Originally Posted by
Mad (Flt) Scientist
With the best will in the world, the FCOM (or any other document, or group of documents even) cannot be a complete or perfect description of an aircraft's systems. There can be subtleties in any unusual condition which can make the necessarily general statements in something like an FCOM inapplicable, never mind that people can make minor errors in phrasing which might not be apparent except in an "edge case". Once you also get into the possibility of a non-normal condition, the FCOM description is a starting point but by no means the final word. Compare, for example, the amount of pages in an FCOM dealing with a given system to the number of pages in the full certification data set for that same system, and it's clear that there have to be things omitted or simplified.
That's not to say that I believe either the FCOM-described or FFS-experienced behaviour to be not representative - I just do not know that it necessarily is. And I would hope that if something like this behaviour is deemed potentially causal, or part of the "chain", that it would actually be verified by test (assuming test data doesn't actually already exist, of course)
Come on guys. Select the G/L down on your next flight at 280 kts, decelerate below 260 kts and wait for the dunlops.