Plane Crashes

As the terrible news of the crash of a Soviet era plane taking the lives of 45 people including some of the best ice hockey players in the world, attention is also drawn to and Air France aircraft that nearly 'fell out of the sky'.

In a scene reminiscent of the earlier flight AF447 in which 228 died, an Air France Airbus flying at 35,000 feet hit a storm, had its autopilot disconnect and as it climbed lost airspeed and nearly stalled. The pilots we understand, acted quickly to save the day.

What puzzles me is that when the autopilot cut out the aircraft climbed, which suggests maybe that the software decided that the aircraft was going too fast (as it was pushed by the storm's wind -an 'overspeed' alarm had sounded), so initiated a climb to take off speed. At this point the idea would be that the crew would take over and fly the plane safely, but the report seems to suggest the aircraft was put in grave danger, coming close to a stall. Now, I'm no pilot but my understanding is that, unless the aircraft goes into a 'flat spin' in a stall, the pilots put the nose down to recover forward speed and fly the plane out of trouble.

Not what you want to happen in a routine flight, but not Buck Rogers stuff either. It would seem from the report that the aircraft was in some danger, which might suggest that the disconnect of the autopilot and the need for human intervention caught those humans unaware and they took some time to react. If that was the case, that is what I would want to read in the report.