in the aviation community, weighing the benefits and risks posed by automation is an ongoing debate. manual handling skills are critical. and the appropriate use of automation balanced in keeping manual flying skills is one of the current and future industry challenges that we have. and we re struggling with it. painful memories of the mont saint-odile crash are etched in stone. but nicolas scuorias will always give thanks for being one of the survivors that night. you quickly realize that you are not invincible and you are human. so, you know, life goes on.
which is plane struggled to make. the ergonomic design was poor. it should have either been a button that identified what mode you were in, or it should have been two separate panels. other causes cited in the investigation below average crew interaction and poor communication and the absence of a ground proximity warning system which deprived the crew of one final warning opportunity. given that this was a short haul fast operation, they were going to get a lot of nuisance warnings, and they didn t want that presented to the flight crews all the time. airinter defended its lack of a ground proximity warning system saying it would not have prevented a crash. by the end of the year, europe s joint aviation authorities require all transport aircraft to be equipped with a ground proximity warning system. airbus modified the a-320 s flight control unit so that a
vertical speed setting would be displayed as a four-digit number, preventing confusion with the unit s flight path angle mode. airinter also increased pilot training for the a320. after this, you can t compose a crew with two persons with less than 300 hours of flight on airbus a-320. translator: i am heartbroken. the sadness endures for hubert who lost his son hue, a flight attendant in the crash. he still can t accept the moment that took down flight 5148, the turn of a knob that began their lethal loss of altitude. translator: they had 17 seconds to realize that they were in a bad descent. they weren t aware. why? because they put their trust in the automation.
with zero visibility in the fog, pilots are having trouble keeping track of the airbus horizontal position. the plane ends up almost a mile left of where they should be on approach to runway 5. at 7:19, landing gear is down and locked, but the airbus is descending way too fast at 3300 feet a minute. passengers are completely unaware of the serious problems in the cockpit. i did not notice something strange. it was a quiet, normal flight. just as passengers are asked to make sure their seat belts are fastened, a low altitude sensor rings out in the cockpit. 200. a second later, a monstrous crash into a mountaintop. coming up a passenger is terrified he ll die in the wreckage.
we kept calling 901. others were also calling flight 901. no one had heard anything. there s still hope for finding survivors at 7:00 p.m. when air new zealand calls marina collins and asks if she s alone. and he said, i don t want to alarm you, but jim s flight is late. we haven t heard from him for a while. i suggest you get somebody to be with you. the weather is so bad it s 12 hours before rescuers finally spot the crash site. from the air, it looks like a smudge in the snow. when we came around the side of the mountain and saw the total devastation, i was shocked. it just did not look like a plane. due to the speed and force of the crash, coroners determined