Originally Posted by
ChrisVJ
Whether it was realistic or not the film "Sullenberg" gave a very good responsre to the question. When briefed all the pilots were able to return the sim to the airport. When not briefed all failed and if they did not choose the river passengers would have died.
I would hope that whatever the failure an unbriefed pilot should be able to achieve stable flight so the problem could be diagnosed or a diversion. Obviously failure may be a learning experience but in real life it is a failure.
We don't expect any line pilot in a real situation to make a decision as perfect as the one a committee of aerospace engineers and test pilots could make after careful review of the recordings, of the situation, and a thorough thought process including meetings and simulator tries.
We expect them to try their best to continue trying to manage the situation and make decisions that are just good enough. By going as far as possible to save everyones lives.
A relatively quick decision to go in the Hudson was the decision made that day, and apart from a few idiots, everybody praised it.
During my initial training we had lots and lots of crappy situations in the MEP sim and even in the aircraft, and we always managed to land back safely.
In the aircraft we flew in simulated IMC with simulated partial panel (basically a curtain and/or imc goggles on the window and post it notes on the instruments), with no horizon, no variometer, no gyro, sometimes even no altimeter and no airspeed for a short time..), just trim and power presets and it worked. Sometimes down to cat II ILS minima or NDB minima (the instructor was visual.. for obvious safety reasons). In the sim we could have several emergencies at a time as well : engine failure, diversion due to weather, alternator failure on the good engine..
Except the exceptionnal one time where the sim crashed due to a bug during an engine failure : the instructor relaunched the exercise to avoid this negative training, by showing the trainee that he had reacted correctly.
All that under single pilot IMC operations.
This type of training could lead to overconfidence rather than fear, since it always ended in a safe landing despite conditions that literally never happen.
Regarding the simultaneous complete pitot blocking :
Any instructor at this flight school would tell that a pilot trained at their flight school should be able to identify the unreliable airspeed situation by noticing the abnormal speed acceleration when related with the rate of climb and power available.
[A job that could also be done with a few lines of code : comparing the power input to the aircraft (power of engines minus drag power) with the power input sensed in terms of mass*acceleration*speed+weight*climbspeed, and triggering an "unreliable airspeed" if a difference higher than X was sensed during more than Y seconds, Airbus being able to very finely tune X and Y thanks to big data analysis] [They could also trigger a "suspicious airspeed" alarm based on the fact that total pressure remains constant during more than Z seconds..]
It looks like a case where Airbus is not confident about a case where their aircraft is very vulnerable.