"Corky Scott" wrote in message
...
It was just a news blurb this morning on the local TV news, but they
claimed that investigators now blame the loss of the Air Bus 300's
tail on the improper use of the rudder by the co-pilot.

If true (that the co-pilot is actually being blamed), I find that
difficult to believe.

As Ron says, if you want to know what the NTSB says, you need to read their
report. The news media often corrupts matter of fact into alarmist
finger-pointing.

The truth is that, when there's an aircraft accident, the NTSB almost always
winds up blaming the pilot in their report. They will often assign
additional blame elsewhere, but the truth is that aircraft failures rarely
occur absent pilot input, and so pilot input winds up part of the report.

For example, if an airplane crashes due to an engine failure caused by a
manufacturing defect or maintenance error, followed by poor engine-out
landing, the pilot will be blamed for the poor engine-out landing.

Another crash might be a result of the aircraft stalling and spinning to to
the ground. The accident report will often simply say that the pilot lost
control of the airplane, without offering insight into WHY the pilot lost
control.

If you recall the Alaska Airlines accident in which the elevator trim screw
failed, I would be willing to bet that somewhere in the NTSB report, they
fault the pilots for not landing at the first sign of trouble. Which is not
to say that the maintenance practices involved weren't the primary cause.
(I would have checked the report before posting this, except the NTSB web
site is *really* slow today...possibly related to the Airbus accident report
having just been released; I've been waiting 15 minutes already, have no
idea when my query will come back, and figure there's at least even odds it
will simply time out with an error ).

The NTSB simply reports whatever errors they feel they've found. In the
Airbus crash, my understanding is that it's reasonably well-established that
the pilot DID use a control input that led to the failure of the rudder, by
exceeding the design standards for that control.

There may be a host of other reasons why the pilot did so (I am especially
intrigued by the point that Airbus claims that their fly-by-wire system is
supposed to protect against such event), but the fact remains that the pilot
is who made the control input that ultimately caused the accident. There is
nothing fundamentally wrong with the NTSB stating that.

So, seems that what we have here is a clear case of the NTSB reporting
facts, with the media filtering the report to suit whatever agenda they have
at the moment.

[...]
Either way, I find it difficult to blame the co-pilot for reacting in
what is likely a normal pilot response to turbulence. Surely all
airliners aren't so tempermental when it comes to rudder input are
they?

For what it's worth, the certification standards do not preclude all
airliners being so temperamental. FAR 25.351 requires only that a single
full-scale deflection be possible, followed by returning the rudder to
center, and an immediate full-scale deflection in the other direction may
well cause failure of the aircraft. Whether any airliners exceed this
design standard, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that most
don't.

Pete