Sensationalism galore...

highlydebased

This in the independent today, cue the "I dont want to fly on Aer Lingus because of something I saw in the paper", remarks...

Long-haul Aer Lingus captains flying Airbus A330 jets across the Atlantic have been warned not to put too much faith in their auto-pilots.

This follows research in the wake of the crash of an Air France jet off the coast of Brazil last year in which three young Irish doctors lost their lives.

Jane Deasy (27), Aisling Butler (26) and Eithne Walls (28) were among 228 people killed when the Air France Airbus they were travelling on crashed in to the atlantic.

Data broadcast from the doomed Airbus jet suggested the air speed indicators or 'probes' were malfunctioning and that the auto-pilot had disconnected.

Airbus auto-pilots are designed to disconnect automatically if the probes -- which tell the flight computer how fast the plane is travelling -- give erroneous or contradictory readings.

The pilots will then resume manual control and "hand-fly" the aircraft until the problem is sorted out, or until they can land safely.

But now the European Air Safety Agency has discovered a potentially unsafe condition where flight computers suggest reconnecting the autopilot if two of the aircraft's three speed sensors give the same reading, even if it is false.

"We are aware of this and the associated amendment has been distributed to flight crew," an Aer Lingus spokeswoman said.

- Gerry Byrne and Kevin Keane

Irish Independent

cyrusdvirus

The indo is a rag.

Terrontress

It's plain to see that it is sensationalism when they give the names of those poor doctors prior to any other details about the claims they have made.

donkey balls

The two journo,s that wrote the peice what back ground do they have in Aviation?,If it was someone like David Learmount who has a back ground in aviation i would listen.

Run_to_da_hills

I thought that Aer Lingus upgraded all their A330 pitot tubes to a Honeywell instead of using Thales manufactured ones that were fitted on the Air France A330 that crashed.

drdeadlift

"A BMI Airbus A321-200, registration G-MEDJ performing flight BD-996 from Khartoum (Sudan) to Beirut (Lebanon) with 42 passengers and 7 crew, was enroute at FL360 overhead northern Sudan when the crew noticed a number of electrical problems, the most significant being the intermittent repeated failure of both the captain's and the first officer's electronic displays, the uncommanded application of left rudder trim and unexpected reactions of the aircraft to flight control inputs. Following an ECAM message "ELEC 1 GEN FAULT" message the crew shut the left hand generator down after which normal operation was restored. The flight continued to Beirut for a safe landing."

The problem seem to be generating the autopilot problems/failures in a simulated environment.That above quote is from pprune..


ps papers should do proper research before they spout off about something they know nout about.

highlydebased

Run_to_da_hills wrote: »

I thought that Aer Lingus upgraded all their A330 pitot tubes to a Honeywell instead of using Thales manufactured ones that were fitted on the Air France A330 that crashed.

I think they were not the only operator to do it too! But it seemingly remains that if one set fails others will seemingly give erroneous readings also and be unreliable to the operation of the autopilot. I dont know are there any recorded cases of it happening save for the unfortunate Air France accident