According to a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, the captain of the Air France Airbus 330 that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 said he had not had enough sleep the night before, a detail that was not previously released, according to the French magazine Le Point. Le Point says that in a judicial transcript it acquired, the captain said, “I didn’t sleep enough last night. One hour, it’s not enough.” According to ABC News, the new information raises concerns about the investigation and whether the full content of the CVR transcript should be made public. Investigators released a final report on the crash last July.
Meanwhile, Airbus officials have found that simulators used to train crews can’t accurately replicate the scenario faced by the 2009 crew when the pitot tubes iced up and the airplane subsequently stalled. “The whole training philosophies need to be adjusted,” Airbus test pilot Terry Lutz said in a recent presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, according to Bloomberg News. Lutz’s co-presenter, Paul Bolds-Moorehead, a senior lead engineer at Boeing, said, “It has been extremely challenging to try and get an accurate simulator, post-stall. Could we develop a way to provide some kind of angle-of-attack limiting function? It would be very problematic to do, but it’s something we should probably look into.”
