Airbus A320 CRASHES during AIRSHOW! | Air France flight 296

this video is brought to you together with nordvpn use the link below and get 68 off the two-year deal plus one month for free it's sunday the 26th of june 1988 and just about quarter to one local time at a small airport outside of basel called mulhaus habstein a fairly big crowd has gathered in order to see the the local air show they're all eagerly awaiting the star of the show air france has promised to do a flyby of the airshow on his first ever passenger flight on the airbus a320 suddenly the crowd can see the aircraft arriving it's coming in with full landing configuration the flaps hanging out the gear hanging out all of its landing light on and it's making a slight banked turn as it descends in towards the grass airstrip it levels off at only 30 feet that's about 9 meters over the runway and it keeps an impressive nose up angle it was almost hard to hear the aircraft arriving because the engines were spooled all the way back to flight idle as the aircraft passes the local air traffic control tower the crowd can hear how the engines start to spool up towards go around thrust and they're waiting for it to start to climb away in a nice turn but something is wrong instead of climbing the aircraft just maintains that high north attitude as it flows straight forward right into the forest on the other side of the runway the aircraft disappears out of view and only a few seconds later a big black cloud can see rising up from the forest what has just happened has the new slightly controversial fly-by-wire system malfunctioned or is there something else that has happened here stay tuned efron flight 296 was the second flight of the day for the involved flight crew it was part of a publicity program where air france have invited passengers either passengers who'd won a lottery or selected journalists to be part of the first ever passenger flights with the airbus a320 they started up in the morning by flying from paris charles de gaulle to basel mulhouse and in basel there was to be a press conference followed by two sightseeing flights down over montblanc and then in the evening they were to fly back from basel to charles on the second flight flight 2906 there was 130 passengers on board four cabin crew members and two flight crew members now there are several things that you need to understand in order to understand why this accident happened and what we're going to start with is talking a little bit about the airbus a320 so the airbus a320 in 1988 had just been certified and like i mentioned before this was going to be the first ever passenger flight with its launch customer air france the airbus a320 was special in the way that they had just incorporated something called fly-by-wire system in conventional aircraft before the airbus a320 the pilots control the aircraft by a direct connection between the flight controls and the flight control surfaces the rudders this meant that if a pilot for example wanted to pull up suddenly the aircraft didn't have a say in that it just did what the pilots told it to do but with the fly-by-wire system installed in the airbus a320 all of a sudden those kind of inputs that came from the pilot became electrical inputs and they went into a couple of computers now those computers took the input from other systems as well for example the aircraft speed angle of attack g-loading temperature outside things like this and then it adapts the way that the flight control surfaces move depending on the phase of light now this comes with a lot of different positive safety features right this means for example that a pilot cannot overload the wings of the aircraft if i would as a pilot suddenly decide to pull really hard and that would produce a lot of g-forces then the computers of the airbus a320 would feel that this is not appropriate and no matter how much i pulled the aircraft is only going to give me as much as it can do safely all right same thing comes with flying too slow or trying to pitch up if i don't have enough speed for the aircraft to do so to prevent the stall the airbus 320 will just not let me pitch that much now this came with a lot of skepticism from the pilot community pilots just don't like being kind of overruled by a computer right if the pilot wants this aircraft to do something it should do it it shouldn't just you know listen to whatever the computer says so during the time there was a lot of discussions whether or not this fly-by-wire system was actually safe and the captain of this flight was a fervent believer in the benefits of the fly-by-wire system so there are two specific safety systems of the fly-by-wire systems that you need to understand in order to understand what happened here we're going to talk about the alpha floor protection and the alpha protection system now i say alpha and when we talk about alpha we often refer to the angle of attack so in order for you to understand this you need to understand what the angle of attack is now this is something that is really often misunderstood so the angle of attack on aircraft is the angle between the cord line of the of the wing as in the kind of angle of the wing and the oncoming air right it is not the same as the pitch angle the pitch angle is the difference between the chord line and the horizon and there is a difference here because you could potentially fly with a constant pitch angle and as the speed changes your angle of attack will change so if you're maintaining a constant pitch angle of let's say 10 degrees nose up if you let the speed decrease of the aircraft the angle of the oncoming air will differ so the angle of attack will go up to 12 degrees 13 degrees 14 15 degrees as the speed decreases right but what you will see from the outside is the same angle of the aircraft however the angle of attack is really important when it comes to stall because we have something called the critical angle of attack and that is the highest angle of attack that an aircraft can have before it stalls so if we start with explaining the alpha floor protection the alpha flow protection is essentially an out throttle protection in the airbus a320 which if the aircraft feels that the angle of attack of the aircraft supersedes 15 degrees it automatically adds thrust to the engines in order to get out of the potential stall situation now the alpha prot or the alpha protection that has to do with the inputs of the side stick so the alpha prot will feel as the angle of attack goes above 14 and a half degrees and after that it will start to limit the amount of pitch that the aircraft will do depending on how much you kind of pull the stick back to make sure that it doesn't go over 17.5 degrees of angle of attack which is where you're getting close to the um critical angle of attack so just to clarify that with the alpha protection if you as a pilot keeps pulling back on the on the side stick and the speed has deteriorated so that you are now at a you know very close to the critical angle of attack of the aircraft the aircraft just will stop the flight controls from allowing you to pitch up more right you can pull as much as you like the aircraft is just going to stay the flight crew on flight 296 was of a very special composition instead of having a normal captain and a first officer we actually had two senior training captains that was part of the management team in air france at the time piloting command was captain michelle asseline he is a 45 year old training captain he had 138 hours of flying on the airbus a320 at the time which will would be considered to be quite a lot because it's been just certified and he had been very heavily involved in the actual implementation work of the airbus 320 into the air france fleet as a new aircraft gets implemented you need to do you know you make new manuals you need to work on procedures and you need to work on training programs for the pilots and michelle had been doing a lot of this and he was very very proud of the aircraft and all of the potential safety features that the fly-by-wire system could offer now acting as a first officer on this flight was training captain pierre massieres at this time he had been newly converted onto the airbus 320 and he had about 44 hours of flight time on on it at the time pierre was extremely experienced he'd also been in air france almost as long as michelle had around 20 years and both michelle and pierre had been flying on the caravel before the boeing 707 and the boeing 737 so this is an extremely experienced and confident flight crew now when it comes to the preparation of the flight there's a couple of things that we have to look into so this is by no means a normal flight okay uh the first flight from charles gold over to basel that's pretty much standard but the second two flights both the fact that we're doing sightseeing flights and the fact that we're going to do a exhibition flight over the hubstein airport is not normal right this is something that would require a lot of preparation for any aircrew at the time the technical department in air france had been doing a technical assessment of the habstein airport and they'd looked into the asphalt runway runway 02 in habstein they had clearly noticed that the runway was not suitable to land on for the airbus 320 the runway classification number as in how how thick and how hard the asphalt is was not high enough uh but they had looked at the obstacle clearance around it the fact that they could you know get away from there in case they had an engine failure and things like this the flight club that was arranging the airshow had also been in contact with our fronts but they had kind of figured that the normal morning briefing that they did with all of the other participants of the air show would not really apply to the air france crew because they were in paris and they were so experienced that they probably wouldn't need any real briefing further than that so this all meant that the kind of package that was presented to the flight crew was a quite limited one right they were presented with a vfr short of the area a topographical short of the area they also had the documents that air france had at the time specifying how to do these type of flights namely that you couldn't go below 100 feet radio altitude and just some general guidance but all in all the flight crew was pretty much presented with uh a card blanche like they they were allowed at least in their own mind to to plan the overflight as they saw fit and it's likely that given their management positions and their experience that they didn't see any real threat in this kind of low level preparation for the flight so the first flight that went from parachute legal over to basil mullhouse went without a hinge no problem at all the aircrew landed in basel they disembarked and they had a small press conference over there together with their front and then they started getting ready for the two sightseeing flights now we don't know how much briefing was actually done on the ground the only thing we have from the final report is the cockpit voice recorders but we do know that during the taxi out before they did flight 296 they had a briefing on the taxiway about how they were planning to fly the flight this was captain michelle who was briefing pierre because he was going to be the pilot flying for the first part of it and he basically said that okay we are going to take off from here we are going to climb up to 2000 feet altitude that's about a thousand feet above ground level gonna turn right towards hubstein uh we'll maintain flaps one and then we will try to find the airfield remember this flight is going to be flown on an ifr flight plan but on the vfr conditions for the actual flight show he said then my idea is that we descend down to 100 feet above the ground and level the aircraft out the first thing we want to do is we want to show a maximum angle of attack over flight right so we want to configure the aircraft to landing configuration so gear down flaps 3 which is the full landing configuration for the airbus a320 and we are going to slow it down until we have achieved maximum angle of attack okay remember how i talked about the alpha protection yes that's what he wanted to try to achieve now in order to do so we are going to have to disconnect the alpha floor protection that's done by holding in the disconnect switch for 30 seconds that will disconnect that feature for the whole rest of the flight the reason you want to do that is because if you don't do that as soon as the aircraft reaches that 15 degrees angle of attack is going to just apply maximum thrust and the aircraft will fly out but what michel wanted to do was he wanted to establish the aircraft down at 100 feet at maximum angle of attack and then add thrust kind of slowly to maintain a prolonged stabilized flight with maximum angular attack because it will look really really impressive if they can do this and he had full confidence in the safety of the aircraft so he's telling pierre that as we get down to 100 feet i'll pitch up and i want you to add trust slowly so that we can maintain the flight and then i will tell you to put max trust on and then what we'll do is we're going to accelerate climb out do a turn and then i'm going to hand over the controls to you and you are then going to do the high speed flyover which is going to be the second part of the air show that's 100 feet flight at 340 knots and then we will climb out down towards mont blanc and continue with the sightseeing flight so this is kind of the briefing being done and what's important to understand here guys is that a it seems from this briefing that they were definitely going to maintain 100 feet that was the plan it also seems that the crew is expecting to be able to level off and have a fairly prolonged flight at maximum angle of attack because they're talking about keeping the trust up to maintain it okay and this is really important because when they're briefing this and they're talking about it the captain says that he's done this more than 20 times and what he's referring to is that during the training program for the airbus 320 to show these kind of protections to the pilot they would at high altitude put the aircraft into alpha protection put the trust off and just demonstrate how no matter how much you pull on your side stick the aircraft will not stall right but the important thing here is the thrust level position okay you need to have the truss stop because the way that a jet engine works especially one with a large turbo fan is that if you have the speed up to let's say 60 or more well if you need full go around trust from there the acceleration of the engine only takes about a second but if the engine is all the way back to idle it takes a long time for the engine to accelerate up to about 60 in fact in the certification of the cfm56 which is on the airbus 320 it's certified to take five seconds from when you're at idle you add goron thrust until the engines have accelerated up to something resembling full goron trust right five seconds that's a long time now during the taxi out it's a very festive kind of atmosphere in the aircraft remember that most of the passengers are there because they have won a lottery raffle and the pilots are probably also feeling this kind of atmosphere in fact they have even invited one of the passengers to sit on the jump seat this is a female cabin crew for another airline that is situated in the um cockpit and you can hear on the corporate voice recorder that they're kind of interacting with her a little bit during the taxi out at time 1241 air france flight 296 receives its takeoff clearance the aircraft takes off normally makes an immediate right hand turn and levels off at 2 000 feet qnh that is 1000 feet above ground level so it's a very low level off the crew maintained flap one just as expected now remember that they have received very little briefing about the airport that they're about to fly into and they're fairly close to it right hubstein is only about four minutes flight away so they're taking up the vfr charge and they're looking you know where to find the airport they're following a motorway up at a thousand feet and at about five and a half nautical miles away from hubstein airport they see it right they recognize it and they start lining the aircraft up for runway 02 which they have initially planned to do the flying flyover they bring the thrust levers back to idle and they initiated the sand of about 600 feet per minute as they start the speed is about 190 knots or so now what you need to understand here is that in order to do what they want to do which is to descend down to 100 feet decelerate back to alpha floor they need more than five and a half miles right to establish a stabilized high angle of attack flight at 100 feet they would have needed a couple of more miles to do so but they're not familiar with the terrain or the airport so they see it a bit late and they start the maneuver a little bit late now another thing that you have to understand here is that they have planned to do this maneuver over runway 02 which is the asphalt runway but as they're descending down now captain michelle realizes that actually this airshow doesn't take place next to rhombus city 2. it takes place next to runway 3 4 which is a grass runway to the left of runway 02 and it required a little bit of maneuvering so he started to plan for doing this but he doesn't tell first officer pierre that this is what he is planning to do now they're descending down decelerating taking gear down flaps two and flaps 3. at about 300 feet they get a gpws warning that's a ground proximity warning and they switch off the ground proximity warning system they also verify that they have turned off the alpha floor protection which is something they did even earlier during the flight but it confirmed at this point and they get the callouts from the radio altimeter of 200 feet as they pass 100 feet first officer points that out right watch watch is what he's saying on the corpus voice recorder basically indicating okay we've reached 100 feet this is the altitude we should keep at this point the aircraft is in a banked turn towards the left to align themselves with runway 3-4 they have the engines still back at isle and they're continuing to descend through 100 feet down to as low as 30 feet but during this maneuver the first officer is also pointing out some obstacles in the distance it's saying watch out there are pilots around here and those pilots are about a kilometer and a half away but he's not talking anything about the trees at the very end of runway three four now remember that air france when they did the calculation for this maneuver they thought that it was going to be done up over runway two so they haven't checked runway three four and at the very end there you have 12 meters high birch trees and oak trees now the reason that they don't really see these trees as a threat initially is thought to have been that as they're coming in since they're not familiar with the area they would have just seen a slight difference in color right they would have seen the green grass field and then slightly darker green forest and they wouldn't necessarily have seen the contours of it and realized how high those are those obstacles actually are anyway the aircraft is now slowing down and at this point as they're passing ahead of the crowd that is watching this awesome aircraft coming in with a high angle of attack the speed has crept down to as low as 122 knots and it's still decelerating so this is a below the normal approach speed for the airbus 320. the aircraft levels off at about 30 feet which is 70 feet lower than what they had planned for and it's not immediately clear from the final report why they descended below 100 feet um there are some explanations that has to do with the kind of visual villas that the pilots might have had as the pilots are used to flying into much longer runways two thousand three thousand meters runways with towers that are about 100 feet high this grass trip is only 800 meters long and has only a 40 feet high tower so it's possible that the pilot who's now flying completely visually you know feels that he's actually at more or less the right altitude because everything else looks the same but he's actually much lower down also the fact that at this angle the kind of height that the cockpit is at is much higher than the back of the aircraft which is closer to the ground so all of these factors have likely kind of influenced the fact that they're down that low but like i was saying as they pass the air traffic control tower suddenly the captain reaches down and applies maximum go around trust this is not according to the plan that they had discussed on the ground remember they talked about how the first officer was supposed to be adding trust slowly to maintain a level kind of maximum angle of attack flight so it's likely that at this point the captain realizes the danger of the trees ahead and just adds maximum trust himself but like i was saying before the engines have up until this point been sitting at idle so as michelle is now adding thrust onto the engines the engine's starting immediately to spool up however it takes a while for them remember it takes about five seconds and at the end of those five seconds from the flight data recorder we can see that the engines were up at 83 percent accelerating up to maximum goron trust but this is where the aircraft hits the trees during the last two seconds before they hit the trees the uh the side stick is indicated to be at full back all right so the captain is trying to pitch the aircraft up however as he was actually planning they are now in alpha protection mode the angle of attack of the aircraft is about 15 degrees at this point the speed as indicated as low as 112 knots so as designed the aircraft will not allow him to pitch more backwards without achieving higher speed the engines are now trying to accelerate the aircraft but it is just too late the aircraft plows into the trees the engines suck in a lot of branches and leaves which immediately makes them fail as they fail the exit the aircraft is now starting to decelerate because of the impact of the trees the right wing gets ripped off the aircraft that will throw all of the fuel from the right wing straight ahead of the aircraft which immediately ignites and that is what you can see on those famous pictures and videos from this incident that big plume of black smoke is actually the fuel from the right hand wing being ignited fortunately at this point outside of the aircraft the aircraft is descending slowly into the woods okay it's still more or less in one piece the engines are being ripped off but miraculously as they come to a stop everyone inside has survived at this point okay so they start to evacuate the aircraft now there's problems with doing that because they're in the middle of the forest so they're trees kind of sticking and holding against the emergency exit but they managed to get some of the emergency access up and they start evacuating the problem is now that the cabin is quickly filling with black smoke and there's fire in parts of the aircraft and unfortunately during the evacuation two children get trapped one of them is a handicapped boy who just cannot get out of his seat alone another one is a little girl who had problems her brother was saying that she had problems with opening her seat belt so they are left behind and one woman who actually reaches the emergency exit realizes that this girl has having problems she turns back and goes back into the cabin and they're all all three of them overcome by by smoke and unfortunately those three people will not make it so out of the 136 people on board 133 survives and there are three fatalities now the official report went in and i looked through all of the flight data recorders the compute voice recorder and in this case they also had both pilots that could come in and kind of explain what was heard the warnings the noises everything that was heard on the tapes and the final report basically concluded that this accident happened because of the flyover happening at a way too low altitude at way too low speed with too late application of go around trust and poor preparation before the flight the conclusion from the final report was quite obviously that airlines was not allowed to take passengers on board demonstration flights of this type that pilots who were to do these kind of demonstration flights need to be properly both prepared and actually certified to do so and they needed to go and do proper reconnaissance of the airports that were about to fly over before they did so on top of that there was also some technical kind of recommendations made to airbus regarding the design of seat belts and some internal systems of the aircraft and some other smaller recommendations but basically the blame for the accident came down to the human factor and on to both the flight crew and also some of the preparation officers in air france that had prepared the the kind of briefing pack and the the person who had arranged the flight show at the um airport in the end five people were charged with involuntary manslaughter and all five of them were convicted the only one that received a prison sentence was captain michelle aseline he got six months in jail the other one's got probation but it should be mentioned at this point that captain michela celine had until this day maintained his innocence he said that the airbus 320 did not respond when he applied goron trust and tried to climb away now there was thorough investigations into this and all of the investigations came up with the same thing namely that when captain aseline added goron trust the same second the fuel flow increased to the engines you can hear that on several videos that were taken of the event as well but for the engines to accelerate from idle which they were at to full go around trust just took longer than what the aircraft had before it impacted with the trees so i really hope that you're enjoying these series that i'm doing about famous air crashes and investigations if you want to see more of it i have a full playlist up here that you can check out and please let me know what else you want me to talk about sign them in in the comments here below and i will try to answer as many of your questions as possible i also want to send a huge thank you to the sponsor of this episode which is nordvpn now i use nordvpn myself especially when i'm out traveling to you know through airports or restaurants where i might be using local wi-fi it's very good to know that my data will not be able to trace when i do so but to be perfectly honest what i use it the most for is to get past these pesky regional restrictions when it comes to netflix for example you know by the click of a button i can just change my location to be in the united states and there's loads more and better tv shows to watch there if you are interested in this then use the link here below that link will give you a whopping 68 discount on the two-year deal with nordvpn and you can use that deal to up to six different devices on the same deal so go down click the link and consider supporting me by supporting them [Music] [Music] [Music] so so too low terrain [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 791,481

Keywords: af296 crash, af296 video, air france 296, Air Crash investigation, Pilots vs aircraft, Oh no oh no, air crash documentary, Mentour Pilot air crash, Mentour PIlot, Breaking aviation news, Aviation explained, air accident investigation, air accident documentary, air accident report, Fear of flying, aviation facts, Airbus A320, Airbus accident, Fly by wire, Airbus A320 crash, Aircraft incident, Aircraft flying into trees, Alpha floor, Angle of attack, Alpha protection

Id: wQlEoGB-d40

Length: 35min 6sec (2106 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RoxSpirit]

TLPV :

Pilot error on a brand new plane.