STS comment
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Salute!
my comment re: STS was based upon the FCOM description I have and FCeng84 comments and most inportantly, the log entry if the Lion flight that preceded the fatal one.
The pilot stated that the STS was working backwards. Yep. Sucker should have been trimming nose up as speed increased, right?. Of course,he was dealing with the shaking yoke and a slew of warning lights. Still did a great job for longer than most of us.
I can understand a good design that has a bit less speed/AoA stability than older planes like the DC-3, Constellation, 707, and on. We even have "help" for coping with dutch roll and such via our yaw dampers and even pitch dampers on some planes. But seems to me that the 737 either needs a waiver and not a kludge system that is implicated in two fatal accidents, or the FAR requirements need to be improved.
Someplace on pPrune there's a story of the initial Airbus FBW certification and how the speed stability issue was handled. Unless you flew the thing in "direct law", the control laws were doing all kinds of things to "help" you. Most important is that the 'bus was certified with no feedback of any kind to the control stick. You can pull back at any speed and have zero "feel" for the aero forces on your elevator or having to use more deflection at high AoA. Need a 'bus driver here, as actual stick displacement might have a different slope depending on AoA. i.e. at high AoA it might take more degrees of displacement for the same AoA change as at low AoA, even though the system is basically a gee command with attitude components.
Gums.....