Shore Guy
Pitch and Power: Lessons from Air France Flight 447: AINonline
Did the Air France crew simply fail to fly the airplane, as some claim, or were they the victims of a training system that taught them to rely too heavily on computers right up to the moment the impossible overload occurred, like the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001? No one questions whether or not the Air France crew met the certification requirements in place at the time they received their type ratings. But does the type-rating requirement on an Airbus, or any other large aircraft, go far enough into the actual handling characteristics of the aircraft–especially at high altitude–and especially when multiple computer failures occur? (Bolding by me)
Another question keeps nagging in my mind since some time:
Are those actual handling characteristics of FBW aircraft - especially at high altitude- and especially in Alt or Direct LAW known to the manufacturer and to the regulating authorities, and if known, how are they communicated to the training departements and pilots?
Since nearly two years a lot of experts and pilots of this forum (i´dont count myself to those experts) familiar with the aircraft or at least familiar with FBW or engineering FBW are discussing what happens when this and that is going on. Looking back there is lot of disagreement concerning technical and piloting issues, besides the principle PP and importance of AOA. We have searched the web and found uncountable publications related to the aircraft, its normal and abnormal handling procedures, but concerning aerodynamic behavior of the aircraft in high altitude cruise where the ship is flying most of the time, the information is thin to nothing. We know, flying is done by automation, but how and why and by what system seems to be out of the grasp of not only the aircrews. What will the aerodynamic behavior of the aircraft be when AOA exceeds an value, how will CL shift, will there be a tendency of the nose to drop or will it stay high, what will the stabilizer effectiveness be, will ss roll input induce opposite roll due to missing yaw compensation, and how will a degradation of the FBW systems due to failures influence this natural aerodynamic behavior of the aircraft? If some and a lot more points are known to the crew in such a situation, only then wil they be able to judge the effectiveness of control inputs (like nose down stick, how long, how much nose down.....) and have a better chance to do the correct actions.
I wouldn´t have survived in my fighter, would i have been trained and tested on such a minimalistic scale.