Jacko
The problem I have with your current position is that it
assumes that the pilot was intentionally trading airspeed for altitude. That it something no one will ever know, so no matter how long you keep asking the question, you will never get an answer, at least not one that should satisfy your journalistic integrity.
For what it's worth, my
opinion is that for most of the time, Marty was successfully performing a very delicate balancing act and maintaining approx. 200 ft at approx 200 kts. Had all things remained equal, I am confident that he would have been able to put Concorde down in Le Bourget in a more or less controlled manner.
Sadly they didn't, and what happened after that was, I believe, not related to his control input, but to further degradation in the aircraft's performace from whatever cause (and there are many candidates).
To continue to ask what other pros would do in that situation may eventually elicit and answer, but if it does, the answer should be treated with scepticism. No one know what they would do in that situation because no one really knows exactly what that situation was. I am convinced that something happened to make a difficult but stable situation suddenly very unstable and ultimately unrecoverable. I am also convinced that, whatever it was, it was outside the sphere of influence of the pilot.
If we were concerned with "what ifs", maybe we could still ask what would have happened if the FE had not shut down #2 engine... but that's another story (and, I'm sure, another long thread!
)
[edited for the inevitable typo]
[ 07 September 2001: Message edited by: Covenant ]