Original subtitles

Just minutes from Strasbourg Airport...

Merde!

...an Airbus A320 slams into a mountaintop.

Delta Alpha, your position?

There are survivors.

And I panicked, because I am going to burn.

But they are still in grave danger.

It's bitterly cold.

And what they don't realize

is that no one knows where they are.

They could be anywhere in there.

We can expect this in the jungle or the rainforest,

but not in a highly populated area.

Before investigators can begin searching

for what caused the crash of Air Inter Flight 148...

They must first find the plane.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are starting our approach.

We lost both engines!

Put the mask over your nose.

Emergency descent.

Mayday, mayday.

Brace for impact!

I think I lost one.

Investigation starting...

He's gonna crash!

January 20, 1992.

Air Inter Flight 148 has departed from Lyon, France.

124.95, thank you.

Captain Christian Hecquet

and first officer Joel Cherubin are experienced pilots

with over 12,000 hours of flying time between them.

The flight is a short hop between Lyon, in Central France

and the city of Strasbourg in the mountainous Alsace region.

The french airline, Air Inter,

caters mostly to business travelers

and prides itself on being timely.

Crews are motivated to avoid delays,

as former Air Inter pilot Gerard Arnoux explains.

We were famous for our very short turnaround.

And the faster we flew, the better wages we got.

Have we been flying for 35 minutes yet?

41 minutes.

The crew is flying an Airbus A320,

one of the most technologically advanced commercial airplanes

in the world.

Even before takeoff, the pilots programmed the autopilot

to land on a specific runway in Strasbourg.

The cockpit of the A320 is also very different

from other planes.

Instead of analog gauges,

the pilots look mostly at digital displays.

Strasbourg, good evening.

Runway in use, 05.

Transition level, 50.

Wind, 040 at 18 knots.

Visibility, 10 kilometers.

A recording from Strasbourg Airport

informs the crew of a change in plan.

Due to high winds and poor winter weather,

they'll have to land on an alternate runway.

05 in service.

Not the one programmed into the autopilot.

05?

What sort of wind are they giving us?

18 knots.

18 knots.

Captain Hecquet doesn't like the idea

of changing runways.

No chance.

He was hoping to use runway 23,

an approach that provides the autopilot

with a precise navigational fix.

The new runway, runway 05,

is surrounded by mountainous terrain

that can interrupt radio signals sent to the autopilot.

You know, if we go with the runway 05 procedure,

we--well, no.

Captain Hecquet suggests a compromise.

I'm putting back runway 23.

Otherwise, I couldn't make the I.L.S. Interception.

He'll program the autopilot

to fly towards runway 23.

But near the airport,

the captain will take over the controls

and make a visual landing on runway 05.

You're taking 23, then?

Yes!

Agreed.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are commencing our descent.

We ask you to please return to your seats...

Nicolas Skourias is a university graduate student.

It was a quiet day.

I was expecting to go to see my girlfriend in Strasbourg,

so I was very happy.

Roger, 854, proceed to GTQ,

air level 140, contact Reims.

Delta Alpha, Strasbourg.

Yes, we intend to proceed to do an I.L.S.

On runway 23,

then an indirect for runway 05 after that.

The Strasbourg controller

considers the captain's plan.

Delta Alpha.

He warns that there will likely be a delay

due to heavy traffic.

Given that we're going to have three takeoffs

on 05, you risk waiting in a stack at 5,000 feet.

We're not going to mess about like that

descending at full speed.

If they had warned us in advance! Cripes!

Delta Alpha, Strasbourg.

I hear you.

Aware of the captain's frustration,

the controller offers assistance.

If you want, I can take you with the radar

to lead you to andlo at 5,000.

Andlo is a navigational point

on the approach to runway 05.

It helps pilots align the plane for landing.

Yeah, that's good.

Oh, yeah.

Ok, then, turn left to heading, 230 degrees.

148, turn left to heading, 230 degrees.

There you are. That will save you some time.

Since runway 05 doesn't allow

for a full autopilot approach,

the captain must calculate the angle of descent on his own.

That makes 3.3 degrees.

3.3 degrees is a normal flight angle

that provides a good slope for landing.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are continuing our descent.

The flight from Lyon to Strasbourg was quite short,

I think 50 or 45 minutes, nothing special.

It was very natural and very ordinary.

Thank you.

Turn left, steer 90.

090 degrees, Delta Alpha.

The controller talks flight 148

through the last turn to align the plane with the runway,

now 15 and a half miles away.

Then, first officer Cherubin notices

the plane is slightly off course.

You are headed inside.

You're inside there.

You should have started with 070.

Yeah.

At least that much.

The controller also notices

that the plane is off course.

Air Inter Delta Alpha.

It has missed aligning itself

with ANDLO, the runway's electronic guidepost.

Delta Alpha, you're passing to the right of ANDLO.

Nevertheless, he authorizes the landing.

Authorized for final approach, 05.

Delta Alpha.

The captain initiates the landing sequence.

Flaps towards two.

Flaps towards two.

Flaps at two.

Gear down.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are going to land in a few minutes.

Hecquet notices that the plane is traveling too fast,

so he extends the speed brakes.

They disrupt airflow over the wing,

which helps create more drag to slow the plane.

We have to watch our descent.

The approach axis...

The first officer is more concerned

with their horizontal position in relation to the runway.

It was 60, check it out.

But before the crew can adjust their course...

Merde!

Delta Alpha, your position?

Air Inter Delta Alpha, Strasbourg?

The crash is catastrophic.

The A320 has flown into the side of a mountain.

Delta Alpha, your position?

Flight 148 is no longer on radar,

nor responding to radio contact.

An emergency is declared at Strasbourg Airport.

This is the last hit we got.

They were flying about 20 kilometers away

from the airport.

Officials need to pinpoint the crash site.

But it's not as easy as it might seem.

The airport's radar is not recorded.

There has been no signal from the plane's emergency beacon.

And surprisingly,

no one has reported seeing a plane go down.

It could be anywhere in here.

The proposed search area

covers more than eight square miles of dense forest,

just outside Strasbourg.

Nicolas Skourias survives the crash of Air Inter Flight 148

with only minor injuries.

I realized that I was alive, it was a crash.

I saw fire in front of me, and I panicked,

because I say to myself, I'm going to burn.

I went to the back of the plane, what remained of the plane.

I found some other survivors.

Come on!

It's going to blow!

I was afraid of the explosion.

I was a panic.

With the smell of leaking jet fuel in the air ,

the survivors move away from the burning plane.

We stayed together, waiting for the first aid.

But the wait will be longer than anyone might expect.

Two and a half hours after flight 148 disappeared

from radar near Strasbourg Airport...

... the missing plane has still not been located.

Amidst growing tension, the French Aviation Bureau,

the B.E.A., sends in its lead investigator, Jean Paries.

I immediately called my two main investigators

and we organized the go team.

And we got prepared to rush to the site

as soon as the site was located somewhere.

The delay feels like an eternity.

It was surprisingly long.

We can expect this in the jungle or the rainforest,

but not exactly in a highly dense populated area

like the Strasbourg area.

With no help in sight,

Skourias returns to the wreckage to look for more survivors.

I think that some people that die,

could have survived if the first aid come sooner.

Nearly 1,000 people search for the missing plane.

But three hours after the crash, there's still no sign of it.

Frustrated, Skourias goes looking for help.

He stumbles into a TV crew trying to find the crash.

But with no wreckage in sight, they react with skepticism.

They didn't expect survivors

from an airplane crash.

Hey! Hey, you have to believe me!

They didn't believe that I was one of the survivors.

But believe me, I was, because my face was black

due to the smoke, the kerosene, and so on.

Come on!

The journalists follow him

back to the crash site,

where they discover eight other survivors.

Finally, the first rescuers arrive.

The crash site is located

near the top of the 2,500-foot Mont Ste. Odile,

nearly 12 miles from the runway.

They found us after

four hours and 30 minutes.

So it was a mess.

A total of 87 passengers and crew have died,

including the pilot and co-pilot.

The survivors begin to tell their stories,

but no one reports anything

that might explain why the plane crashed.

I don't know what happened.

We were landing, I lost all consciousness.

We must have hit the trees.

Bob Macintosh, an American NTSB investigator,

arrives at the crash site.

The B.E.A. Of France recognized

the international attention would be on this accident,

even though it was a domestic accident.

He invited a group

of international accident investigators

to come and participate.

Jean Paries. Welcome to the team.

The first priority for investigators

is to retrieve the plane's black boxes.

We have not removed the recorders yet.

With the boxes trapped

in the burning tail section,

any delay could prove costly.

We were very anxious

about the state of the tape inside.

Will it be possible to use it?

Will we get the critical information we need?

Puis-je m'approcher?

In France, aviation accidents are also investigated

by the justice system.

Paries and his team are not allowed access to the site

until judicial officials secure the black boxes.

I had a visual picture

of the Gendarmes Aerienne,

the transport police,

standing around keeping us away from the wreckage for a while,

and were very suspicious of these international observers.

Maybe we should wait.

Even taking photographs,

which was somewhat surprising to us.

In a previous crash,

the crash of Air France flight 296 in 1988,

investigators waited 10 days

before returning the black boxes over to police.

Rumors persisted that these boxes had been tampered with.

This time, police are keeping investigators at bay.

I can recall seeing the glowing embers

and seeing the flight recorder sitting there

and not being able to intervene

and say, "get that thing cooled down as soon as you can."

After midnight,

the boxes are retrieved from the plane and sent for analysis.

Investigators can only hope it's not too late.

They were extremely hot.

They looked damaged, they looked burned.

In the light of day,

investigators get some of their first clues

from the crash site itself.

They discover why the plane's emergency locator beacon

didn't send a signal.

It was actually destroyed by the impact.

The beacon is located inside the cockpit

and is designed to start working after a crash.

Its failure suggests an unusually forceful impact

with the ground.

We had this first feeling

the descent was abnormally steep.

Investigators examine the engines

to see if they may have stalled before impact.

If you find the blades curved

and a lot of wood sucked inside the engines,

then you understand that the engines were working properly.

And that's exactly what they find.

The plane clearly had power,

yet it plowed steeply into a mountainside,

without ever sending out a distress signal.

Investigators are puzzled.

They hope that the box which recorded the plane's flight data

will help them solve the mystery.

Those particular recorders

had the best survival record of any recorders.

They were top of the line as far as survivability is concerned.

The black box is designed

to survive temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit

for half an hour.

The tape recorder inside is protected by a capsule

filled with water.

When the recorder heats up, the water turns to steam,

absorbing the energy, and actually vents out

through a little hole in the crash enclosure.

But when the flight data recorder is opened,

investigators make a troubling discovery.

The FDR was totally damaged,

impossible to read anything from it.

It was subjected to heat beyond the 30 minutes.

The recorder was just never designed

to withstand that kind of sustained heat.

And so we were very disappointed.

There's now only one hope

for recovering the plane's flight data,

a device called a quick access recorder, or QAR.

Maintenance workers use the QAR to access the plane's computers.

But it also records some flight data.

Unlike the black boxes, the QAR is stored near the cockpit.

Investigators are encouraged to discover

that in this case, the QAR has survived.

But on closer examination, their optimism turns to frustration.

The last 20 centimeters of the tape

were burned and stretched, and were damaged to the point

that we could not use them into a machine.

We couldn't read it.

Investigators are desperate to retrieve the data,

so they take a chance on an experimental technique.

Known as the garnet technique,

a light is shone through a mineral lens made of garnet.

You use a garnet stone to visualize the magnetic pulses

that are actually recorded on the tape.

The special lens helps

the technicians differentiate

between the positive and negative magnetic pulses,

which translate as binary digits, or bits.

There's 768 bits per second,

so that's a lot of ones and zeroes.

You have to be very precise

in moving the tape under the lens or the garnet

to make sure you don't miss a bit

or read the same bit twice.

So it's difficult.

Analyzing the data is even more painstaking.

It took about a day

to read a second of recording.

Any additional second recovered

could reveal something that would make a difference.

The effort to retrieve all the QAR data

could take a month or more.

In the meantime, the focus of the investigation

shifts to the cockpit voice recorder.

It was positioned just above the other black box.

The cockpit voice recorder,

which was just inches away but outside of the ashes

had air passing over it and survived.

Runway 23...

The recording reveals the captain's anxiety

early on in the flight.

You're taking 23, then?

Yes!

Investigators know that landing on runway 05

requires what's called a non-precision approach.

That means pilots receive electronic guidance

only on their horizontal position--left and right.

They get no guidance when it comes to altitude.

The non-precision approach

is significantly less accurate.

It's not really difficult, but they are less comfortable.

05?

What sort of wind are they giving us?

18 knots.

The non-precision approach

increases the demands on pilots.

Investigators can also hear that the captain had concerns

about landing on runway 05.

48, Delta Alpha,

you are number one for the VOR DME, runway 05.

Runway 05, 05.

10 nautical, that won't work.

That's a lot of distress over a non-precision approach.

Wondering what can cause such distress,

investigators research pilot training at Air Inter.

They find that most pilots did not have extensive training

making non-precision landings in the new A320.

I think we should have had double the training

compared to an older plane.

Investigators ask the airline for detailed records

on the pilot's history of runway approaches.

They're intrigued by what they discover.

Captain Hecquet had landed at Strasbourg countless times,

but he had never landed an A320 there

using a non-precision approach.

We're not going to mess around like that

descending at full speed.

Clearly, the captain was uneasy

about having to execute a landing

he had never made before.

I think the captain was worried about making it in

in a minimum amount of time, in the minimum amount of delay.

Have we been flying for 35 minutes yet?

And the co-pilot was worried

about not getting in trouble by offending the captain.

At least that much.

More research into the pilot's work history

offers yet another revelation.

While the two pilots had flown

more than 12,000 hours between them,

they were both still relatively new

to the highly advanced A320.

The aviation community misunderstood the magnitude

of changes brought by the new Airbus A320.

The captain had only 162 hours in the A320.

And the co-pilot, even less--

just 61 hours.

Behind this accident scenario,

there is an issue of confidence

of the crew in themselves,

in the aircraft.

18 knots?

No chance.

They were not prepared, really,

to fly in this kind of condition.

If they had warned us in advance, cripes!

Investigators conclude

that the crew's training was insufficient.

But that alone does not explain the crash.

Merde!

Investigators search for other factors

in the crash of flight 148.

They review the conversations between the crew

and air traffic controllers.

If you want, I can give you radar headings

and take you to ANDLO at 5,000.

Yeah, that's good.

The radar vector makes flying easier.

The captain was happy because it was reducing his workload.

Turn left, steer 90.

With the controller's assistance,

this landing should have been very simple.

But when investigators reconstruct

the plane's trajectory using radar information

from various stations around the airport,

they discover a shocking error.

The 090 heading started here.

090 degrees, Delta Alpha.

But it won't take them to ANDLO.

Last radar vector the controller gave was incorrect.

It sent them...

Thank you.

...closer to the mountain.

They were off course because of following the heading

they got from the radar vectoring.

They found themself in this undershoot situation.

You should have started with 070.

Investigators are also troubled

by the controller's choice of words

when he warned the pilots incorrectly

that they were headed to the right.

Delta Alpha, you are passing to the right of ANDLO.

From the pilots' perspective,

the plane was on the left side of the runway, not the right.

It could only add to their confusion.

It was very poor guidance,

because he didn't employ the usual terminology.

Investigators recommend that

controllers use only compass points when giving directions,

never the words "right" and "left."

the controller's mistakes clearly brought the plane

closer to the mountain.

Turn left. Stay at 90.

090 degrees, Delta Alpha.

But once again,

investigators feel they don't have the whole story.

It's not something totally abnormal

to start a descent from this situation.

Flaps towards two.

Flaps towards two.

It's not what you're expected to do every day,

but it's not outside the tolerance

of the concept of this approach.

Gear down.

When investigators study

the plane's reconstructed flight path,

they discover something more alarming

than the plane's horizontal misdirection.

As it circled the mountain,

the plane inexplicably entered

a dangerously steep and rapid descent.

Perhaps two and a half times

the normal rate of descent.

That's lethal at that altitude.

Without the steep descent,

they would have cleared the mountain.

If the vertical trajectory had been correct,

they would have no problem at all.

Finding the cause of that sudden descent

is now key to understanding why 87 people died

in one of the most advanced passenger planes on earth.

Authorized for final approach, 05.

The descent was initiated at 18].00 hours,

19 minutes and 38 seconds.

That...

Delta Alpha.

...is the point of no return.

By studying flight 148's trajectory,

investigators determine that the rapid descent

began 60 seconds before the crash.

There is no indication on tape that the descent was deliberate.

How it happened and why the crew didn't notice is a mystery.

It should be a no-brainer keeping track of the altitude.

The cockpit altimeter

gives pilots a constant readout of their altitude.

The altimeter is a very precise instrument,

they've become very reliable,

they are accurate to within five or ten feet.

Ignoring it would be

a major error in flying protocol.

Flaps towards two.

The recording reveals just one single remark

from the crew about their descent.

We have to watch our descent.

It occurred 16 seconds before the crash.

We have to watch our descent.

The captain had just extended the speed brakes.

The aircraft was accelerating abnormally.

The captain started to realize there was something wrong

with the descent rate.

But the first officer changed the subject.

The approach axis.

We're hitting the axis a half point off.

There.

It was 60, check it out.

He refocused the captain's attention

on the lateral situation rather than the vertical situation,

which was the main problem, of course.

And they both failed to recognize the situation.

I think they were planning,

they were going to break out of the clouds

so they would be able to see the runway.

And they wouldn't need to do the full instrument approach.

It was 60, check it out.

But the plane never left the clouds.

There's an old adage in aviation--

rocks have been known to hide out in those clouds.

Merde!

It now seems clear

that the crew was not monitoring their altitude closely enough.

But a bigger mystery remains.

We can only guess...

What caused that deadly descent?

After months of work,

investigators may finally have the answer.

All the available flight data

from the damaged quick access recorder has been recovered.

We were very anxious to be able to read

as much as we could.

The data confirms that just before the crash,

the plane was speeding toward the ground

at an extremely high rate-- 3,300 feet per minute.

It also confirms that the angle of descent

was dangerously steep,

much greater than the 3.3 degrees selected by the captain.

3.3 degrees.

That's quite a difference.

Investigators now wonder,

did the autopilot malfunction?

Did it somehow fail to obey the captain's safe descent angle

and send the plane into a deadly nosedive?

But what state was it in before the accident?

Unfortunately, the flight control unit

which houses the autopilot is too badly damaged

to provide any definitive answers.

We could never demonstrate

that this FCU on this aircraft

during this flight

functioned properly or not.

But then, when he returns to

studying the flight data,

Paries discovers something that may finally reveal

the cause of the crash.

He notices a similarity between two key numbers--

the plane's vertical speed, 3,300 feet per minute,

and the intended flight path angle, 3.3 degrees.

Coincidence?

Paries uses a flight simulator

to test the new theory.

Can you show me a descent of 3,300 feet

per minute?

He believes that the similarity

is no mere coincidence.

On the autopilot, there are two descent modes--

flight path angle

and vertical speed.

But they are both displayed on the same window.

So 3,300 is abbreviated to 33.

Now, show me a flight angle of minus 3.3 degrees.

The problem on this aircraft was

that the two values were visible

on the same window and controlled by the same KNOB.

3.3 degrees.

Minus 3.3 degrees.

Paries strongly suspects that

the confusing display tripped up captain Hecquet.

So it wouldn't be hard to make that mistake, would it?

The confusion is quite easy between the two modes,

if you don't do it carefully.

If the captain failed to push the mode selector KNOB,

then entering a 33 would not have initiated

a safe 3.3 degree angle of descent.

Instead, it would have put the plane

into a deadly rate of descent of 3,300 feet per minute.

Two months after the crash, another Air Inter plane

enters a dangerously steep descent for the same reason.

The crew only discovered the problem

when they broke out of the clouds.

Those pilots also confused

the plane's flight path angle

with its vertical speed.

They were lucky enough to have a much higher cloud base

so they could correct the problem.

Further research reveals an industry-wide problem

with the A320.

Many people confused these modes,

especially during training.

And many of them fell in the trap

even after the training.

Eager to test his new theory,

Jean Paries programs a simulator

with all the known data from flight 148.

He then inputs the same rate of descent

he believes the Air Inter pilots selected.

If Paries is correct,

the simulation will end with the plane hitting the mountain.

But it doesn't.

We're missing something.

Strangely, this didn't lead to a crash.

Every approach would overfly this obstacle

by a significant margin.

Have we factored in the wind?

We started to work on other alternate hypotheses.

Let's try again.

But initiate the turn sooner.

But nothing was really credible.

No matter how hard he tries,

Paries cannot simulate the crash.

Unable to explain why,

he turns to the plane's manufacturer for help.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

After much research,

an Airbus designer comes to Paries with an explanation

about a little-known element of the autopilot's design.

In emergency situations

where the A320 needs to change direction quickly,

the autopilot is programmed to reverse the plane's direction

at twice the normal rate.

The reaction of the autopilot would be much faster.

And these cases were typically when you were descending

and asking the autopilot to climb,

or climbing and asking the autopilot to descend.

We immediately went back to the data

at the very second

at which the descent was commanded by the crew.

Gear down.

Paries discovers a tragic coincidence.

Sadly, we found at this very second

there was turbulence.

There was an ascent.

It's very slight, but there it is.

The momentary turbulence

caused the plane to climb slightly.

And this led to a positive 600 feet per minute

vertical speed for maybe half a second.

It was during that same half second

that the crew commanded the plane to descend.

The autopilot read this as an emergency,

requiring a blazingly fast descent.

That could be it.

Investigators now contemplate a terrible thought--

could a random gust of wind,

hitting at exactly the wrong split second

have been the difference between life and death?

Here it comes.

And we got a crash.

Paries' theory explains every aspect

of the crash.

The crew's confusion with the autopilot display...

That's 3.3 degrees.

...caused the plane to descend

dangerously close to the mountain.

Turbulence and an obscure safety feature brought it even closer.

It was a fatal combination.

It's a fascinating lesson

about the random dimension of accidents.

Half a second before, half a second later,

they wouldn't have the accident.

The discovery of a confusing cockpit display

has enormous implications for the entire industry.

The flight instrumentation of aircraft

like the DC10, MD11, the 74S, and so on,

all the Boeing products and all the commuter products

that were using that avionics suite

had this vulnerability about it.

Investigators now face a daunting question

affecting aircraft safety around the world.

If the design of the autopilot interface isn't changed,

how many more people could die?

There's mounting evidence

that the design of the autopilot interface on the Airbus A320

led the Air Inter pilots to accidentally dial in

a dangerous rate of descent.

3.3 degrees.

We felt a need to start the industry to work on this.

The plane's manufacturer, Airbus,

responds immediately.

The main change, which was very quickly made,

was to change the display window.

With the new design,

if a pilot selects a vertical speed of 3,300,

the entire four-digit number is displayed.

So the confusion between an angle and the vertical speed

was no longer possible.

For investigators, only one mystery remains.

All Airbus A320 jets are designed to be equipped

with a safety device known as a Ground Proximity Warning System,

or GPWS.

Which is a downward-looking

single purpose radar

that tells you how high you are above the ground

directly beneath the airplane.

And if it gets to be too low, it'll set off a warning.

Pull up, terrain. Pull up.

But captain Hecquet...

We have to watch our descent.

...never received a warning

for one very simple reason-- his A320 didn't have that alarm.

Merde!

The first question, of course,

was why the aircraft was not equipped.

So it's not part of the minimum equipment list?

The Air Inter management had decided

they did not like the false warnings that had been produced

by GPWS equipment.

Normally, most planes fly slower than 250 knots

when under 10,000 feet.

But we flew at 350 knots until the final approach.

So at those speeds, GPWS was always giving off false alarms.

This decision, while legal,

prevented the pilots from having one last line of defense

before crashing into the mountain.

It's impossible to imagine

that the pilot wouldn't have pulled up

if he'd heard the alarm.

We should have a GPWS on commercial flights.

In any case, yes, that's an obvious conclusion.

The report will list these causes.

Flight deck ergonomics...

Investigators conclude

that there was no single cause

of the crash of flight 148.

The tragedy involved an ill-fated combination

of many different weaknesses in the airline industry.

We made 35 or so recommendations,

including pilot training

about the ground proximity warning system, and so on.

The recommendations lead to sweeping changes.

Pilots must now have more A320 training

before getting behind the controls.

One of the two pilots

now need to have at least 300 hours on the plane.

They estimated that 300 hours were enough.

Another change--

the design of a more heat-resistant black box.

The FAA did a test,

did some studies with the thermal characteristics

of post-crash fires

where it came up with a value of 260 degrees C

for 10 hours.

Delta Alpha, your position?

Air Inter Delta Alpha, Strasbourg?

As a result of the Strasbourg crash,

the A320 is now a safer plane.

You can only get this change

if there is what people perceive to be a good reason.

And sadly, a good reason is still an accident.

But improved aviation technology

is still no substitute

for well-trained, well-prepared pilots.

There's an old axiom in aviation

that you're taught early on

that, never let an airplane take you somewhere

that your brain hasn't visited

at least five minutes ahead of time.

This is an excellent example of a flight crew

that didn't follow that particular axiom.