Do your pilots know what they’re doing?

No one is perfect. I make mistakes all the time. Fortunately, there are many barriers that prevent little mistakes from becoming tragic mistakes. The mistakes you will witness in this animation go well beyond anything I have ever seen.

Most accidents lead to changes in either training, procedures, or the aircraft, changes that hopefully prevent a repeat. One system that came as a result of countless gear-up landings was the GPWS Too Low Gear warning. But that warning assumes the pilots simply forgot to lower the gear. There has always been a gear not down indication that warns the pilots that the gear is not down and locked. I don’t know of any pilot that would continue a landing, without attempting to troubleshoot the problem, before attempting to land. That is before this accident.

Since this animation does not contain the CVR audio, I can’t say that the pilots didn’t discuss the issue of the landing gear. I am confident that they did not follow the ECAM procedures for gear not down.

This one is hard to understand.

Update: New details have emerged that indicate that the pilots were high on their initial approach and did select the landing gear down, but a safety feature of the Airbus, which prevents the gear from coming down above 260 kts., prevented gear extension. It was a high, unstable approach made by two pilots who were confused about what the status of the aircraft.