A330 Autothrottle
Hi,
I recently watched a documentary about the fatal Air France flight from Rio to Paris. At one point they mention that one of the reasons that may have lead to a high altitude stall was the fact that the pilots did not immediately respond to a potential loss of airspeed indication due to severe icing on the pitot tubes. This resulted in a number of errors, including both the autopilot and the autothrottles to be disengaged. Supposedly, the pilots should have trimmed the aircraft for a 5º pitch angle and manually set the throttles to 80% to ensure a safe airspeed. Apparently it may have taken the pilots a while to execute this as they were extremely busy troubleshooting a large number of critical errors. The documentary then puts forward the fact that on the A330, when the autothrottles are engaged, the actual physical thrust levers do not move, and one must look at a screen off to the side showing the power settings in order to see what is going on. They say that had the thrust levers moved (as they do in other aircraft) in response to the autothrottle settings, this would have visually cued the pilots to address this particular situation more promptly. My question is actually pretty simple (all the stuff above is just what made me think about it). What happens when you disengage the authrottle at a different setting than the one indicated by the levers? Does the thrust respond immediately to the position of the levers? Is the pilot supposed to readjust the thrust levers close to the setting the thrust is currently at? Why would a modern aircraft like the A330 not have automatically moving levers? Is there any advantage to this? Thanks, and sorry for the length of this post.