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Old 14th Mar 2010, 17:47
  #497 (permalink)  
Machinbird
 
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HN39
First "super-stall" is not a well defined term. Perhaps it should be defined as an aircraft that will lock itself into an irrecoverable stall (one that cannot be recovered from no matter what combination of control inputs are made).
Deep stalls are generally achievable on swept wing aircraft by virtue of the pitch up characteristic at stall. Deep stalls have no place in airline flying. Airbus has built a series of protections into their flight control system to prevent achieving a deep stall. In Alternate law and Direct Law, the protections revert to IAS basis instead of AOA. It may be that even in Normal law, erroneous airspeed indications that pass the validation criterea could create a stalled condition. When a system such as the airspeed input is triple redundant, it is obviously very critical that it remain functional. It is pretty clear from the ACARS messages that it did not.
That is a certification issue that has been fixed (perhaps) by pitot probe diversity between manufacturers.
If the initial phase of erroneous airspeeds was biased to the high side, the aircraft would begin decelerating and the THS would be trimming nose up. The only clue would be an increasing deck angle and reduced power settings.. If at this point the "pinball show" commenced there would not be a lot of time to sort it all out before the aircraft decelerated into a stall.
Would you care to comment on the availability of the following 3 parameters in the A330 cockpit. I have never been in an A330 cockpit, but from other postings, it appears that there is a multifunction display that can display engine parameters or other data. I suspect that things like THS position and AOA also fall into this category and that none of them are displayed full time in the cockpit.
Not trying to be a wise guy here. Others have posed similar questions. Just trying to assemble the evidence into a sensible scenario.
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