Originally Posted by
dr dre
Maybe we should throw GT, or any other hero here who wants to blame a crew who can’t defend themselves anymore, into the sim and recreate the conditions those pilots (I’m thinking more ET) experienced, and see if any of these heroes have the physical strength to physically pitch the aircraft up when the stab has trimmed so far nose down.
After having seen some videos where crews in a sim were presented with similar conditions and struggled to maintain control it would be difficult, even for experienced crews with prior knowledge of what was going to happened as opposed to a crew who was presented with a surprise event that didn’t match any of their prior training.
Hi DRE
Dont know if you’ve read the report carefully but ET was way over VMO in a dive at full thrust when “they didn’t have the physical strength........”. Nobody would.
The 737 might still get out of that using ELEC TRIM but it has to be held for long enough to wind the trim right back to circa 4 divisions, and Then switches off. That’s going to take about a minute or more. I’m pretty sure the guys had not been trained in this. Looking at FDR there were a few times early on when they did trim ANU but stopped- and we don’t know why.
They will have used trim in that way on a full power go around when you need to trim AND for many seconds to overcome the heavy nose up thrust couple, and the flaps moving from 40-15. It’s a prolonged input - until you are back in trim. Same idea.
Sorry, but of course you don’t let any of this happen in the first place by going switches of while still more or less in trim and with speed and power under control. That never happened because airspeed Unreliable was never accomplished and it’s a memory drill.
The problem we have here is in my view that the crew didn’t really understand that those switches are your life saver after you have it back in trim, using ELEC trim to accomplish that. Not little blips of trim, but prolonged continuous trim input. I know I’ve been around , but when I was trained the instructors called it the “Jesus Switches” because if you don’t turn them off pdq you will indeed meet Jesus.
Here is our problem. The handing down of training that has been accumulated over decades is being lost so fast in the scramble to pretend that a plane is a PlayStation with wings. Airbus designer a few years ago said “ my concierge could fly an Airbus. Don’t think so- AF447?
And we cant forget that this self same problem was handled in Lionair Bali Jakarta the day before successfully, so it wasn’t inevitable.
just a few thoughts from an older pilot, but not a bolder one!
thanks for your post
RGuy