Originally Posted by
CONF iture
Enough to say that the PNF did not touch his sidestick before 10000 feet ... BEA told us.
But you can't infer from that information that the PNF was unaware of what was going on because he wasn't getting any feel through his sidestick. Perhaps he felt that the other pilot was doing what was necessary, perhaps he didn't feel confident enough to intervene (see Birgenair again), perhaps he got absorbed in the "PNF" role to the extent that he was more focused on the ECAM messages than his PFD or - and I know this will be controversial - perhaps he'd fallen asleep and was woken by the alarms. All of which are possible, but we don't know - we'll find out with the arrival of the report.
Originally Posted by
bearfoil
Otherwise you are condemning this man to a blunder: to wit, not being patient with the a/c post auto? At the least it establishes that there may have been confusion re: LAW.
I disagree - saying that the system behaved as designed and that design is logical is categorically *not the same* as blaming the pilot. You're taking a technical aspect of the discussion and trying to make it emotional.
Also, confusion re: Law is (IMO) not the issue. At its most basic (and this is something I've been trying to get through to gums on as well), all you have to know about Law in a pressure situation like the one these guys were in is that you can't rely on hard protections once you're out of Normal Law - the very existence of the Alternate laws is to make sure that the aircraft handles much as it does in Normal Law, and we've had several posts from current FBW Airbus pilots stating that this is indeed the case.
Originally Posted by
BOAC
I still remain suspicious of the limited CVR release from BEA. I cannot accept that ANY pilot, out of line training, would sit idly by while the other pitches up to a large angle and the altimeter (and IVSI?) scream skywards. Why is this part missing? Let me make it clear, I do not wish to hear 'the voices', but where is the crew inter-action?
As I said, I expect this aspect of the case will be causing a very thorough human factors investigation on the part of the BEA - if they didn't release it last month, I suspect it's because they're unsure of the significance of what (if anything) was said.
Instead of all the pilots here proving how clever they are at deciphering the IF....THEN and WHILE....WENDs why do they not address the basic PILOTING illogicality of all this?
I think you'll find that it's been us techies trying to decipher the logic flow rather than the pilots "trying to look clever". And the fact is that occasionally pilots do illogical things. All this back-and-forth isn't really getting us anywhere and is simply giving those with an axe to grind an opportunity to hammer the square peg of this case into the round hole of their preconceptions.
(Also, you're definitely showing your age with the WHILE/WEND comment, as am I by acknowledging that I know what it means...
(I haven't written any Pascal since I finished my A-Levels, and it was pretty old hat even then!))
In early years of "the shift" however, it wasn't "more of the same" in the sense that the shift from piston-to-jets, straight-wing to swept wing, mid-altitude to high altitude flight took beginning in the late 50's was still with a conventional cockpit with conventional controls.
Well - kind of but not really, especially from the late 1960s onwards. The cockpits may have *appeared* conventional but were in fact masking a complex fully-hydraulic system with no direct connection to the flight surfaces in the traditional sense, as some early DC-10 pilots and the crew of JAL123 sadly learned the hard way.
I know you know this by the way, just putting it down in the record.
The accidents were due to slower acceleration (engine and therefore airplane rates - no big 'wash' over the wing from the props, - higher weights, higher altitudes where yaw dampers and Mach number meant something, an extremely clean profile, and the effects of buffet boundaries never encountered in piston flight.
And the aforementioned "loss of hydraulics" accidents in the third generation jets.