The accident of flight AF447 Rio-Paris: a case study for HCI research

On 2009, June 1st, flight AF447 from Rio to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The safety and legal investigations have concluded that human factors played an important role in the accident. Observing that a number of elements from the report written by the French Office of Investigations for Civil Aviation Safety may be assimilated to known concepts from HCI, we propose to use the report as a case study for HCI research. After introducing the aeronautical vocabulary required to its understanding, we extract the HCI-related elements from the report, and assimilate, organize and translate them into conceptual frameworks from the Model of Action and Epistemology. We hope to foster further research aiming at a more formal modeling of the accident, or to foster the identification of possible improvements of the onboard systems.