Flight AF447 (Air France A330 mid Atlantic crash) - official BEA animation
Why Aviation Stack Exchange recommends it
Aviation Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as a visual reference for what happened on AF447 and for explaining stalls, angle of attack and pilot inputs.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2015 to 2019.
What it is
A seven-minute animation released by the BEA, the French accident investigation bureau, reconstructing the final minutes of Air France Flight 447 from flight recorder data. It shows control inputs, airspeed, angle of attack and cockpit warnings with English subtitles, as republished by the Eurospotter Aircraft channel.
What people said
Recommends DeltaLima · 2015-07 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “Why Air France 447 could not reduce angle of attack?”
I just finished reading this article and couldn't understand why in 3 minutes and 30 seconds even though there was no reliable speed data, pilot could not level the plane? If you look at this video [this video] by the French accident investigation bureau (BEA) you can see what happened. The problem started when the speed indicators failed temporarily because of icing of the pitot tubes. The aircraft was flying through the intertropical convergence zone (ITCS) where severe thunderstorm activity can build up to high altitudes. Instead of maintaining attitude and thrust setting, which is a normal procedure when speed indication is lost, the pilot flying (PF) brought the nose up. The aircraft started
Cites Simon Ludlow · 2015-03 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “What is a 'deep stall' and how can pilots recover from it?”
It's assumed that deep stall mainly affects T tails, but high angles of attack may lead to a more conventional low tail design having the tail stalled. If you look for the accident investigation animation of AF447 (youtube) [this video] , you will see that there was a lot of ineffective stick movement. Finally, when the stick went forward, the nose lowered to about 10 degrees down, but the flight path angle was close to -45 degrees, so the angle of attack was roughly 35 degrees. Both surfaces were deeply stalled and this manoeuvre was survivable with conventional stall recovery. There are recovery techniques which may work. I used to air test a large T tail design and the briefed manoeuvre was to
Cites Gary Bak · 2019-03 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “What is being depicted w.r.t. AoA in this video?”
[LINK] I was looking at this video [this video] of the AF447 crash simulation and at about 4:45 the angle of attack diagram shows a few things I don't understand (frame above). I get the orientation of the airplane, pointing a few degrees above the horizon, but what does the green line represent in layman's terms? Is that the direction the plane needs to go for the wings to generate lift? Also, I see the red line has to do with the warning, but how does that play into it as well?