When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others, like JFKjr's crash.

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filleduchaos an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed?

To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.

	▲	WalterBright 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and pushed the stick forward. But it was too late. If the captain could figure it out, so could the computer. I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground. They could have recovered if they pushed the stick forward - failing basic stall recovery training. There are many others - I've watched every episode of Aviation Disasters. Crew getting spatially disoriented is a common cause of crashes.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

IIRC, they were dealing with frozen pitot tubes or other sensors that were keeping the air data computing hardware from getting valid input. An automated "Get me out of trouble" button might have had the opposite effect.

	▲	WalterBright 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As I mentioned elsewhere, the captain figured out what was wrong immediately, but he was too late. BTW, my dad taught instrument flying in the AF. He said it was simple - look at the instruments. Bring the wings level, then the pitch level. Although simple, your body screams at you that it's wrong. He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of the controls. This was against regulation, but he wasn't going to let a student pilot kill him. When JFKjr's crash was on the evening news, he said two words - "spacial disorientation". Months later, that was the official cause.