Paul Holmes: A pilot's dilemma

Of course, I am no aviation expert and unless I have mislaid the invitation, nobody sought to invite me on to the French team investigating the aircraft catastrophe that Friday afternoon in November last year off the coast of Perpignan in the south of France.

And, as you well know, the last time I landed an aircraft was into a Hawke's Bay vineyard next to Bridge Pa Aerodrome.

In fact, my investigative attentions these days, today included, do not rise much above what has gone wrong with a septic tank and septic tanks do not do much more than they are meant to do - they stay in the ground and do not do anything fast.

The French issued their report into the disaster - in which seven lives were lost, including those of five New Zealanders - in the middle of the night, without warning the families of the New Zealand deceased or the owners of the very expensive aircraft, Air New Zealand.

Their overall conclusion? The aircraft was flying too slowly, too low.

That is the guts of what the report says. It is very easy for the public to get this. Too slow, too low - fall out of the sky. Very glib.

Very nice for the aviation bureaucrats and very easy to sign off.

Issue an international NOTAM, a Notice to Airmen. Remember, chaps, do not do your low-speed test manoeuvres at lower than 12,000 feet. Look at what happened to those fellows at Perpignan.

Except it was not, in practice, necessarily too low at all. And this verdict does not explain this weird, perplexing accident.

For that German pilot to crash that hazy Friday afternoon, in the way the reports insists, he had to be suicidal. There is no evidence that he was, neither is there any evidence his second officer was in any way unstable.

The aircraft went into a sudden catastrophic stall. Its nose pointed up nearly 46 degrees. If you are standing outside on a flat area, the sky from the front to your back is 180 degrees - 46 degrees is roughly a quarter of the way round.

You are looking almost straight up. The aircraft nosed up 46 degrees and only rockets fly like that, and jet fighters, briefly.

The A320 pilot would not have done that. The aircraft would stall and fall on its backside into the sea.

Low-speed work never has to go that far, never has to go that horribly wrong. Low-speed work does not have to take an aircraft into a stall. There has to be another factor, or other factors, the French have not yet seen, looked at or looked for.

No pilot particularly likes that low-speed stuff, that stalling and recovering stuff. The German pilot, from what little we know of what occurred in the cockpit, seemed quite diffident about doing it. He asks the New Zealander what he wants to see next and the New Zealander says, "low-speed flight is probably next".

Four minutes later, the German skipper hears from the control tower. We do not know the substance of that conversation. Then he says: "I think we have to do the slow flight probably later. Or we do it on the way to Frankfurt or I even skip it."

Or even skip it! I can hear the accent and I can see the shrugging of the shoulders. The German is over it. Let's skip the damn low-speed stuff, anyway, he is saying. None of us is ever going to go that damn slow anyway, let's skip it. The plane's fine.

But two minutes later, the cockpit recorder hears the German say, "Down below the clouds, so you want what?" Say that sentence to yourself. "You want what?"

Even a German knows that in English that construction is rude. It is arrogant, it says he can't be bothered. But the New Zealander, determined to get his low-speed work in, says, "we need to go slow with, er, recovery from ... recovery".

He is being tactfully insistent. The German is being superior in his attitude, and while the New Zealander might sense this and not like it, well, it is the German's aircraft today - the German is flying it, he is in command, and it is European airspace, it is their part of the world and, in any case, everything has been fine so far and Germans do not crash.

We might be hearing in those words the first of the human factors that might have contributed to this disaster.

But the New Zealander, sitting in the middle of the cockpit, slightly behind the commanding pilot and the first officer, is reading the same instrumentation the other two pilots are reading: the same airspeed indicator and the same altimeter. He will also know, it is safe to assume, that in international aviation circles 5000 feet is considered a little low for the low-speed stuff.

But let us be clear. Five thousand feet is not, in itself, a dangerous height for a low-speed exercise. It is just that on a test flight, you buy a bit of height before you play with this stuff.

But 4000 to 5000 feet is not dangerous in itself because the only time that aircraft would ever be approaching anything like the low speeds the A320 was about to fly would be when it was near the ground, such as when landing or crash-landing. The aircraft is designed to fly at very low speed just before it lands. It is disingenuous of aviation investigators not to point this out.

If you are working by the book, you would apparently go to 12,000 feet for your low-speed exercise. It gives you a bit more space, more time to correct things, should something go wrong.

Who knows exactly what the cockpit voice recorder reveals, but we know of no objection by the New Zealander.

There is no indication from the French control tower that he asks for a return to altitude for what the Germans are about to do. All we know is that he wants this low-speed stuff done and dusted. There is no sign either of any objection from the other German pilot to low-speed work at this altitude.

So, three experienced pilots, knowing the Airbus A320 well, seem willing to go through with this. Why? Because they know the A320 can handle it. Simple as that. Why? Because the A320 will not allow you to stall it. It will override the commands from the pilot. It knows there are a couple of hundred people on board so this pilot must be disobeyed. It is a very good system.

In my flight training I hated that stall recovery practice. You power-off, point the nose up and wait for the speed to drop away. You are looking straight up into the sky waiting for the ghastly shudder of the stall. When it happens, after a second or so, in a Cessna, the left wing simply drops away. Solution: nose down, power up, gain airspeed and return to straight and level.

It is very simple stuff. It does not matter what size aircraft you are flying. It is a simple recovery.

Why it never happened in the A320 that Friday afternoon is the unanswered question of this affair.