http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flightblogger/2007/11/etihad-a340600-accident-photos.html

Be sure to read the comment from "Karl". Might be worth a Snopes check.

It happened. A good friend of mine who works for the FAA sent me those pictures years ago when it happened, and from what he told me, it happened just like the scenario that Karl posted, ie. they were doing an engine run for an accpetance flight of the brand new airplane, and someone pulled the ground sensor CB, and voilla...no brakes!

I have never liked Airbus products, their design philosophy is that their airplane is 'smarter' than the pilots and it won't let you do things if it doesn't agree to what you are trying to do.

If you really want to see some scary sh!t, go watch some You Tube videos titled "Scary Crosswind Landings", you will notice that most of those 'scary landings' are in Airbus products...

What does that tell you?

We have a saying in professional aviation:

If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.

I will leave you with this other Airbus incident. It was the unveiling of the (then) new Airbus A320, at the (huge) Paris Air Show, it is being flown by the Number One Airbus A320 Demo pilot. Not an average schmuck, but one of the guys who HELPED DESIGN IT! If he can't fly it, what chance does an average schmuck have?

He was doing a 'low pass' demo for the crowd of prospective buyers, with about 20 prospective buyers on board the airplane as well. At the end of the low pass, when he tried to pull up to go around the pattern and come back to land, the 'smart' airplane said, "Nope, we are going to land now..." And it did...in the trees, off the far end of the runway. Unbelieveably, only 3 were killed.

Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEH7OpnA-I4

You Tube is loaded with other Airbus crash videos. They are much cheaper than a similar Boeing, but you get what you pay for.

Part of the problem is, they sell to the third world, and their pilot don't get as much -hands on- training as we do over here in the USA. They don't train their copilots very much at all, and they are taught to just push the buttons, and let the (Smart) Airplane do everything, complete to the auto-landings. They are not allowed to land the airplane at a lot of Asian carriers. Every landing is an auto land.

Thats all good, until the Autopilot drops out...then what? You've got a couple pilots up front who have not made a manual landing in years.

Good luck!

Didn't Boeing have some similar episodes with the automatic landing system and a faulty sensor fooling the aircraft to think "we are now on the ground, time to cut all power" while doing the final approach..

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951

Just for equality of course

I distrust electronics/software deeeply and want a human pilot to fly the plane. Same when looking for cars. I want as much mechanical and as little electronic/software as possible. I have probably been working too long with software, computers and control systems..

Not the same type incident Rolf. In the Airbus incident I posted, the Pilot was trying to go around, the airplane wouldn't let him. With the Turkish airline incident, the (idiot) pilots were not paying attention to their airspeed and allowed the airplane to get too slow.

The Airbus would not allow the Pilot to over-ride the thrust levers and flight controls, and basically flew itself into the ground.

In the Boeing 737 incident, if the pilots had simply pushed the thrust levers up, they never would have gotten too slow in the first place. There was a faulty radio altimiter indication which fooled the airplane into thinking it was near to the ground, but the PILOTS should have seen this immediately and corrected it.

This is exaclty what I was talking about earlier, about the piss poor training of pilots in the third world. They do auto lands all the time, and when something goes wrong, they are not skilled enough to see it, and make a simple correction, that would have easily saved the airplane.

We have a saying that is drilled into us starting with our primary flying lessons, ie. on lesson number 1.

Airspeed is Life!

Altitude is Life Insurance.

You never want to run out of both, at the same time. How the Turkish pilots couldn't see they were getting too slow is beyond me, but I was trained in the USA, and we hand fly all our approaches, all the time. We only do auto landings when the weather (Sever fog, nearly zero visability) requires it, and even then, we monitor the autopilot very closely, to be sure it's doing things correctly. And if it so much as burps, we disconnect it and hand fly it, or go around and go to a holding pattern somewhere, at a safe altitude, and sort it out.

Cat IIIc landings are scary as sh!t. I'm with Rolf, not a fan of gizmos on anything.

Nor am I, but Boeing does a very good job of using technology to -help- the pilots, vs. Airbus, who tries very hard to use technology to -replace- the pilots.

In a Boeing, with one button push, you can turn it all off and you are once again in control.

With Airbus, you first have to discuss it, with 3 computers, they have a board meeting, and then they get back to you...you may -or may not- like the 'solution' they come up with!

But the bottom line is, it comes down to training. All the US Major Airlines spend a lot more time, and money, training their pilots than any of the 'third world' carriers.

so how did the thing not just go straight through the barrier and explode? No brakes, full thrust... and it more or less bounces over the barrier? Clearly someone figured out something or they would have been doing over 200kn into the barrier, right? and that is no 200kn crash in the pics.

And BTW, doesn't this demonstrate that the plane is indeed smarter than some pilots? If you make a product flown by inferior pilots, wouldn't you want more automation?
No offense, but you seem like a guy who would have complained 60 years ago about seat belts!!!!

BTW.. check my most recent venture into flight:
http://royaloak.patch.com/articles/beaum...#video-11023068
Get a load of me being all political and stuff starting at about 30s

My point is that computers make better errors. The limitations of the software architects and programmers are inherent in the system they build. One small thing that is unanticipated happens and the whole thing can spin out of control. A human are able to do analysis and invention to overcome an issue on a far better scale.
I have made enough mistakes in software myself to know this

I want a human with real intelligence to supervise and monitor the situation and to take over with override on all automatic systems. I dont want these human pilots to have to be software and instrument experts to be able to interpret the situation. I dont want the pilots to become complacent and rely too heavily on the computers either. Air France flight 447 comes to mind as en example of human - computer interaction problems.

Rolf, I agree 100%.

Ptp, the barrier was only 100 feet away, so it didn't have time or distance to accelerate to 200 kts....

I'm in Shanghai using my smart phone, I'll expand on this when I get home, Friday.

The one common ellement in all airplane crashes; human error.

You cannot get away from it. Humans design the airplanes, humans build the airplanes, humans design the software, and humans install the systems, and then humans try to operate it.

Boeing is not perfect, look at the 3 years of delays on their new 787's, and they still don't have all the bugs worked out.

So...how do you overcome human error?

You train for it. ie. you have the attitude that everything you know could be wrong, so don't trust anything, or anyone, ever. The most dangerous guys I fly with are the few who think they know everything, about everything.

Nobody knows everything.

You know how you tell a new guy on the 777 from an experienced guy?

The new guys say, "What's it doing now?"

but the experienced guys say,

"Oh, it's doing that again."

Flying is still safer than driving to the airport, the worst part of my day is driving home through Orlando traffic at rush hour.