I play a pretty decent flight sim now and again called "X-Plane 10." The goal of the program is to realistically model worldwide flight, from aerodynamics to making virtually every button in a cockpit work how it's supposed to. Here's a pic of my favorite cockpit and in-game model, the 777 which is licensed by Boeing and comes with pretty much just a copy of the actual 777's basic operations manual:
Anyway, while I play this and am in-between cities (I "flew" from Italy to Israel the other day and it took like 3 hours) I'll usually pull up youtube and watch ripped copies of air-crash investigation shows. Most of these are pretty horrific stories as they are mostly about mass casualty air crashes - so they are all pretty sad and upsetting. However, one set me off in a way none others have, the one about Air France 447. The needless crash was so frightening and so confusing while listening to the pilots is one of those kinds of things you'll never forget. If you know anything about aircraft, you'll also know that the pilots had over 2 minutes to do one simple maneuver and save their lives and the lives of all the passengers and the mistake that put them into the problem should never have occurred in the first place. I have an unfortunate tendency of having bad events happen after I talk about something online. I vented some of my frustration about the 447 crash, wondering how these pilots could have made such a horrific error that even someone who's never actually flown a plane (but knows a little about them) could diagnose and recover from. Anyway, the Malaysia plane disappeared two weeks after I posted some propaganda demanding that pilots of passenger airliners be required to pass physics so it can be verified that they are capable of diagnosing a situation on the fly by properly thinking about the status of the plane (http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img20/8636/iy52.png). Normally something like that wouldn't get under my skin if it were the first time it happened (terrible tragedy occurring right after I post something quite similar to the tragedy - for example - the one time I mentioned Japanese internment on facebook in my life, there was a 9.1 quake in Japan that killed several tens of thousands of people exactly 11 minutes after I posted it). Anyway, back to it... The missing Malaysian plane is just what made me want to write this blog.
The pilots of AF447 should have been able to save their plane, but they were unable to conceptualize what was actually happening to the plane resulting in the death of themselves and several hundred people. I'm not the only person in the world who believes pilots ought to be taking physics prior to flying passengers - I found this cartoon online:
Realistically, most planes are designed so a smart moron can fly them, but it still never hurts to be able to quickly evaluate something based on a firm knowledge of the fundamental principles of nature. I'm of the opinion that the problems with AF447 would not have occurred if the pilots had known physics, but I'm not really sure on that. The truth is any pilot should have been able to save that plane physics or not - but the pilots were unable to quickly diagnose a situation when they briefly lost their airspeed indicator - and losing airspeed briefly led to a deadly chain of stupid mistakes on behalf of the pilots which caused them to crash their plane. For the record, I'm not a pilot, but I did get A's in Calc-based physics, and I've spent enough time playing flight simulators to be confident enough to express that opinion concerning commercial aviation.
I don't know why I wrote this - the Malaysian plane kind of brought back my "freak out" from this particular episode of "Mayday..." The kind of error these pilots exhibited was akin to watching a video of a surgeon opening up a patient and calmly asking the nurse: "what's that pulsating thing in his chest there?" The difference is, an incompetent surgeon can only kill one person at a time. It was a terrifying realization of the dangers of putting potentially incompetent people in important positions. Here's the episode - it's always good to keep abreast of who and what our corporations do, especially in things like aviation where they take responsibility for peoples' lives.