Originally Posted by
Lyman
All aircraft will STALL. Defining the way the controls are managed is irrelevant.
Amen to that. Has wings, can stall. Cannae change the laws of physics...
The bottom line? If things are going well, and the Airbus is in NORMAL LAW it almost certainly will not STALL.
Yep. Although I
suspect there are actually ways to do it - but that you'd have to try really hard.
Once things are broken, however, particularly air data sensors, all bets are off. Perpignan is probably the classic - 2 stuck AOAs, correct one voted out. Until SW AOA reached at which point normal law decides something isn't right, bails out and hand over to the real pilots who then mess up the recovery with a secondary stall.
No, it didn't stall in Normal Law, or even at the transition - Normal Law bailed a few seconds before. Like you say - that's entirely irrelevant and doesn't get normal law off the hook.
The point is that
if things are broken you can go from
1. normal-law-protected to
2. un-protected at the edge of the envelope to
3. stalled
in a matter of seconds. In various scenarios (several I can think of, and there will be more). Arguing about whether or not stall can happen in (1) deflects attention from where it needs to be, namely can you handle (2) and stop it turning into (3), and also recover from (3) if necessary.