That’s all correct, but AF447 was exacerbated by the pilot and copilot (actually 2 copilots, IIRC, the senior pilot was on break) fighting each others controls as the plane flew towards the ocean. The pitot tube was giving bad readings (frozen over), but from what investigators can tell, one control was trying to pull up and even out and the other was still pitching down to gain speed (per the warnings given by the faulty pitot tube).

The tragic thing about that is all they had to do was simply let go of the controls completely and the plane would've been fine. The transcript of that flight still gives me chills: https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/

For anyone who hasn't read it: Imagine waking up, and a few moments later saying "I can't believe this is happening" right before you reach altitude zero.

That transcript is so sad.

A car, plane or whatever should only have one driver/pilot. Planes have dual controls by default but this sort of nonsense should not be allowed to happen.

This was not AF447 so what on earth happened? I'm guessing inadequacy of some sort and that's on the industry as a whole.

In cases like this it's almost always some variation of normalization of deviance.

If company culture doesn't strictly enforce callouts 100% of the time, it's easy to get into a routine of everything being just fine 100's of times until it isn't.

Really these sorts of things show there should be a failsafe mechanism that provides tactile/haptic feedback to the pilots if the other inputs are "fighting" theirs.

Even an audible alarm isn't enough, as you'll likely get more than a few of those during events where it matters.

Proper CRM of course should make this "impossible" - but in high stress moments any more layers of swiss cheese you can add the better.

Agreed. There should be a stick-shaker or similar to let pilots know the other control is being used. Maybe not the existing stick-shaker, since that's usually for stalls, but something similar.

I have no idea why the pilot-monitoring would have taken his controls. Or why the pilot-flying wouldn't have called him out for it. Possibly a seniority issue - we've seen similar issues before. Hopefully the french aviation authorities can determine the root cause.

Ever see those really long fire trucks?

Two drivers

But the second driver of a tiller truck only steers the rear wheels, more like the pilot of a glider being towed.

> In the very guarded language of accident review I would say that is a damning indictment of the behaviour of the pilot and co-pilot as being completely reckless and bloody stupid.

Well, yes, but these kind of incidents keep happening at AF. Everyone talks about AF447 because it ended in the ocean, but there have been many incidents with AF since AF447, involving serious pilot error which nonetheless ended in a safe landing. So you have to look a bit beyond the "muppets" in the front seats and start to wonder about company culture and training.