Miles O’Brien is a pilot, airplane owner and freelance journalist who lives in Manhattan. His blog is located at www.milesobrien.com. The opinions expressed are his own.

A lot of travelers boarding an Airbus today might be thinking twice. After all, yet another Bus is at the bottom of yet another ocean – and another 153 souls have gone west.

Could the European airliners be latter-day versions of the DC-10? That is, a flawed design and thus a relatively dangerous way to fly?

For the entire Airbus airliner fleet (more than 5400 are in service globally), the numbers do not support that conclusion.

In July 2008, Airbus’ bitter rival Boeing released a “Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents” from the dawn of the jet age in 1959 through 2007.

At the time of the study, the A330 still had a flawless record: no fatal accidents in the course of a million departures. A month ago, Air France 447 changed that record, but the airliner remains very safe statistically.

Over the years the Airbus A300 has had three crashes that caused deaths. That equates to a rate of .47 airplanes lost per million departures. The A320 series has had eight fatal crashes – or .23 hulls per million departures. And the A340 has never had a fatal crash.

The record is not as good for the A310, the model of airplane that plunged into the sea trying to land at Moroni, the capital of the Comoros Islands. It has crashed and killed people eight times now. That equates to a fatal accident rate of 1.42 airplanes for every million departures.

(The actual plane that crashed is pictured shown here in a photo taken in 2002.)

The infamous and much maligned DC-10 crashed with fatalities a dozen times, for a rate of 1.36 fatal crashes per million departures. Pretty much a dead heat (if you will pardon the expression).

It is worth noting that these fatal accident rates have come a long way. The early jet airliners - the 707 and DC-8 - logged fatal accident rates of 4.21 and 4.03 per million departures respectively.

But take a look at the accident reports for the A310 — there are two common threads. First, they are all attributed to pilot error: Trying to land in a thunderstorm, botched use of thrust reversers on rollout, improper stall recovery, spatial disorientation on a dark, stormy night, a botched missed approach, and the most infamous of all, the captain who allowed his son to take the controls, leading to a stall and spin.

The second is the airlines were all flagged in third world/emerging nations [Maybe the Russians might quibble with that characterization, but over the years Aeroflot has logged a third-world quality record.]

This is why you are hearing so much talk about the so called blacklist of airlines that are banned from flying to Europe or the U.S.

Airlines have to be pretty sloppy (and scary) to get on this roster. It means they lack:

• the regulations to properly certify airplanes

• the technical expertise and resources to oversee them

• adequately trained technical personnel

• adequate inspectors to insure they comply with minimum international standards

• and insufficient record keeping to document what they are doing (or not).

Yemenia Airlines is not on the European blacklist, now 194 airlines long. But the crashed 19-year-old/17,300 cycle airplane (7O-ADJ) apparently was, at least in France, where it was banned in 2007 because inspectors there found long list of squawks.

So why so many pilot error crashes by crews flying the A310 for third-world airlines? Is it shoddy training? Is it simply that the A310 is a cheap, widely used aircraft for thinly endowed airlines? Is it the flying environment in the countries where these planes fly, with fewer, less sophisticated navigational aids and less air traffic control coverage and expertise?

Could the highly automated Airbus design be ill-suited for these crews/ airlines/airports? Or has it saved untold lives by preventing accidents? These are hard questions to answer.

Unlike Air France 447, we should know the answer to this riddle fairly soon, as searchers have already found the black boxes (left).

But the man in charge of the airline claims he knows what happened.

“We never had problems with the plane,” Yemenia Chairman Abdulkalek Saleh Al-Kadi told Bloomberg. “It was purely weather.”

What about the weather? Here is the weather picture (in pilot parlance, a METAR) for MORONI/Prince SAID IBRAHIM (FMCH) airport:

FMCH 292300Z 21025G35KT 9999 FEW020 25/16 Q1017 TEMPO 18015G30KT

Translated – it means the wind was coming out of the southwest (210 degrees) at 25 knots (28 mph) gusting to 35 knots (40 mph). There were a few clouds 2,000 feet. So it was windy and the sky was nearly clear albeit totally dark when the crash occurred just before 2 AM local time, and moonset that night was 12:23 AM.

With that in mind, let’s try to imagine ourselves on that Yemenia flight deck. The Moroni airport has one runway that allows planes to land either toward the northeast (20 degrees) or the southwest (200 degrees). Airplanes nearly always land into the wind, especially when it is blowing as strong as it was at FMCH that night.

But there is only one precision instrument approach to the airport – and it is for the runway that would have forced them to land with a strong tailwind. So the crew was forced to fly a visual approach to runway 20 on a dark night over water – approaching an island that probably does not have many lights blazing at that hour.

To add to the challenge, runway 20 does not have a Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) (left). This is an array of focused light beams that sit beside a runway and give a pilot a visual indication of where his craft is relative to the ideal glide path. A four light PAPI – as you see here will show the pilot two red and two white lights when he/she is at the correct altitude for a safe approach. More red – and you are too low…more white and you are too high. It is truly pilot-proof.

But without those lights on that dark night over the water, the crew would have had a hard time judging how close they were to the ground (or the surface of the sea). It is called “spatial disorientation” and it kills a lot of pilots and passengers (including John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and sister-in-law).

They apparently tried to land once – but aborted the approach – turning around in a “black hole” – itself a perilous maneuver - especially for a crew that would be a bit rattled and distracted by their predicament – and were, no doubt, dog tired after a long day of flying.

It is the perfect recipe for losing focus on your gauges – and forgetting which way is up – and how far is down.

(This commentary was corrected to change the landing direction for planes at Moroni airport to northeast (20 degrees) or the southwest (200 degrees).)

Miles O’Brien is a pilot, airplane owner and freelance journalist who lives in Manhattan. His blog is located at www.milesobrien.com. The opinions expressed are his own.

Air France Flight 447 went down in a giant, dangerous, violent storm that might not have been survivable under any circumstances. But as the Airbus A-330 penetrated that huge system of thunderstorms, sensors, systems and computers on the plane started failing in a rapid cascade that would make any pilot’s head spin – even if he was not in the middle of extreme turbulence flying blind in the night.

The failures likely sealed the fate of the 228 souls sealed inside that thin metal tube as it hurtled through the dark, stormy night - but were they contributing causes with their own roots – or simply the unavoidable outcomes of a decision to fly such a perilous course?

Remember, more often than not, an airliner goes down at the end of a long chain of unrelated, seemingly innocuous decisions, malfunctions, mistakes and external factors. Remove any single link (or even change their sequence) and you have an on-time arrival at Charles de Gaulle.

So how do those system failures fit in the chain of calamity?

Consider for a moment two cockpits. This one is the granddaddy of jet airliners – the Boeing 707 – which first flew paying passengers in 1958. This is the Airbus A-330 – which started flying the line 35 years later. Now quick: which is the more complex airplane?

Looks can be deceiving. Relatively speaking, the 707 is a much simpler airplane – which is different from saying it is simpler to fly. Mastering and monitoring all those steam gauges required an alert three-person crew. In the 707, the burden of the complexity – and the opportunity for error – is on the human side of the instrument panel.

Because humans make mistakes and machines do not, airplane designers have steadily shifted that workload to the other side of the gauges over the years. The A-330 instrument panel is proof they have done a bang up job. It looks simple to fly, doesn’t it? It is.

The joke is that in the not too distant future, flight crews will consist of one human pilot and an ill-tempered junkyard dog. The pilot is there to watch the computers fly the airplane – and the dog is there to bite him if he tries to touch the controls.

Airbus has embraced the philosophy (if not the joke) with zeal. The company builds highly automated “Fly By Wire” (FBW) airplanes. NASA developed the first FBW aircraft in 1972 – an F-8C Crusader. On FBW planes, the movable surfaces on the wings, the horizontal and vertical stabilizer are not connected to the controls on the flight deck with cables, pulleys pushrods and hydraulic actuators as they were on the 707.

Instead, electrical wires transmit the pilot’s commands to hydraulic actuators that move the aero surfaces.

Between the pilot and those surfaces is a bank of computers that are actually flying the plane. The computers are programmed with some strict rules (in fact, Airbus calls them “laws”) designed to assess the human commands from the flight deck – and veto them if they would put the plane in harm’s way. Point the nose too high or too low – or bank too steeply and the computer will correct your bad airmanship. Who’s in charge here?

Pilots like to call their autopilots “George,” old phonetic shorthand for “gyro”, which makes the autopilot work. On an FBW airplane, “HAL” might be more apt.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman: What’s the problem?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
-From 2001: A Space Odyssey

But what happens when the silicon co-pilot gives up the ghost? It gets very ugly - very quickly.

Just before Air France 447 went down, it transmitted a four-minute spurt of text data reporting five failures and 19 warnings via its Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS).

The data is cryptic and we will only know the full scenario if searchers find the black boxes, but we know the autopilot disengaged, the flight control computer failed, warning flags appeared over the primary flight data screens used by the captain and first officer and the rudder moved beyond its limits.

All of it is consistent with a flight control system that was getting some bad information about how fast the airplane was moving through the air. The device that performs this task is called a pitot tube. Pointed in the direction of flight, it measures the relative pressure of air as it flows in. For pilots this is a crucial device, like an EKG for a heart surgeon, I suppose. If you don’t know your airspeed, you can easily stall or overspeed the plane. That’s why the A-330 has three pitot tubes.

They tend to be ice collectors on an airplane flying through precipitation. If they glaze over, or get clogged with crystals, they won’t work – so that is why they are heated. Even so, A-330 pitot tubes were icing up and failing in flight so Airbus issued a “service bulletin” recommending airlines replace them with a newer model that has a more powerful heater. It was not considered urgent, and so the pitot tubes on the doomed plane had not been removed and replaced.

But I would not focus on this too much. The epic thunderstorm system that Air France 447 flew into would have been a huge hail and ice-generating machine that could have overwhelmed even the new and improved pitot tubes if they had been installed.

Regardless, the failure cascade chronicled in the ACARS text message hauntingly matches a 2008 event when an Air Caraibe A-330 flying the same route encountered some serious pitot tube icing. That plane was not in such severe circumstances so the crew was able to get things back under control – and lived to tell the tale.

Now here is a key point to remember: as systems fail in an Airbus, the laws that the computers live by change from “normal”, to “alternate”, to “abnormal alternate” to “direct”. At each stage the computers surrender more authority to the humans – until finally silicon surrenders and the carbon pilots are on their own – with no help at all from HAL – at just the point they need him most.

They were in the dark, getting hammered by turbulence, flying blind, by hand, a plane that was designed and built to be controlled by machines – with human supervision.

Suddenly that deceptively simple cockpit was a riddle so complex it was unsolvable.