There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.

And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.

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Svip 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Airbus didn't require them because of money

I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.

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etiennebausson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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ktallett 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do we want airlines that only put in fixes for safety issues once they are forced to?

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borisBigAi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is a real problem with the current FAA setup. The limited amount of legal liability seems like a major problem, even switching from 200k euros to 2 million or 10 million euros as the max penalty per soul would add a minor amount of heft to lawsuits against the airlines and manufacturers.

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WalterBright 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fixes have to go through the FAA, which can be difficult, bureaucratic and very expensive.

	▲	ktallett an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well yes of course they have to be checked by a regulator, but you should still have the thought of, we must do this, no matter the cost as safety matters above everything else in this industry.

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iepathos 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	ktallett 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not that black and white. Airbus will be responsible for educating Air France too and giving appropriate training. These planes are not purchased by Air France without significant documentation and access to support.

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delusional an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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raverbashing 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

As much as I understand the culture of blameless post-mortems and the fact that people in that cockpit don't get the benefit of hindsight, maybe those other companies didn't have an accident because they followed procedure (which was a simple one)

Yes there were UX factors. Yes training could be better. Yes distractions happen

But if I'm going to blame the companies I'm going to blame them on putting someone inexperienced and probably who did not have the right mindset in navigating the profession. And meanwhile companies waste time in making automations on top of manual processes that make things even more complicated