Lyman
ach time the guff gets to this point, someone needs to remind us of the conditions, the failures, and the not well understood UAS problems.
Exactly!
Let us try to be fair:
Simulators (Airbus test pilots have sais so) do not simulate in a useful way for training crews, piloting sensations at high altitude: that means the fact that a small stick input will give much more important nose up or down effect than at a lower altitude. How do you train then as airlines do not encourage hand flying in high altitude cruise?
Protections (although here, as we do not know exactly when the alternate law came in, this may be out of the subject) kick in with the same enthusiasm at 2000 ft and at 35000 ft in a heavy, rear centered airplane, with no regard at all for the flight envelope: see the Caracas A340 incident.Unbeliavable to me: you may have a 1,75 positive g "protection" at 39000 ft!
Speed indications coming back but not trusted. Understandable.
No AOA indicator. (I flew with one in the A300 for years, and, believe me, it is useful).
Nose up from 0 to max 10 degrees, variable, with an angle of attack (unknown to the pilots) of 40 degrees! Difficult to guess for them that their AOA is so high.
Trim wheel: never looked at, never used manually in thousands of hours..
Variometer unreadable in those planes, when leaving "normal values" and probably not read in the chaos.
Only the altimeters unwinding at full speed were an indication of what was really happening to them. I do not say they did very well. I say, without doubt, that they were not test pilots and that the situation was totally out of reach of the training they were provided.
Their experience was onlyA320 A340 A320...Where would they have learnt unuasual positions ?
I have a lot of hours, and have learnt to be really modest. Let us all give a thought to the very many, distressing missing informations in the BEA report. I hope the next one will be a little more complete.