Originally Posted by
lederhosen
the co-pilot flying by hand allowed a high rate of descent to build and take him well below the glide
At 1927:59 hrs, the controller issued the air traffic control instruction to head towards 340° and descend to 3,000 ft AMSL
At 1930:42 hrs, the CVR had recorded the automatic altitude announcement Two Thousand Five Hundred. At the same time the autopilot was disengaged.
My underlines. It looks, from the text, as if the autopilot was engaged until after the aircraft descended through 3,000 ft.
But looking at the FDR plot (Fig 5), the autopilot was disengaged at about 1930:24, not 18 seconds later as the text states. That's very bad.
If this report was to serve any purpose, and it could have done, it needed to provide other parameters, which would enable much better understanding, including downlinked selected altitude information and autoflight modes.
However, I don't like these guessing games very much and we are heading straight into WYLFIWYF territory (
https://www.erikhollnagel.com/oneweb...t_analysis.pdf).