Originally Posted by
TTex600
As someone else stated, airline management has mistakenly decided that the protections/etc are a substitute for stick and rudder skills.
Hurrah - he gets it!
In my short six years flying narrowbody Airbii, I've realized that the airplane demands a masters degree level of understanding in order to deal with any situation other than normal.
Really? The fact that a planeload of people got out of the Hudson River cold, wet, but very much alive would tend to go against that suggestion, especially given that that A320 involved was not much more than a sophisticated glider for the few minutes it was in the air, and those few minutes were all the crew had to troubleshoot and land it.
I mean sure, ECAM output can look very dense and not especially human-friendly, but it's no different than Boeing or MD's equivalent, and you don't need to process pages of ECAM to keep the thing in the air - that's your colleague's lookout, and he or she will tell you what you need to know.
In A447's case, the pilots were faced with the need to properly evaluate the situation, to understand what changed in the 330's flying characteristics depending on the exact failure/control law downgrade, to hand fly an aircraft with different flight characteristics than they had likely EVER experienced, etc.
Well, seeing as they apparently hadn't manually handled *any* jet at high altitude, that's going to be a problem no matter what they were flying.
While it's very easy to say this from my little office/den, and I acknowledge that - the handling characteristics don't change a great deal between Normal and Alternate Law - pitch handling is practically identical, and roll is slightly more sensitive in the latter.
To the best of our knowledge, what was presented at the start of the sequence was this:
FMS/AP Disconnect - So you're going to have to handle her manually. Be prepared, but first of all do nothing with the controls for a few seconds to see what she's doing by herself. Any inputs you make must be slow and gradual.
Unreliable Airspeed indications - OK, so you don't know how fast you're going via the usual channels, and you're in moderate turbulence, so just keep her straight and level using small and gradual inputs if you have to. Use pitch and power to keep her stable.
Alternate Law 2 - So now you have to fly the aircraft manually with no hard protections, so be even more careful with your inputs. She wants to fly, so keep pitch and power steady (bring power up a little if you have to - if, say, you pulled the power back to transit turbulence earlier on).
If any of that seems more difficult than it would be in any other airliner, for what it's worth I can't see it.
I'd still rather fly a Douglas.
As an SLF well-versed on some of what that company did in the '60s and '70s I can assure you I wouldn't!