Stalling or mach tuck at cruise altitude caused by a sudden and significant change in wind strength / direction could result in a departure from controlled flight and could cause a significant loss of altitude. I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily what happened to the Qantas A333, just pointing out some basic aerodynamic principles.
Does anyone know what altitude the A333 was cruising at and what the margin between stall speed and critical mach number would be at that altitude?
at FL3xx , can't we take for sure that the acft was flown with both AP and ATR ON and that these systems on new generation acft like A330 are supposed to cope with CAT without ending up in a spin or a dive bombing run ?? if some part of these sytems was U/S or OFF, that's however another story to know how george is going to react
(an A310 romanian crew had a very bad experience years ago on final to orly
)
anyway great airmanship from crew
and wishes of quick recovery to the roaring forties
