University of Southern California engineering professor and aviation safety expert Najmedin Meshkati's summa-tion of cockpit automation has a sobering ring as the aviation industry comes to grips with die interim accident reports of Air France flight 447, the Airbus A330-200 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people onboard.The latest interim report, issued by the French BEA in late June, prompted particular focus on cockpit automation and flight crew interface after detailed analysis of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that were recovered earlier this year. The report, though emphasizing that BEA doesnot assess blame, indicated that the pilots were inadequately trained and failed to properly identify a stall situation or react promptly to it. While BEA reiterated that a key factor in the crash was the inconsistent speed measurements from the air-craft's pitot probes, once an emergency situation arose and the autopilot disengaged, the two on-duty copilots conducteed "no explicit task-sharing," BEA said. Even though a stall warning
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