Whether one looks at what happened in US cockpits on the Colgan Air flight (49 aboard killed, 1 on the ground, 4 injuries on the ground), or at Air France Flight 447 (228 killed), or if one looks at foreign crashes such as in Mangalore (166 aboard, 8 survivors), it appears that pilots need better tools to indicate when they are in trouble; and better training on how to respond in emergency situations such as when components fail, or flight is becoming unstable for whatever reason. It does little good to be warned that something is wrong if the warning comes at a point when it is too late to do anything about it.

One wonders if the Thales pitot tubes are equipped to warn when there is a heating failure; or if there is a backup heating system for the tubes; if that backup system were equipped to give a warning. One wonders if there might not be an additional set of pitot tubes installed, one that might be stored internally, but that the pilot might be able to engage automatically if the tubes fail; or barring that, one wonders if there should not be some other mechanical (as opposed to digital or mathematic) “speedometer device” alternative on board for emergency situations… in case pitot tubes again happen to fail in the dark of night over an unlit ocean hurtling for the duration of a four minute stall to an inevitable watery grave.

I do not advocate reverting everything to fly-by-wire. The best way I can express this is with a simile: Forcing pilots to use fly by wire is like forcing a healthy person to always ride in an electric wheelchair because there is a possibility they might trip.

If you do this, the person stuck in the wheelchair becomes less able to walk. Their leg muscles will atrophy and their walking skills will deteriorate. They become a passive passenger rather than an active participant. Thus ultimately, relying on a mechanical device to perform what the human being should be doing actually cripples their abilities rather than enhances them. Fly by wire should only be a tool an otherwise competent pilot can use on occasion, not part of the status quo.

It seems ironic that the automatic pilot quit at the point that it was most needed. But face it–the automatic system was as confused and disoriented as the pilots were at the incoming faulty data.

We will never know, whether, if the AF447 data crash occurred during daylight hours, if the pilots would have known better how to deal with the situation. Or if the notification of approaching flight crisis was a death knoll rather than a warning, i.e. a warning that came too late for any corrective measures to be applied. But we can be fairly sure that if there were better training and better warning, the catastrophe would not have occurred.