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Old 18th Aug 2011, 02:07
  #3024 (permalink)  
airtren
 
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Originally Posted by kwh
I'm not a pilot, but what I get from this thread is that the only guy in the cockpit who knew what control inputs were being made was the guy making them. The problem wasn't that HE had insufficient feedback, it was that he was pulling back on his stick, and the other pilot and the captain when he got back to the cockpit couldn't see that he was doing so, but possibly assumed that he was doing the opposite.
The info you've mentioned is inferred from the BEA Report, and the way the AB stick is functioning. You could check to see if your own conclusion based on same sources would be a match....
Clearly one solution would have been for the pilot who was flying the thing to tell everybody else on the cockpit what he was doing so that they had a chance to tell him he was doing it wrong.
It seems that he misinterpreted the neutral position of the stick, and consequently. what he thought is Neutral, was NU, so most of his work, around the Neutral was, in fact around NU.

Therefore, any verbal communication coming from the PF would have not been of real help, as it would have gone through the translation of his own senses, or in other words, his misperception of the Neutral position of the stick.

Anybody who has ever flown a computer game with a keyboard will surely be familiar with one of those little 'stick position' indicators that shows you where the joystick would be now if you had one... so, would a small circular display with a glowing 'stick position' display in the middle of the glass cockpit, showing the stick was 'being pulled back' have made it obvious to everybody else on the flight deck what control inputs the pilot flying was making? A lot easier to do (in software) than retrofitting force feedback, all the information is obviously available... presumably you'd only need/want it in certain circumstances, but would it have prevented this crash assuming one of the other humans in the cockpit had known the right thing to do but didn't realise that the pilot flying was doing the wrong thing?
This would have been one way to directly and unambiguously transfer the pertinent stick info to the PNF and Captain.

Last edited by airtren; 18th Aug 2011 at 02:22.
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