Airbus Manual Flawed. A Call for Justice.
NTSB Puts: Airbus In the Hot Seat.
It’s about time!
Irony of ironies. Today I finish reading and thinking about the NTSB’s report on the Hudson crash see here here and here . GMTA as they say (Great Minds Think Alike.)
So I am not the only one who believes that Airbus demonstrates problems. In fact, by now, one would have to live on the most remote mountain top in Nepal NOT to know that Airbus instruments, and Airbus instrumentation leave a lot to be desired.
How bad is it when the manual causes accidents instead of preventing them? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it myself.
It’s bad.
Apparently if the Hudson crew had attempted to use the manual, they would have failed to make a safe landing, because it had precise directions (required to turn off automated features related to ground landing as opposed to a water landing). Relying on the manual would likely have lead the crew to make the kind of errors that result in fatalities. It’s a good thing that Captain Sully–our Captain/Pilot/Hero of the decade–knew what he was doing.
But the survival of everyone on the Hudson flight was because of the actions of a man–in spite of the Airbus he was flying.
In spite of the manual which tells pilots how to fly the Airbus.
The NTSB has a list of suggestions, advisories and directives that Airbus may eventually heed. But hopefully our courts will have long memories. Hopefully, when Airbus cases come before them, they will be strong against EADS, the European aerospace company that owns Airbus, and Airbus Industrie itself. If the US doesn’t check Airbus and make them stop and pay attention to those little details that keep people alive, make them correct careless mistakes, prevent them from the publication of reckless negligent manuals, who will? Who will remind Airbus that exclusive reliance on fly by wire flight control computers is unwise–when a mere computer failure can easily render an aircraft uncontrollable? Haven’t we all seen enough blue screens to know even redundant system computers are fallible? We can look at Sully in the cockpit and conclude “the ultimate pilot is not a computer. It is…He is a man.”
We all know about the failure of the Thales pitot tubes which froze up and contributed to the loss of AF 447.
Now we know the manuals are useless in certain catastrophic situations over water.
What else will we have to learn the hard way before Airbus negligence will be checked?
