Originally Posted by
gulliBell
Please excuse my ignorance with the question, but is it possible to fly a complex commercial jet airliner like this when the flight instruments go whacky by pretending it's a Cessna 172, set the power manually, fly an attitude manually, trim it manually, and look outside? Or is that too difficult for pilots of push button planes now?
And in this instance where an air data computer (or whatever gizmo) was replaced as a fix for a defect entered into the technical log, is a maintenance assessment flight required to actually check that the fault has been fixed?
Basically if you look at the previous posts specific to both memory items and the QRH that's more or less what your describing, you start by turning off the various levels of automation and then setting pitch and power. So the real question is what exactly was going on? Was there a compounding technical issue or possibly a slow response that caused a structural failure (overspeed with flaps still down for example) or did the crew get distracted for some reason or fail to follow the recommended procedures? The simple truth is that by itself the UAS should not have been enough to cause a loss of control without some other variables at work. This did not happen at cruise to an unsuspecting crew but was a known issue with an engineer onboard and was in fact an expected event if in fact the 4 previous flights all had issues. The limited factual information makes it somewhat baffling till we get the CVR transcript...