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jbverschoor
Stark contrast between Boeing (US) never been guilty of anything vs Airbus (EU)
burnt-resistor
What portion of blame does the pilot who yanks back on and holds the side stick without understanding the situation deserve? This is flying 101.

How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots? That's the blame component for AF.

wolvoleo
Hmm I don't think it's as black and white as just blaming airbus. The pilots literally flew a perfectly flying plane straight into the ocean. And they had plenty of time to understand what was going on. But they didn't. They didn't willingly do it and the system misguided them but that wasn't the only factor.

I agree airbus shares the blame but it's not the only one. The pilots should have realised the situation they were in, their training should have been better, there were a lot of factors.

Admiral cloudberg has a good deep dive on it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...

Cider9986
My cousin was one of the pilots. I heard he was a great guy, but I never got to meet him.
flightsteward1
I remember reading about this 10-15 years ago. How is it possible that this almost took decades to resolve?
bahmboo
The are guilty of letting these terrible pilots fly humans over oceans. Sometimes the driver is bad and yet we point at the car and say it should have been designed "better". I have read a lot about this flight over the years and I have my obvious opinions.
tverbeure
It's really a miracle that the black box was found.
mike_hock
Can I commit manslaughter now and pay a one-digit percentage of my income as a fine?
KolmogorovComp
To all here saying this is was only a pilot error. I'll ask you, do you also think it is only a programmer error when a critical memory-safety bug is introduced in C? And that they should be the only one responsible and face jail-time (or death, like here)? Or is there more at play? Why use C in safety-critical code, why wasn't it catched by reviewers, fuzzing, testing, etc ?

Error is not binary, it's a statistic. Even perfectly trained pilots/programmers do make errors depending on the situation. What you should ask is what the error chance is, and if it acceptable.

As the accident report shows, the exact same pitot tube failure happened at least 15 times and recovered by the pilots. The 16th time, it killed more than two hundred people. Do you think a 1/16 chance of dying is appropriate in modern aviation safety?

motxilo
> The captain was on a break when the co-pilots became confused by faulty air-speed readings. They then mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane upwards when it stalled, instead of down.

Investigators concluded the co-pilots did not have the training to deal with the situation

Blame.