Salute!
TNX for the support, Chris, and I was "buying time", as you suggest, until we see the data resulting from the successful search.
Perhaps we wait a bit, OTOH, the new thread we shall soon have when the data becomes available will require some background concerning the stability issue, ya think? So before I shut up and wait some more.....
There must be a reason that the French claimed early on that the plane hit the water in a fairly level attitude without a high forward vector. The only scenario this old pilot can envision is a deep stall, not a conventional stall/spin.
- There is no requirement to enter a deep stall by pointing the nose up at a 70 or 80 deg angle and "waiting" until speed gets so low that you lose pitch authority. In the Viper's case, you can get "parked" if you are already slow and then do something stupid and/or have an external loadout that interferes with "normal" aerodynamic characteristics that the flight control computers were designed to handle. The "bus" would not likely be rolling or skidding as the fighters do at low speed, but abnormal flight conditions could certainly conflict with all the control laws the "bus" "normally" applies.
- The test pilot commentary shows he was at 100% mil power ( no 'burner/reheat/augmentation). So power won't get you out of a deep stall. The drag at high AoA is significantly higher than the thrust available. Further, you are risking an engine stall if you monkey about with the power under those conditions.
- The comment by another pilot about "sitting in a stall" for a bit until things stabilize or get worse is a good point. The test pilot talks about this, and the Viper control laws were verified when the yaw/roll moments were brought under control by the computers and the jet just sat there in the stall and things seemed benign other than extreme vertical velocity and basic "loss of control", heh heh.
- The Viper's "stabilators" were called that because they acted like the basic horizontal stab and the elevator. As Yeager discovered, moving the whole surface is a good thing, maybe even necessary, when supersonic. It's akin to moving the basic stab with the jackscrew or other mechanism for the commercial jets. Additionally, the Viper stabilators moved independently and were used to help roll under certain conditions ( good example to be provided when we get the "final" thread going). In fact, all of our control surfaces moved independently.
- It will be interesting to see the AoA data plot, and I did not realize the plane did not have a cockpit display. If the speed sensors were FUBAR, then all the thing had working for it were AoA and the attitude sensors.