhaps with more disasterous results). The only computerized flight control issue with the demo crash was that the plane was below 100 ft RA. This means that the automatic full-throttle stall recovery didn't kick in. Well big deal! Most planes have no such feature. So what you are witnessing is a plane that is at its critical angle of attack at idle power. The pilots (far too late) realized that the trees were close and applied full power. Unfortunately, the spool time for the engines was far too slow. The solution was a higher idle setting. The flight control system worked fine and never took anything away from the pilots. Stupid is as stupid does. No computer will override that.