Originally Posted by protectthehornet
air rabbit
my whole point is this...if a pilot wants to stall a plane, he shouldn't have to say: pretty please let me stall.
and sully wanted to arrest the descent a bit...but couldn't because the plane thought he might get too close to the stall.
ok...you shouldn't be fULLY stalled in this situation, but a few knots closer to the stall and he could have cut his descent rate in half.
I agree with you! Of course, I'll probably never know for sure, but I'm under the impression that Sullenberger
wanted to pull the nose up more, but the airplane was going to have no part of that.
The point I was making - not disagreeing with your comment - was that while Sullenberger was very likely trying to do just what you said - the computers on board were controlling AoA to maintain it where the computers thought was best. Had there been thrust available, the back pressure on the side stick would have had the computers adjust the pitch attitude UP, but the computers would have added thrust to maintain that AoA. In that there was NO thrust, the computers wouldn't allow an increase in pitch, as that would have allowed the airspeed to decrease, putting the airplane closer to the critical AoA -- apparently a "no-no" as programmed by the engineers.
Whether or not I think that is a mistake is probably not of interest to too many folks. However, there are tons of "bus drivers" out there who will extol the virtues of what the airplane's computers will do FOR the pilot, not TO the pilot. I have to agree with most of what they would be saying - but, while leaving the "driving" to a
circuit board isn't terribly bad in general (I'm not as consistent as "George") -- leaving the
decsion making to such an entity IS something I'm NOT very comfortable doing.