Originally Posted by HPbleed
Renegade man - good post, however I do feel it's a bit of an airbus bashing. You have to remember that even though the airbus has loads of protections, the control surfaces still work in a normal sense. Stick forward, nose goes down. Stick back, nose comes up. There is no need to put in opposit control to stop or control the movement either, the aircraft just trims for you, so you can set the exact attitude you want then release the stick. So the stall recovery is still the same as for a light aircraft, with the exception that you may actually have to reduce thrust to remove the pitch power couple. I hope that helps you understand the airbus a bit more.
Thanks HPbleed. Not trying to AB bash. Have travelled on most of the AB range and all the Boeings (and few others too). Having been in the IT industry for 30 years I've seen every type of software human interface failure you can think of. And new generations of developers/engineers keep coming through with even bigger convictions that technology will "save us all and take us to the promised land"....Human performance improvement through the art of listening, understanding, acknowledging, valuing and respecting PLUS the development and use of technology is where we'll see the most benefits achieved, but most industries and businesses are still very slow to understand this and the technocrats still push their philosophy without due regard for their and technology's inherent fallibility.
Auto trim sounds just great, but I can imagine even a simple concept like that could have you confused in amongst a systems failure in trying conditions and it's the overall response of the AB's 'ecosystem' (to put it one way) I'm wondering whether has been fully thought through.
Some of the 'protections' built-in to the systems must also be contributing to some deep seated misunderstandings about operations within that 1% area where the machine is no longer 'protecting' a pilot's inputs.
Originally Posted by
RenegadeMan. Response by iceman50"can't possibly have been trained well enough to deal with the conditions they found themselves in that night (dark, IMC, turbulence), the complexities of the flight data systems being compromised by the pitot malfunction and responses of the aircraft to the extremity of the a/p & auto throttle disconnect."
Wrong I am afraid as the Instrument rating is designed for flight in the dark or heaven forbid IMC! The A/C was NOT at any "
extremity" when the AP and A/THR disconnected they were virtually STRAIGHT and LEVEL, one of the first things we were taught as PILOTS!
Hey iceman50, I wasn't for a moment saying the crew wasn't trained to handle the dark or IMC, I'm simply saying that these conditions PLUS whatever occurred at AP and A/THR disconnect (and yes I take your point that at that moment it was not 'extreme') PLUS the AB's system's response(s) PLUS the potential poor crew initial response PLUS potentially other things none of us can be clear on yet, facilitated a complex mix that the crew couldn't understand and this must be partly a training issue as well as the man-machine interface
psychology issue that makes me concerned this type of accident could readily happen again.
Originally Posted by
RenegadeMan. Response by Clandestino"but if the side stick of an Airbus behaves (sometimes, always or only occasionally such as perhaps when the aircraft is fully stalled) in a manner not dissimilar or even a little bit like the old video game I’ve mentioned above (i.e. the pilot makes an input such as ‘stick fully back’ and a substantial forward stick counteracting input is required to negate the state that the first input leaves the aircraft in)
It does not. Not in any control law. Rest of your post is based on this assupmption and is therefore not true.
Thanks Clandestino; glad you've cleared that up for me (although given I was pretty good at that old video game [which someone reminded me was actually called 'Asteroid'] I was thinking I'd be in a good position to head on up to the cockpit of an AB if the entire crew became disabled and a call went out to the passengers "can anyone onboard fly?"!) Please don't just write off the rest of my post. One of the challenges on forums like this is that if you display some ignorance, everything else you've said just gets flicked away and the potential for the debate to morph into something that might help can be lost. I (and all other crew/SLF) want to be able to travel on these airliners confident the crews flying them are trained well enough to cope with the complex scenarios and multi-faceted problems systems failures can introduce.
The rest of my post was an effort to highlight
"(the) man-machine interface psychology, economics, politics and big business needing to come clean and invest more dollars into research and training rather than just about this particular crew's lack of ability, perceived or otherwise". I think that is still the major concern here and how crews can ensure they're ahead of the curve on comprehending what the machine is attempting to do. These highly automated systems are a miracle of ingenuity and technical brilliance but what appears to be missing is an overarching realisation that it is simply not possible to cover every combination of potential system responses to incorrect data input and the likelihood of a subsequent incorrect human interpretation under the extreme stress of an inflight emergency (and being in an stalled airliner [regardless of how the stall was entered, who was responsible or what warning horns were sounding either continuously or intermittently] travelling downwards at 10K FPM with just a few minutes left is an environment that makes the phrase 'extreme stress' sound like an understatement) is very real and likely to occur again and with increasing regularity given lowering of crew standards.