I agree airbus shares the blame but it's not the only one. The pilots should have realised the situation they were in, their training should have been better, there were a lot of factors.
Admiral cloudberg has a good deep dive on it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.
And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.
I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.
If the airline doesn't comply afterward, it would be on them.
But they didn't issue a recall, so they wouldn't have to pay for the fix, an over 200 people paid the price instead.
At least, that's how I read the blame distribution.
How do you get this "sense" of writing code and building systems by yourself if all you do is instruct some agent to do it? Are we all going to be like Bonin in the future where we just don't understand anything outside of the agent box?
This is both terrifying and sad.
The other piece of the picture is that pilots acknowledge that their skills are perishable, and they have to commit to ongoing training. This would be analogous to writing code by hand and getting a licensed engineer to sign off on your currency periodically even if you use LLMs for work.
Setting a Cessna down on the runway is fairly strait forward. A jetliner, on the other hand, is quite complex to land.
An A320 might be flying 3 times faster but is generally flying between relatively flat, straight runaways several miles long with approaches typically flown on a stable instrument approach from several nautical miles away. It's control laws mean flying straight or maintaining a particular bank is as simple as letting go of the control stick. If anything the stick and rudder skills in normal circumstances are much less involved. Systems management, obviously the autopilot, but also environmental, hydraulic, navigation an the operational concerns are obviously vastly more complex.
Why? Not as a regular thing I hope, that's about 90m short of "tight".
If you're intent on proselytizing PNG at least get a PAC STOL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAC_P-750_XSTOL )
I put it this way:
Commercial aviation pilots don’t really fly the plane as such. It’s more like a 1:1 real-time flight sim. They’re sort of up there having a LARP.
They’re flying in a similar sense that a DJ creates music.
So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.
no wonder airbus was found guilty
Boeing, in similar situations "in the past" would just sound a "computer is giving the fuck up, fly this pig dog" bell and leave it to the pilots to figure it out.
AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.
Edit -- to wit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253931
Once there were multiple alarms that made no sense at all (petty early in the event), the pilots should have ignored them as per the checklist.
But the most damning thing is the one pilot pulling the stick back and holding it back for almost the entire event. There aren’t any flying conditions where that’s an appropriate input. Not to mention being told to give up control and ignoring that request.
I agree Airbus has some blame in terms of the computer system not adequately communicating when it drops out of normal mode.
Vs
Fraud for two crashes caused by knowingly having unsafe planes (and two whistleblowers conveniently die)
2) Flight recorders weren't recovered until 2011
3) Manslaughter charges initially recommended in 2011
4) Accident report released in 2012
5) A long time with a lot of lawyers arguing about whether or not the charges should be heard in court
6) Charges dropped in 2019
7) However, public prosecutor announced proceeding with prosecution in 2021
8) Trial began in 2022
9) Both Airbus and AF acquitted in 2023
10) Prosecutor lodges an appeal in 2023
11) Trial begins in appeals court in 2025
12) Appeals court finds both companies guilty in 2026
Basically - these are two huge companies in France, they have a _lot_ of well paid lawyers, and a lot of political heft, but then there was a large amount of public outrage - and so the debate about whether or not to actually prosecute the case continued 2012 through to 2021 - the prosecutor reopening the charges in 2021 was due to intense public pressure.
Cruically once it actually went to trial, it only took 4 years to reach a conclusion including with appeals, which is quicker than I'd expect - and something I noticed is that the appeals court was able to find them guilty, I'm not sure how it goes in other common law country judiciaries, but in my country, if this had gone to an appeals court, they don't have the power to find you guilty, but they could overturn the previous ruling, and direct the lower court to begin the trial again - so it would have been even slower.
I guess that's an aspect of civil law judicial systems that might be considered an advantage.
That seems a bit far fetched.
How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots? That's the blame component for AF.
But IIRC, it happened by night, over the ocean. If the instruments fail you, this is really hard to “perceive” your speed and orientation.