BEA URGES DEEPER A320 CRASH PROBE

Flight International
July 17, 2007

More detailed study into the factors behind last year’s Armavia
Airlines Airbus A320 crash near Sochi, Russia is needed, according to
the French accident investigation agency the BEA in comments that it
has appended to the final report. The aircraft, inbound from Yerevan,
Armenia, crashed on 3 May 2006 during a go-around manoeuvre ordered
by the Sochi approach controller at night in bad weather. The BEA
comments suggest the pilots and the approach controller were working
according to different rulebooks, and the misunderstandings and
surprise generated by this was a major contributor to the accident,
in which all 113 people on board died.In March, investigators from the
CIS Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) concluded: "While performing
the climb with the autopilot disengaged, the captain, being in a
psycho-emotional stress condition, made nose-down control inputs due
to the loss of pitch and roll awareness."

Poor crew resource management also contributed, says the report,
because of the co-pilot’s failure to monitor the flight performance
parameters.The BEA is in broad agreement with the MAK report’s causal
and technical findings, but its ideas for further action differ. MAK
has taken a traditional approach, listing the mistakes made and
recommending specific fixes for each one. The BEA says the reasons
for the mistakes need to be better understood and suggests detailed
checks on training procedures and standard operating procedures as
practised by Armavia. When the controller told the crew to abandon the
approach because of the weather, he instructed the crew to carry out a
climbing turn to the right, but did not explain this nor use standard
terminology. The BEA believes the captain’s "psycho-emotional state"
was the result of the unexpected instruction to abort. It says the
crew did not expect any more disturbances after the aircraft had been
cleared to land. The order to stop the descent, which arrived 46s
later, "was thus completely unexpected and ran counter to the pilots’
mental representation of the situation. This destabilised the crew,
already annoyed [with] the controller, in particular the captain,
who reacted to this instruction rapidly and, it appears, without
developing any strategy."