Easy's first A319

[Norman Stanley Fletcher]

I may be of some assistance here. The legendary AF crash occurred because of foolishness on behalf of the pilot. Sadly this one accident, simply because it was shown so spectacularly on film, made everyone think Airbuses were death traps.

The A320 family has, among numerous other protections, a facility called 'Alpha Floor'. In essence this facility automatically selects TOGA power regardless of the position of the thrust levers if it detects a low energy situation. It becomes active when the the alpha (aoa) of the aircraft decays below Alpha Prot (the angle of attack when the sidestick starts to control alpha directly) and before the stall aoa known as Alpha Max. As all Airbus pilots will know it is not possible to command an aoa more than Alpha Max in normal operation regardless of how hard you pull back on the side stick. Nonetheless it is clearly not desireable to have a very high aoa and low energy, hence Alpha Floor kicks in to provide the necessary power to get out of the situation.

What the AF pilot did not realise was that Alpha Floor is only active from take-off to 100' radio on landing, and when he did his fancy manoeuvre he was below 100'! Therefore Alpha Floor never kicked in as he expected. Being an Airbus it just sat there at a high (but totally safe!) aoa moving gracefully just above the runway. By the time the AF pilot realised that he was not going to get TOGA power automatically through the Alpha Floor facility he manually selected TOGA by pushing the levers forward. The engines spooled up as normal (fairly slowly like all jet engines) and because he had used up so much runway he was unable to get a positive rate of climb on to climb above the trees at the end of the runway. He therefore flew in controlled flight straight into the trees with the engines in the process of spooling up as normal!

The difference between an Airbus and a Boeing is that had this spectacular manoeuvre been attempted in a Boeing the aircraft would have crashed at the the start of the runway instead of at the end! The bottom line is the guy blew it in spades and it was nothing to do with the aircraft which did its best for him.

I hope that very basic explanation is some help to people in explaining how even the most superb of aircraft cannot provide indefinite protection from overwhelming foolishness. For what it is worth, from what has been described here the 'flypast' alluded to previously was simply a standard go-around and sounded totally safe and normal to me.