When they said they
worked in the oil industry,
I knew I was in trouble
The Cafe
Another view of sectarianism
Transform
every death
into a birth
Rear Window
Jock Gallagher on brollies
John Cameron
Air France flight AF 447 – an Airbus A330 – was at its cruising altitude above the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, when the captain left the cockpit for his rest period. As the plane flew into a tropical storm the autopilot and the auto-thrust disengaged probably because the three speed gauges on the outside of the aircraft had iced up.
At the plane’s cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, maintaining a precise speed is critical with a margin of error so small that pilots call this position ‘coffin corner’. One co-pilot said ‘I have the controls’, but the aircraft pitched to the right and as he struggled to correct this his colleague called out, ‘We’ve lost the speeds’. The warning ‘Stall! Stall!’ sounded and the pilots reacted with maximum thrust but the horizontal stabiliser then moved to the maximum forcing the plane into a steep climb.
Whether this manoeuvre was pilot error or just the result of increased thrust (a known characteristic) will be a huge bone of contention between Air France and Airbus. If it was a programming error leading to a failure of the Airbus’ electronic flight control system, the pilots could not have forced down the nose while full thrust was on.
The report indicates the captain re-entered the cockpit, recognised the problem and screamed ‘It’s a stall. Reduce power and nose down!’ But it was too late. The jet was still pointing steeply upwards and losing vertical altitude at a rate of 200 kilometers per hour when 40 seconds later it crashed into the sea.
Questions will be asked as to why the veteran captain went for his break leaving inexperienced colleagues to cope with a tropical storm he knew to be approaching. However, of much greater significance is the part played by the stabiliser. In theory the pilots could have adjusted it but they would first have had to know it was deflected.
Tellingly, Airbus has since delineated the correct behaviour in the event of a stall, which involves the manual trimming of the stabilisers using a wheel near the thrust levers. The other piece of kit under the microscope is the French-made speed sensor used by Airbus which is known to be significantly more prone to failure than a rival US model.
The industry has a bad record of tombstone technology in which known dangers are ignored until passenger deaths make it impossible so to do and this looks like another.
I was there to see
the results of Mladic’s
handiwork
Marian Pallister
It was too easy to later deny the existence of ‘rape camps’ because there
were no formal holding places. But night after night, the soldiers came
and took their pick.
I’m not after an execution, just the certainty that there is no chance of
denial of the rape camps and ethnic cleansing by impregnation in decades
to come.
So no, I wasn’t scared witless by the bull-like Mladic. I wasn’t in Sarajevo as the shells exploded and electricity and water were denied the brave inhabitants.
But on the Bosnian-Croatian border I got inside the heads of the victims of that maestro of terror and they got inside mine. For all the women traumatised by Ratko Mladic’s military tactics, I hope that his crimes are paraded in an international court of law. I’m not after an execution, just the certainty that there is no chance of denial of the rape camps and ethnic cleansing by impregnation in decades to come.
International law now accepts rape as a war crime, but lest you think the Balkan experience convinced me that some rapes actually are more serious than others, I’d like Ken Clarke, who wants to give time off for quick guilty pleas in rape cases, to consider this crime from a different perspective.
If you are the victim, it doesn’t matter whether 15 Serbian soldiers gang rape you and the last one is so disgusted by the mess his colleagues have left behind that he shoots you; or you are Carol X (a young Glasgow woman with whom I spent many days in the run-up to the civil case she brought against the youths who gang raped her in a container lorry, scored noughts and crosses on her body with a Stanley knife and left her for dead); or you are a confused young woman in a skimpy top whose consumption of Bacardi Breezers led you to be a bit slow to say ‘No’. Rape is rape.
Marian Pallister was a journalist. She ‘got the hell out of it to do other things’
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