Originally Posted by
RetiredF4
It may look like that, but it is not relative to it. If the loadfactor demand would have been achievable, letīs say with a THS trim of 10° NU, then the elevators would be back in neutral after SS release. The elevators are used by the FCPC to change the loadfactor demand, when achieved and stick is back in neutral the THS trim will trim out the load of the elevators, bringing those back to neutral.
I'm not so sure, not least because the traces indicate that the sidestick was *never* released - from the moment FMC disengaged until impact. The last two forward stick movements are held for several seconds, but the trace never goes above -20 degrees - it can't take tha long to respond to a full pitch-down command, surely?
This pitch commanding mode was mentioned several times, however no reference to it surfaced until now. Would be interesting to know, when does it self-employ and how would it work.
Personally I reckon we should both hold our horses until this is clarified.
That is the one million dollar question, some answer with adressing poor airmanship and some try to look deeper to prevent it from happening in the future.
What bothers me the most (and this is not directed at the crew, it is directed at the industry that trained and passed them, as are all my airmanship questions on this matter) is that I can't understand how a rapidly unwinding altimeter despite considerable nose-up pitch and TOGA thrust could be perceived as anything *other* than a stall- and that's before we get to the 50-odd seconds of stall warning that sounded!
@deefer dog - That's precisely what Alternate and Direct Law are - full authority handed to the pilots, transmitted through the digital control system, no hard limits or protections - Alt 1 and 2 have "soft" (i.e. overridable through pilot input) protections except in the case of ADR failure. This is, however, determined by the computers rather than manual input (however, the computers know when they can no longer cope and make it very clear to the crew via ECAM message that the control law is degraded).