PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Pilot Commands TOGA; A320 lands anyway
View Single Post
Old 31st May 2001, 16:56
  #26 (permalink)  
Heavens Gate
Guest
 
Posts: n/a
Post

To Flight Saftey:

My initial reply was solely of technical nature. You wrote about the a/c being tricked into believing the AOA was too high, and about selecting TOGA and a suitable GoAround attitude below 200 ft will get you climbing in anything but an A320.
Remembering the doomed L1011 at Dallas (as well as many others) selecting TOGA and the proper attitude WILL NOT get you safely away from the ground if the energy and height required is less than the energy and height available. In case the a/c was rapidly approaching the stall AOA, adding further UP-elevator would only serve to increase the drag and trigger the stick-shaker in a non-Airbus fly-by-wire a/c (the pusher being disabled at such a low altitude). Therefore your choices would be limited to hitting the ground as controlled as possible on the shaker or stalling, going down uncontrolled, which the AOA-protection tries to avoid.
Please consider this reply again as technical, not as a pro-Airbus statement. But I have been part of some accident investigations in the past, and I can safely say that AOA-protection would have prevented some of those unfortunate accidents, as instant energy just isn,t available close to the stall - no matter how you got there.

Best regards ...