He kept his job. We believe there are average pilots who have bad days.” He called this a principle that underlies Boeing’s cockpit designs.

It seems absurd, but the pilots were overwhelmed. Bonin rang the forward flight-attendant station and said, “Yes, Maryline, it’s Pierre up front.

The timing was unfortunate for line pilots, who had begun to fight a futile rear-guard action, ongoing today, against an inexorable rollback in salaries and status.

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Nadine Sarter said that the process is known as de-skilling.

Neither pilot made mention of it, but later comments hint that Bonin was growing nervous. Bonin said, “Go ahead—you have the controls.

”, Dubois said, “I like to feel where we’re going.”. It is not known whether he knelt or stood behind Bonin and Robert, or sat in the jump seat. Robert said, “Fuck, is he coming or not?”. A small glitch took Flight 447 down, a brief loss of airspeed indications—the merest blip of an information problem during steady straight-and-level flight. He is so blunt that for a while he required police protection. The manufacturers scrapped the crowded electro-mechanical panels of the past and, using proof-of-concept work done by NASA, equipped their new airplanes with “glass” cockpits built around flat-panel displays.

For now the night was smooth and clear.

Entertainment, TV, politics, celebrity, fashion, and beauty news and commentary. But as subsequent exchanges would demonstrate, Bonin was almost too deferential, and perhaps too aware of rank. Vanity Fair Italy was the first non-English-language edition and the first weekly version of the legendary magazine founded by Condé Montrose Nast in 1913. Robert kept urgently ringing the call button anyway.

In the aftermath of the accident, the pitot tubes were replaced on several Airbus models; Air France commissioned an independent safety review that highlighted the arrogance of some of the company’s pilots and suggested reforms; a number of experts called for angle-of-attack indicators in airliners, while others urged a new emphasis on high-altitude-stall training, upset recoveries, unusual attitudes, flying in Alternate Law, and basic aeronautical common sense. We do not know. Dubois answered an intercom call from a flight attendant, who told him she was taking the night duty in case he needed anything. Likewise, the conditions in the passenger cabin are not known. Bonin tried to match his nonchalance.

What the hell is happening?” STALL.

Which is why the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed 228 people, remains so perplexing and significant. Bonin had managed to come out of the sustained right bank. For Flight 447, it was too late: the probes were quickly clogged.

Listen, in about two minutes we ought to be in an area where it will start moving around a bit more than now.” He advised the cabin crew to take their seats and rang off with “I’ll call you when we’re out of it.” As it happened, he never did. Bonin said, “What is it?

It opened the way to airline travel as we know it today. .

Bonin and Robert were flying a fourth-generation glass-cockpit airplane, and unlike the pilots who think they know more than they do, these two seemed to fear its complexities. He called it Cockpit Resource Management, or C.R.M., an abbreviation since widened to stand for Crew Resource Management. As might be expected, the new ideas met with resistance from senior pilots, many of whom dismissed the NASA findings as psychobabble and derided the early seminars as charm schools.

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It’s a standard call in normal operations.

Fadden did say that once capabilities are added to an aircraft system, particularly to the flight-management computer, because of certification requirements they become impossibly expensive to remove.

A third, standby display showed much the same, though in smaller form. Robert did not respond. These are generally known as “fourth generation” airplanes; they now constitute nearly half the global fleet.

Since their introduction, the accident rate has plummeted to such a degree that some investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board have recently retired early for lack of activity in the field. A synthetic voice said, SINK RATE. When I mentioned the inherent complexity to Delmar Fadden, a former chief of cockpit technology at Boeing, he emphatically denied that it posed a problem, as did the engineers I spoke to at Airbus.

More immediately, the lack of linkage did not allow Robert to feel Bonin’s flailing.

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But what’s happening?”, In sequence the alarms were sounding PULL UP, C-chord, STALL, C-chord, PULL UP, PRIORITY RIGHT. He said, “We don’t have a single valid display!”. At the same time either Robert or Bonin said, “Fuck, we’re dead.”. Autopilots have been around since nearly the start of aviation, and component systems have been automated since the 1960s, but in glass-cockpit designs, the automation is centralized and allows the systems to communicate with one another, to act as parts of an integrated whole, and even to decide which information should be presented to the pilots, and when. Wiener pointed out that the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high. Bonin may have understood the same, because he said, “O.K., I’m going back down!” He lowered the nose, but by only half a degree.

Though the accident rate had been reduced, the accidents that continued to occur were being caused almost entirely by pilots—the very people, many of them still at the controls, who had earned a nearly heroic reputation for having stood in the way of the mechanical or weather-related failures of the past.

Dubois said, “Watch out—you’re pitching up there.”. He said, “But we’ve got the engines! You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener). Flight 447 took off on schedule at 7:29 P.M. with 228 people aboard.

In 1987, Airbus took the next step by introducing the first fly-by-wire airliner, the smallish A320, in which computers interpret the pilots’ stick inputs before moving the control surfaces on the wings and tail. Such interventions are extremely rare. “We try to ask for 3–6 [36,000 feet] nonstandard? Even today—with the flight recorders recovered from the sea floor, French technical reports in hand, and exhaustive inquests under way in French courts—it remains almost unimaginable that the airplane crashed.

In the impact 228 people died. He said, “So, here, take that, take that.”, Robert repeated the order more urgently.