r/aviation

After reading today that the Paris Court of Appeal has found Air France and Airbus guilty of involuntary manslaughter for AF447, I've been re-reading through information about the accident.

My layman's understanding is that a key tenet of Airbus Fly-By-Wire design is that flight computers will prevent the pilot from taking the aircraft outside of its safe envelope - including preventing stalls through the use of high-AoA protections (Alpha Prot / Alpha Floor / Alpha Max). I understand that the A330 switched into Alternate Law after the pitot tubes froze and lost reliable airspeed information, and Alternate Law kicks out high-AoA protection, essentially allowing the plane to fly like a "normal" jet that CAN stall.

Does Alternate Law removal of stall protection boil down to the computers essentially losing faith in their airspeed inputs - i.e. without trustworthy ADR information the protections simply cannot operate safely so the engineering decision is made to return the envelope to the pilots? Or is it actually more complicated than that?

AoA comes from separate vanes, not the pitots. Was there ever post-AF447 discussion about retaining some degraded version of AoA-based stall protection even if you have unreliable airspeed? Or are there sound engineering reasons that that would be a bad idea?

The stall warning reportedly activated ~75 times. It also stopped functioning at very low airspeeds because the system considered the airspeed data invalid. As I understand it, that seems to be why pulling back momentarily silenced the warning, but may have also strengthened an incorrect mental model in the cockpit. Was that known about at the time, and did it change in later software versions?

I realise this accident has been scrutinised for years by people far more qualified than me. I'm just trying to ascertain exactly where the Airbus envelope protection stops and where the crew is truly on their own.

This is hard to write.

I hold a CPL, I failed my instructor rating 3 times, I never finished it. In total I now have 7 fails.

Should I quit trying to look for work.

I'm 99k in debt, pretty sure if I leave aviation my family would disown me and my gf would leave me.

I don't have to get to an airline job but I would like to fly for a living. Is it over?

Doesn't sound like an exposure, but a customs issue.

Air France boarded a passenger from the Democratic Republic of Congo in error on a flight to the United States," U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to Free Press Wednesday evening. "Due to entry restrictions put in place to reduce the risk of the Ebola virus, the passenger should not have boarded the plane. CBP took decisive action and prohibited the flight carrying that traveler from landing at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, and instead, diverted to Montreal, Canada."