Just doing my usual morning browsing and I came across this. I figured you guys be interested in reading.





http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

 

9 pages....good lawd...

I'll let the cat out of the bag....ice formed on the Pitot? tubes giving false info to the computers in the ifr flight conditions

While there is indeed lots of blame on the pilots, I'll predict that the author does not fly jets for a living.  He seems to casually assume that once the pilots were given corrupted flight data that it was easy to carry on thinking that all of the other data was legitimate. Should it have been figured out over the course of a few minutes? Yes, it would seem. But, we are taught in the sims that problems don't usually heal themselves especially right away.  An initial moment of confusion of such a rare failure of both airspeed indicators would have the average pilot thinking of a bigger picture (such as air data computer failure, thus altitude and vertical speed errors) I would hope.

The "full aft stick" BS not withstanding...!