My response is from the PoV of a passenger.
Originally Posted by nervous SLC
You are in cruise, albeit in bumpy weather. Depending on the breaks, you are 11 seconds from an unrecoverable stall. That is the message that bearfoil is articulating in message 1747.
(any subliminal Seattle affect??).
Is he wrong? if so, why?
You forgot the ice. (Is it in your glass of bourbon whiskey?
Too expensive by half, but a better value per dollar than the beer airlines serve.
)
I'd say your read of his post is wrong.
Why? (It isn't the three second violation).
Depending on the breaks, you are 11 seconds from an unrecoverable stall.
No, unless you assume very anomalous values for "the breaks" on passenger flights. Depending on the breaks ... a whole host of strange things can happen. Some jackwad could set off a bomb in his underwear, and not screw it up this time. Some manureforbrains could drop his alertness and allow a suitcase full of explosives into the cargo hold, a la Pan Am flight 103. What breaks are you worried about?
I'll also point out that "unrecoverable" is a premature verdict, based on the idea that in this mishap, it wasn't recovered. You cannot make the a priori assumption that the stall was unrecoverable ... among other reasons, when? When in the event chain was recovery less, or more, likely?
Depending upon what operational lessons the BEA can filter out of this crash, the odds of a repeat go down considerably, and the odds were remote in the first place. (Obviously, greater than zero ... )
The problem isn't just bumpy weather, the way your rephrase his post, which is somehting that you or I can be subject to at any flight altitude. The problem is a cascading series of untoward factors combining together in anomalous fashion. A few of the preconditions included ice of some sort (presumably ice crystals found only at high altitudes).
Oh, by the way, a stall
can also occur on a sunny smooth day. So that risk "depends" on a lot of factors. It just isn't very likely when you board your next 737 or A320 on your next trip, and by not likely, the odds are significantly smaller, by orders of magnitude, than you getting into an automobile accident, your fault or someone else's.
I invite you to look up the Swiss Cheese model of aircraft mishaps.
Swiss cheese model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Add a few crackers, and you can have a nice snack ... just switch from bourbon to vodka or gin, on the rocks.
By the way:
The Seattle Effect
Is that what you mean by Seattle Effect?
or this?
The Seattle Effect- Excerpt from "Networking Futures: the Movements against Corporate Globalization" (Duke Univ. Press, 2008) | The Real Battle in Seattle
The reference appears a
non sequitur.