MC writes in. Check this out:

Nice article on this crash – I followed it on Tim Vasquez’s weather blog and he did a nice job of laying out the meteorology. I believe this crash happened before I found your blog via my wife and The Corner.

One quibble, though, on this: “Seeing the plane failing to increase speed, the pilots assume there is a massive headwind, and get concerned that the plane is about to stall. Standard practice is to counter the headwinds by adjusting the flaps.”

I think if you removed all references to “headwinds” the line would work. A headwind will not change airspeed, just ground speed. If they failed to increase airspeed after a throttle-up, they probably assumed the Airbus computer is not letting them increasing thrust to gain airspeed. So they drop flaps to get some lift to prevent what they think is going to be a low-speed stall. At cruise altitude and speed, deploying flaps would cause all sorts of havoc.

It is interesting that the senior pilot aboard was at minimum not belted in one of the two front seats, so whatever happened was not enough to rouse him or perhaps things were so thoroughly forked over when he went up front that all he did was sit in the the jump seat and advise (if things were really bad, trying to swap him back into the seat would be a disaster too).

There is incredulity in the blogosphere from some pilots that anyone would think an experienced pilot would avoid deviating for thunderstorms in order to prevent an extra fuel stop. Yet the most senior KLM pilot drove his 747 into another one at Tenerife because he had get-home-itis. Not every “First World” airline does CRM and ORM well, and some maybe not at all.

The Czar will not quibble here and bows. The picture we tried to paint was that pilots, seeing their air speed plunge, would naturally assume something was either creating drag or reducing thrust. To the Czar, the most obvious candidate would be a headwind. That is obviously not always the case. And yes, we concede a tremendous difference between air speed and ground speed. The reader is thus advised to follow MC on this one, who knows more about aviation than the Czar, and possibly (if our hunch is right) more than the Mandarin.

Another grisly point: the captain’s wife was on board AF447, and because the captain was not found strapped into any jump seat, one suspects he came back to sit with his wife in coach. Very likely, she was a bit upset about the extreme turbulence and he offered to come back and calm her and the passengers down that all was well up front.

Last, regarding your excellent observation about Tenerife in 1977, the Czar believes that pilots are human (perhaps way more paranoid than most; your own comment about incredulity reveals that commerical pilots thrive on paranoid conspiracy theories). Like most humans, they conclude that they know the plane, and that she can take it, and that we have plenty of fuel. Just like the safety-minded driver whose car makes a sudden, bizarre sound from the engine…and rather than pull over, speeds up a bit to get the car home. If we just get home, the sound will work itself out. It usually does. Except when it doesn’t.

So a pilot electing to battle severe weather without sufficient fuel to deviate? Totally normal. And the math backs it up: thousands of similar flights did so successfully, and everything has been double-checked prior to takeoff, and all the calculations agree. There is every reason to assume the plane will arrive safely.

Except when it doesn’t.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.