How is it possible to fly a modern Airbus 330 airliner that has no mechanical problem. Going from cursing altitude and flying into the Atlantic Ocean in less than ten minutes?
Take the time to read the transcript of the pilot conversation in this article. If you fly for pleasure or as a passenger on a plane. This is information about how to recognise and recover your aircraft from a extremely dangerous situation. This is how things start to go bad and then just gets worse. If these pilots had used their training to problem solve their situation, things would have never gotten to the point that would prove to be so fatal.
The pilots lost their airspeed indicators due to icing conditions. From that point the autopilot disengaged. Forcing the pilots to take the controls of the plane. That was when their minds shutdown and did not recognise the situation they were in. The alarm was blaring "stall....stall" but they did not preform the maneuver to recover from the stall until they had gotten to about two thousand feet. Then about two seconds later all souls were lost.
Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, "Our pilots would never do that"? Read more: Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
