Week 32: Upset recovery and the Wairere Falls

As even someone with the weakest of interest knows, in 2009 an Air France Airbus failed to arrive in Paris following it's cross-Atlantic flight from Brazil. During normal operation through the inter-tropical convergence zone (an Equatorial region famed for very wild weather), the aircraft unfortunately experienced severe icing which caused a system failure, and although the failure itself wasn't catastrophic, the confusion it caused and the subsequent actions of the crew unfortunately led to the aircraft hitting the ocean, and 228 lives were lost.

I won't go into the reasons for the system failure itself, but one of the primary causes of the aircraft dropping out of the sky was the crew failing to recognise that the aircraft was in the wrong position (a nose high attitude), possibly due to confusion as to the limitations of the aircraft's safety systems, and perhaps a lack of thought for the very basics of manual flight they had learnt many years before. Put simply, the aircraft was established in a nose high attitude flying very slowly, and as a result an insufficient amount of air was flowing over the top surface of the wing; the wing had stalled. This meant the force known as 'lift' was too little to sustain flight, causing the aircraft to fall at approximately 10,000 feet per minute. 

The stall is one of the earliest hazards new pilots are introduced to, because it is a continuous threat to safety, and the earlier a pilot can recover from the stall without conscious thought the better. On Air France 447, the theory goes (as the pilots also perished so investigators will never know their thought process) that the pilots believed the aircraft was too technologically advanced to suffer from the stall, and therefore neglected to initiate the standard stall recovery. This conclusion is why there has been a recent change in flight training, with a lot of emphasis placed on upset recovery and recovery from unusual attitudes. On the MPL perform stalling in the aircraft and simulator (which I did this week), but also go through upset recovery in the Airbus.

Wairere Falls from the Lower 

viewpoint, all 150m of it

Asides from flight training, yesterday a few of us went to see the Wairere Falls which are about an hour away in the Kaimai range. The falls themselves are 150m high and the view from the bottom is just as impressive as from the top (as the picture to the right demonstrates). We were able to get close to the point where the water disappears over the edge, where the effort of climbing in the humid forest air was more than rewarded. Hopefully when Alice comes over the weather is dry enough to venture to the top again......on which note, happily the flights are booked, and a Qantas A380 should be winging its way across the globe! Excited to say the least!