Originally Posted by
rickyricks
OK, first post, and not a pilot. But I have read all posts here. Simple question. If the pilots of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 had been flying Airbus A320s would these accidents have happened? I am a frequent passenger (I hate TLAs, especially SLF - we simply pay your wages after all) so I would like to have some objective feedback.
The 737 Max uses one AoA vane, and if it fails a world of hell ensues.
The A320 uses the two best of three vanes, so discarding the faulty one. This makes a fault very unlikely. However, it has happened! 2 froze in a fixed position causing the aircraft to pitch down (it thought those 2 were correct and the 1 truly correct one was incorrect). The pitch down was overcome by the pilots using half backstick. They then worked out the two side by side buttons that needed switching off to correct the situation.
Since then Airbus underwent a huge program to ensure pilots knew how to recognise the problem (you can catch it well well before it pitches you down) and which two buttons to press. Google: OEB48. The issue has now been engineered out and I don't think it happened a second time.
The A320 is a proper FBW aircraft that has been pottering around since the 80s. The max is a conventionally controlled aircraft with a bit of totally inadequate FBW bolted on, to fix a fundamental aerodynamic problem that would be forbidden if the aircraft was new.
And yes, I received sim training to recognise and recover from an OEB48 event.
Incident: Lufthansa A321 near Bilbao on Nov 5th 2014, loss of 4000 feet of altitude