They should be able to recall a plane for a safety flaw. In which case they have to pay for the upgrade themselves.

If the airline doesn't comply afterward, it would be on them.

But they didn't issue a recall, so they wouldn't have to pay for the fix, an over 200 people paid the price instead.

At least, that's how I read the blame distribution.

That's right, Airbus is responsible for the faulty equipment onboard, not pilot training. Air France is responsible for its pilots' operational training and recurrent training.

Separating "regulators" and "manufacturers" in such distinct categories is overly simplistic, I'm afraid. As we saw with the whole Boeing debacle, the manufacturers are the experts on what they build, and we expect them to give clear, levelheaded, and honest guidance to operators and regulators. That also means they must have some responsibility for the outcomes of that guidance.

Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.

But I mean flying a cessna vrs something that has fly-by-wire like Airbus jets, its not really about understanding abstractions or anything, since the plane is basically a fundamentally different machine no? Basic principles of gravity and physic apply sure, but the flying experience is 100% different and not like a levelling up thing right? Like i would not trust someone with a Cessna pilot license to fly the airbus i am on.

Boooo!

"Profession" is often cited with regard to LLMs, but honestly, in reminded more of (and scared by) "The Feeling of Power".

I'm not flying anymore if that's the case.

Airbus kind of embodies the "trust the computer" mentality; and if you're going to do that the computer damn hell better be right all the time - it must not have "backwards" failure modes.

Boeing, in similar situations "in the past" would just sound a "computer is giving the fuck up, fly this pig dog" bell and leave it to the pilots to figure it out.

The behaviour you describe above only occurred after the pilot flying stalled the plane. There was a procedure for unreliable airspeed indication. Had the pilot flying performed it, the situation would have been resolved without incident.

AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.

Thank you, this accident reminds me a bit of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, where the popular narrative of "be less of a dummy" is not really fair

Edit -- to wit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253931

While true, pilots aren’t trained to just “respond to the alarm” they are trained to fly the plane.

Once there were multiple alarms that made no sense at all (petty early in the event), the pilots should have ignored them as per the checklist.

But the most damning thing is the one pilot pulling the stick back and holding it back for almost the entire event. There aren’t any flying conditions where that’s an appropriate input. Not to mention being told to give up control and ignoring that request.

I agree Airbus has some blame in terms of the computer system not adequately communicating when it drops out of normal mode.

I actually think that is likely. Humans in these conditions have to make decisions under immense stress. Machines don’t, they just need to be able to understand that sensors may fail and are not completely reliable all the time. Though they would need lots of different input , just like humans, to be able to call out which part of its input is flawed.