Originally Posted by
infrequentflyer789
I almost agree - from an engineering perspective the gradual degradation makes sense (and Boeing must have htought so too as theirs is practically the same), but if pilots aren't trained in all the modes, they might as well be labelled "crash mode".
I still don't see what's so complex about Normal Law = protected versus other laws = not protected though, which is in reality the only factor that matters at a fundamental level to the pilot.
All you really need to remember is that if you're not in Normal Law you have to be as careful with your bank and pitch angles as you would be in a conventional (unprotected) aircraft. The protections are what allow FBW Airbii to perform some pretty wild maneouvres at airshows, but even if you hand-fly the line in Normal Law it's unlikely you'll ever see the protections kicking in, because the trigger parameters for those protections are considerably beyond anything you'd normally do with paying SLF down the back.
And in one sense it is worse than above - someone (AF...) failed to train pilots at all in hand flying at cruise in alt law (and quite possibly in any law). Between SOPs and RVSM rules etc., it appears todays line pilots also get no experience of hand flying in cruise either.
Result is that if A/P drops out for any reason (and on any type) in cruise, pilot is handed an a/c he has quite possibly never actually flown at this speed or altitude. Throw in the event happening at night middle of ocean, middle of bad weather, and the result isn't that suprising. Between mfr, airilines, and regulator, no one thought this lack of training / experience was a bad idea, or at least no one did anyting about it
This is my primary bone of contention - without this factor the rest of the theorising is somewhat moot.
Saying that this was the eventual result of an insidious industry-wide pattern of laxity and procrastination is not "protecting Airbus".
Agreed [for what my opinion is worth, which is zero] - stall warning / stick shaker is way too crude, no difference between "you are nearly stalled" and "you are stalled by 30+ degrees".
Maybe so, but was it not reasonable to assume that by having a warning several degrees of AoA before the stall that a properly trained crewwould do something about it at that stage?
Originally Posted by
infrequentflyer789
The biggest problem with replaceing them turned out to be actually getting enough (decent) pitots out of the supply chain.
Now I didn't know that - have you got a source for that just so I've got it on file?
Since that takes "too difficult" out of the usual suspects for procrastination, it was most likely "too expensive"... as ever.
Well - possibly, but it raises the spectre of something else that happens in mass production. Ultimately you get the contractors to bid and the ones with the best chance of fulfilling the contract at the required price will get it. If Goodrich could not provide the yields (presuming they were making them as fast as they could) then throwing money at them couldn't get them to make the things faster, so it looks like the Thales AB probes were borne out of necessity. Even if Airbus and EASA said "Replace these now" - if Goodrich couldn't supply them then the replacement work would have been slowed down anyway.
It does rather beg the question of how they worked the AD after the accident though (unless the AD was simply a political fudge to make it look like something was being done, while the replacement programme played out as it did before).