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The "Intelligent" Airbus and its crashes

Chronical of an avantgarde technology

"Until today we had no incident or accident that was directly related to a problem with the structure or the design or a system or anything like that." Bernard Ziegler, Senior-Vice-President of Airbus Industrie on 5.12.1994

"Why is the Airbus A 320 as well called the John Wayne plane? - It cuts trees, climbs mountains and kills Indians." Joke among Boeing pilots, origin unknown

My critics have claimed that I have a problem with the Airbus "next generation" family of aircraft, and that I am unjustifiably hard in my criticism of this wonderful piece of technology.

Do I have a problem with the airplane? No. I'm not afraid of boarding it, I flew, and sometimes still fly, in it as a passenger and, for some hours, I piloted it myself - in professional full motion flight simulators.

The Airbus A 320 is an especially beautiful airplane with great flight characteristics, a spacious, clean (and proper) cockpit like no other I have seen or sat in before. Many sophisticated protection systems make the handling, even for an inexperienced pilot, almost fool proof. As long as everything works.

I do believe Airbus has designed an innovative aircraft that is on the leading edge of the future of air transportation. I respect their intentions in trying to eliminate threats to pilots by helping them with the support of sophisticated computer systems. I am very pleased by the current Airbus approach. In recent conversations with the ÈconsumersÇ - pilots from all around the world - I have heard that Airbus now seems willing to face, and attempt to solve, problems reported to them by the operator community. This was not always the case.

My critcism of the Airbus attitude (not their products!) goes back to the introduction phase of the A 320 and is, therefore, very much tied to the personalities in charge during that period. Maybe it can be attributed to the vagaries of human beings and their own struggles in making their life mission reality, by all means and against all sorts of opposition and obstacles. I have high regards for their achievements and for their dedication; This is really not the issue here. A leading manufacturer of aircraft like Airbus should have regard for the weakest part in the system: software that is more than 50,000yrs old, the human brain, that ultimately operates these machines.

In the early stages of the introduction of this new generation of aircraft, Airbus was presenting itself much differently than today. Every critic was an attacker, doing serious harm to Airbus's baby and, therefore, considered an enemy of the state. This was, sometimes, even literal, as the ties between the French aviation industry and the government are historically very close.

In contrast to other competitors in the aircraft business, Airbus was always politically protected, and financially supported, by individual governments of the consortium. This made Airbus invincible for all intents and purposes. This attitude prevailed, unfortunately, for almost a decade. Whenever something happened to an Airbus aircraft, or it became involved in an incident or accident, senior members of the management were quite fast to release statements blaming the pilots for the mishap. Even the statement of Bernard Ziegler, quoted above, is still a very strong example of this attitude and it speaks for itself.

I earned a lot of respect in the aviation community when, in producing the TV documentary "Fatal Logic", I was able to get Ziegler to the point where he as the spiritual father of automation in the cockpit had to admit that the computers in this new generation of aircraft are not the ultimate non-plus-ultra. They simply can not cope with each and every possible malfunction or fault in this aircraft and its complex systems.

While on the one hand I earned a lot of respect, mainly among the pilot community, I got a positively fanatical enemy in Bernard Ziegler and his supporters within Airbus. Those who are interested in this dispute might find it interesting to read the chapter in Fatal Logic: "How to Deal With Critical Journalists".

I still believe that Airbus's defensive attitude of those days was wrong. A completely unnecessary form of over reaction. Nobody expected something as complex as the first "fly by wire" commercial aircraft to be perfect right from the start. Well, maybe the engineers did.

In those days, Airbus seemed to be very much a dead end when it came to criticism, even constructive criticism, whether it was substantial or even just a hint to a still dormant problem in software programming and aircraft user surface design. Over the past decade Airbus has initiated, on some occasions, a form of witch hunt against critical journalists, their reports, and publications.

So, for example, the British author Karl Sabbagh was forced to rewrite a few sentences in his book The Twenty-First Century Jet, about the Boeing 777 jet, just because Airbus didn't like it. To avoid a lengthy litigation with Airbus Industrie, Sabbagh agreed to reword his script and take passages out.

Also my former employer, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), a public TV network in Cologne, Germany, recieved a court order denying their freedom of press and gave up their right to broadcast the documentary "Fatal Logic" in its original version. In the good old days that would have been regarded as a serious breach of the public trust, an unjustifiable attack on constitutional rights and freedom of the press. But, as Germany has its own strong political interests in the consortium, this is obviously a different story. Airbus, in their claim, merely objected to some very well known facts.

When I was invited to the NASA Ames Research Center in California in 1996 to show and discuss the film in front of NASA's Human Factor Research Department, I was forced to read the Airbus objections prior to the screening, as dictated by the court order against WDR. The hall burst out in laughter.

I am convinced that Airbus's real intention behind this court action was to prevent further screening, especially of the very telling scene with their former vice president of engineering, Bernard Ziegler, saying: "This is one of the highly remote probabilities where you really need a crew to interpret. You can not cover such low probabilities with a computer". (Quote from "Fatal Logic", WDR 1995)

But they could not do anything to edit this scene because Ziegler had signed a receipt for the amount of just 300 German Marks ($100) and thereby transferred all his rights on the filmed material to WDR. The film was produced after the crash of the Lufthansa Airbus A 320 at Warsaw, Poland, and tried to shed some light onto the accident's causes, and associated factors.

A specific attitude towards the public defined the self righteous stand of Airbus before the accident of Lufthansa A 320 in Warsaw. It was not the first accident, and also not the last, involving one of their aircraft. When we are talking about safety issues in aviation, censorship is the worst reaction. Safety deals with lives, and, therefore, everybody should be able to state his opinion, especially when it is backed up with concrete findings. Accidents and incidents have to be prevented and this requires the freedom, and the obligation, to think preventively. Part of prevention is the freedom of speech and thought, regardless of geographic location.