BF2S Forums Air France Flight Vanishes - All hands feared lost.

11 Bravo wrote:

well i find this interesting.  not sure about air france but when i was in flight school we had a KLM school located within ours.  i was trying to flirt with some cute KLM chick and she said once she graduates this school they go right to training on a 737 or whatever plane they get.  i was shocked at this because in america you have to get tons of hours flying smaller aircraft before you even have a chance to fly something like that.  i wonder if it is the same with air france?   or other euro countries?

It's pretty much the standard way in Europe, you do the minimum training required, get all your licenses and rating etc...Then you accept awful T&C's from a low cost carrier, sign a contract, then they strap you into the right hand seat of 737/a320.....then you hit the magical 1500 hour mark and soon become a captain, flying hours that leave the body in an unfit state to be operating a metal tube carrying 100+ passengers....

Having said that, those air france pilots must have had thousands of hours between them. If they really did pull up on the controls during a stall, that is just an inexplicable error and must be put down to flawed training, or more likely fatigue and disorientation....Scary either way.

11 Bravo wrote:

fatigue...nah.  most pilots in these computer airplanes somehow forget they can stall at 38000 feet and try fixing the problem with the computer instead of actually flying the airplane.

There seems to be an awful lot of crashes like that, particularly with the Airbus models and the pilots relying too much on the computer.

My flight instructor always made us use our cardboard E6B instead of the electronic ones for that exact reason. Electronics can fail.