Originally Posted by
augustusjeremy
Takata,
But remember that if a pitch down ever occurred - something equally controversial - the crew would be put in extreme stress - not understanding what really was going on.
Let's also recall that between 2:11 and 2:12 (2:13 ?) zulu that night something happened that caused a brief interruption in the ACARS message transmission.
Are you refering to a pich down in the Qantas fashion (under AP control), or to a nose down induced by the flying pilot (under human control) ? The Qantas nose down has probably nothing to do with the AP¨447 case (except for possible weird reactions of the AP just before it throws the towel), but for a good model, I would rather refer to the Air Caraïbe report (of great safety interest). Take the same Air Caraïbe situation, manageable using pich and thrust (or by switching off the A/THR & fixing a N1 value by applying the "severe turbulence" proc. but it doesn't seem it was the case for AF 447) and concentrating on the trajectory, but just assume that the AF 447 took the opposite decision that was made when stall alarms sounded in the cockpit (the stall alarms were ignored by the Air Caraïbe CPT, although the procedure was to take them in account). It is just about making the assumption that the AF SOPs were applied strictly in this case (in a similar context to the Air Caraïbe incident, with stall alarms): what happens next, at high altitude, if the crew attention was also focussed on the failing nav, on the SOPs implementation, on failures very difficult to understand and isolate, and on the AP reanimation ?
Jeff