NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

The Airbus 330 - an accident waiting to happen: With its human-proof computer systems, it is the most technically advanced aircraft in the world. So why has the Airbus 330's gleaming new fleet been so dogged by technical problems... and disturbing evidence of flawed cabling been so comprehensively ignored? 9David Rose, 19th July 2009 , Daily Mail)

Eight months after QF72’s emergency, in the early hours of June 1, 2009, another A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down with the loss of all 216 passengers and 12 crew – France’s worst air disaster.

The full story may never be known. Like most of the wreckage, AF447’s black boxes – its data and voice recorders – are thought to be resting 15,000ft below the surface in an underwater mountain range. However, before it crashed the plane transmitted a series of automatic messages, from which it’s possible to determine several events leading up to the accident. These are detailed in the newly published official report. Having analysed this as well as reports on the Qantas flight and on other similar incidents, Live has found worrying parallels. Interviews with pilots, lawyers and crash investigators suggest there may be an underlying problem with A330s. It’s impossible to conclude what this is, but there are two prime suspects – either flaws in the software, or with the wiring found inside huge numbers of modern aircraft.

‘It looks to me like there’s only one reason why AF447 crashed and QF72 survived,’ says Charles-Henri Tardivat, a former crash investigator who’s now part of a team from the London law firm Stewarts Law, which represents the victims’ families. ‘On QF72, the same things started happening that preceded the Air France crash. They were able to recover control because they were flying in daylight and perfect weather. They could see what was happening, even without their instruments. But AF447 was caught in a violent storm at night. The A330 is a very well-built aircraft, but there obviously is a problem somewhere. With so many of them out there, we need to find it.’

In an A330 cockpit, everything is computerised, and when the system is working properly – under what Airbus terms ‘normal law’ – it should be impossible for the crew to make a mistake. For example, when a plane is cruising at high altitude, the window between a dangerous overspeed that might place intolerable stresses on the airframe and a stall is quite narrow – less than 70mph. In older planes, pilots discover the aircraft is at risk of stalling through cockpit alarms and when their control sticks start to shake, and they have to react very quickly. On a modern Airbus, if the airspeed falls to a dangerous level, the system will increase the engines’ thrust without human intervention.

‘Airbus think they’ve designed a computer that’s smarter than a pilot,’ one airman says. ‘If a pilot moves the controls so as to turn the aeroplane upside down, the computer will refuse.’

It’s possible for the pilots to override the computer, effectively switching to manual control – what Airbus calls ‘direct law’. But even then, they remain dependent on electronics. ‘In older aeroplanes the throttles in the cockpit are hooked to the fuel controllers on the engines by a steel throttle cable,’ another pilot says. ‘On an Airbus, nothing in the cockpit is real. Everything is electronic. The throttles, rudder and brake pedals and the side-stick are hooked to rheostats that talk to a computer, which talks to an electric hydraulic servo valve, which in turn – hopefully – moves something.’

In the Nineties, when fly-by-wire was in its infancy, several Airbuses crashed because of conditions that hadn’t been programmed into the software. A more recent incident involved a brand new A340 being tested on the ground in Toulouse in November 2007. With the engines running at high power – and, contrary to specified procedure, no wheel chocks in place – a technician was taken by surprise when the plane started to move. Instead of reducing the thrust, he released the parking brake in order to use normal braking – but failed to keep the pedals fully pressed.

Seeing a concrete blast wall straight ahead, he tried to steer away from it – but since the A340 automatically inhibits centre-wheel braking when the nose wheels are steered, he didn’t succeed. By the time the plane hit the wall, it had reached 36mph. Four people were seriously injured. The aircraft was a write-off.

Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau, which is still investigating QF72, isn’t yet sure why the aircraft plunged so violently. But the plane’s survival means the incident can be reconstructed from the cockpit – in this case, the black boxes were recovered.

The event began at 12.40, just after the first co-pilot went for his break. The first sign was the sudden disconnection of the autopilot, accompanied by a ‘master caution’ alarm which sounded almost continuously for the rest of the flight. Three seconds later, the ECAM – the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitor, the display panel that alerts the crew to faults – warned that a critically important system had failed. This was one of the plane’s three ADIRUs, Air Data Inertial Reference Units, which gather data from the plane’s sensors about its speed, direction, position, altitude and angle of attack. Losing the ADIRUs is the digital equivalent of flying blind.

The captain tried to re-engage both the primary and back-up autopilots, but to no avail. Messages suggested the computers were going haywire. Two minutes after the crisis began, the first downward lurch occurred, caused by an ‘uncommanded’ movement of the elevators on the tailplane. ‘The captain reported that he applied back pressure on his side-stick to arrest the pitch-down movement,’ says the Bureau report. ‘Initially this action seemed to have no effect, but then the aircraft responded.’

However, the ECAM was still going crazy, with ‘multiple’ fault warnings – including one saying that one of the three primary computers had failed. While the crew tried to reboot it, the plane lurched downwards again, and as before, it at first failed to respond to the controls. At 12.49, they issued a radio alert and made for Learmonth air base.

The ECAM was still displaying contradictory, rapidly scrolling messages about the plane’s speed and altitude, and the computers were still not functioning. Unable to rely on Airbus’s much-vaunted technology, the pilots had to position themselves for a ‘straight-in visual approach to [the] runway’ from a distance of 15 nautical miles.

Behind that bald language lies a terrifying fact: had they not been able to see the runway from that considerable distance, they might not have been able to land. No less frightening is the fact that the Bureau is still ‘evaluating’ all the data to ascertain what went wrong. Meanwhile, the plane has been cleaned, refurbished and is back in service.

QF72 isn’t the only A330 to have encountered unexplained electronic problems. On flights from Paris to Martinique in August and September last year, two planes flown by Air Caraibes Atlantique also experienced the sudden disconnection of their autopilots. Forced to proceed on ‘alternate law’ – a hybrid of manual and automatic flying in which many of the normal computerised protections are lost – the pilots also had to deal with the loss of ADIRUs, and bogus ECAM messages.