Airbus Warns Against Reducing Pilot's Role After Germanwings Crash

By Robert Wall 

PARIS--The chief of Airbus's jetliner division, Fabrice Brégier, on Friday cautioned against downgrading the role of pilots in flying airliners in the wake of the Germanwings plane crash.

Flight 9525--an Airbus A320--slammed into the French Alps in late March in an apparent co-pilot suicide that killed all 150 people onboard, raising questions about whether greater automation could prevent a repeat incident.

Deutsche Flugsicherung, the German air-traffic controller, this week said it was developing a system that could take over the controls of an aircraft in case of an emergency and put it on a programed course for safe landing.

"Having pilots in the loop will still have a critical role in assuring aircraft security," Mr. Brégier told reporters on Friday, warning that hasty decisions by regulators in such situations could backfire.

The comments came as relatives of the victims of the Germanwings flight gathered in Cologne, Germany, for a memorial service.

Germany and the Cologne-based European Aviation Safety Agency have announced plans to explore a response to the crash.

Mr. Brégier said any decision should be made at an international level rather than just in Europe.

Airbus also is working on upgrades to its aircraft to reduce the occurrence of onboard sensor malfunctions that have become the subject of safety bulletins by authorities after other incidents, Mr. Brégier said.

Airbus is pursuing improvements to pitot tubes with suppliers, he said. Pitot tubes--sensors that help indicate a plane's airspeed--can sometimes get blocked. In 2009, clogged pitot tubes on an Airbus A330 led to a series of events that caused the crash of Air France Flight 447, killing all 228 onboard.

Pilots should be able to recover planes that encounter such conditions, though that hasn't always been the case. A senior Airbus safety official recently urged revamping pilot training world-wide to improve manual-flying proficiency and other cockpit skills that have been de-emphasized over the years.

The European Aviation Safety Agency this week issued a safety alert to pilots to remind them how to recover from such situations.

Write to Robert Wall at [e-mail]

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