Good evening,
We´ve been running into some strange situations concerning hard landings / severe turbulence lately - and the way how to deal with them. In this frame, I have the following questions
for you:
- With long and less stiff airplane structures (e. g. A340-600), does the flight crew still have a reliable feeling / indication of a hard landing and/or severe turbulence (I am not talking about sink rates at touchdown here)? As of today, the flight crew report is the trigger to start an inspection...
- How do you match FOQA data with ACMS data (load report), especially when the AMCS and the flight crew did not report anything while FOQA later on apparently "detects" an excessive load?
- Having scratched my head over the interpretation of A340 load reports quite a few times last year
, I wonder if we cannot get more reliable aircraft system data in the future:
RVDTs/proximity sensors/pressure sensors on the landing gear detect the actual touchdown time, three axis accelerometers in the centre wing section detect hard landings (accelerometers in the tail can contribute to turbulence data). Data acquisition and storage in approx. 0.1s intervals should be feasible to allow proper assessment of the landing / turbulence. Is it too far fetched?
Looking forward to your comments!
Cheers,
J. V.