Seems a naive viewpoint to me...
Originally Posted by HeavyMetallist
It's not naive at all. Plenty of aircraft have very unpleasant stall/departure/spin characteristics, which no-one in their right mind would want to explore outside a very carefully managed flight test environment. That isn't to say they can't be operated safely, just that their pilots need enough warning to be able to stay away from the stall in the first place.
Fair enough
HeavyMetallist, I didn't make a very good job of saying that it just isn't always possible to avoid the stall... we've had two or more in A-Buses fairly recently. And note too, this aircraft configuration seems to have fairly benign stall characteristics, stays pretty straight - waggles its wings a bit - but doesn't appear to spin or nod seriously. Likewise, from the Turkish Amsterdam experience, that 737 seemed to mush straight in, and was close to a recovery should some more height have been available.
Note! Both to some extent auto-trimming + inattention accidents.
But
please don't think you'll ever avoid stalls 100% - that theory has been proved wrong since the Wrights. In fact, may well have helped cause this accident..
So.. at least... let us talk
seriously about educating pilots about what stalls [really] are,
not to be so scared stiff of them that they yank the stick back and open up the gas every time the very idea enters their head rather than a firm & steady ND, which has
always been the No. 1 lifesaver! (which rarely will do any harm, speed is safety, even near the ground it can be fairly readily re-converted to PE!)
I personally believe the instumentation is poorly conceived... position error should be minimised 'by physical design' not using PE corrections (e.g. probes far fwd away from pressure field around wing or fuse, as in test fl;ight a/c).
Originally Posted by HeavyMetallist
Actually the engineers designing these aircraft aren't stupid, and go out of their way to position static sources where the inherent pressure error is at a minimum over the normal flight envelope of the aircraft - those probes and static plates aren't where they are for convenience. Sure you can do better with a massive probe on the nose or trailing a static cone from the fin (or presumably several for redundancy
), but why got to all that trouble and expense when you can get acceptable accuracy by applying corrections for AoA etc?
I know they're not stupid ... I worked alongside some of them for years. But yes, again, was over the top in trying to make the point that the instrumentation aspects of this accident are not simply (and only) about icing pitots. Many assumptions that were made at original design time have to be re-assessed.. The whole thinking behind some of the most important basic instruments should be looked at again... it can very often be the 'off-design' case that suddenly become 'on-design' to catch you out. Here we have ASI basic (heating icing venting) pitot problem, ASI high alpha position error uncertainty, compunded by an AoA vane that really should be 99.99% foolproof and not reliant on an ASI cutoff, nor prone to any weather related problems itself and from Perpiganan - a lot more robust in basic nature.
Better backups should, indeed must, be de rigeour and not 'optional extras', ne'st pas.. these are civil airliners carrying many hundreds of passengers... lets just thank our lucky stars that many more have not dies in the last few decades from glaring faults that have caused many tens of extremely serious in-flight incidents.. every one a serious accident or a/c loss in the making.
and again, come back from the precipice of l/h and r/h sidesticks. They are NOT a good ergonomic solution