Jackonicko
I hear what you've all said about Delta wings stalling, but looking at the altitude/airspeed/AoA traces you can see that the aircraft effectively stalled and spun once airspeed decayed/alpha increased beyond a certain critical point.
How can you see that?
The reason I keep digging in this stall thing (which by now we should agree that Concorde doesn't) is because it somewhat implies pilot error. You have no facts to support vortex bursting, which as far as I can read from the
Vortex bursting thread would require a hypothically high AoA, and the aircraft would probably become unstablile before reaching that AoA. All you know is that for unknow reasons the aircraft rolled over and crashed (speculation as to why may be e.g. fire damage to the control surfaces). This does
not necessarily imply that the wings were not producing lift. However, as
Covenant mentioned it is academic to discuss lift if it doesn't act in the opposite direction of gravity (i.e when roll is greather than 90 deg).
At point 8 (181 Kts, angle of bank going from 38° to 93°, AoA up to 19.5°) it looks as if he'd lost it - and to my uneducated eye, had over-banked and tried to 'hold' the nose up.
See above, and atleast support speculation with
some facts. Otherwise one might just aswell say that aliens shot it down with a laserbeam
At that point, the left wing had (sorry) seemingly 'stalled'.
If talking about a conventional wing (that stalls
), the right wing would stall first in a left turn because it has the highest AoA.
3) Why not turn gently towards Le Bourget much earlier (the direction the aircraft wants to go, and to keep it straight you're using right rudder)?
Are you suggesting that they should have let it sideslip towards Le Bourget (keeping the wings level and let the nose drift)? That is not the most aerodynamic efficient way of flying.
After 150+ post on this topic, I for one, feel more and more confident that the accident was indeed caused by the tireburst and subsequent fire. If it was the fire damage that caused the crash, overweight, engine shut down, etc. would not have been factors that directly contributed to the crash.