Reprogram what?
Something to ponder?
The thread over the past few days seems to be fairly fixated on autotrim behavior and stick "feel" (or the lack of it, particularly w.r.t. trim). However I think (personal opinion, I'll take the flack) that in any control task, humans are amazingly adept at learning and understanding whatever set of controls we are given (subject to sufficient training/use/learning). What I see here is a collection of folk that have various backgrounds (F4, F16, Boeing this or that, and more) and I think it is fair to say each specific aircraft had unique "quirks". I see comments here related to the lack of trim response on the Airbus sidestick (unlike the yoke crew where trim unloads the force needed to maintain an attitude), but, 'hello!' the F-16 is no different... and in fact I'd state the F-16 is a good analog to the Airbus flight control system, except, more extremely, the F-16 sidestick moves almost not at all - I think the travel is something like an eighth of an inch (Gums?) total. Control is achieved not by waving the stick around but by applying pressure to it. Quite different. Similarly many of us will have played with various flight simulator games... while I suspect many here are gasping in horror at the mention of such 'toys' the point is even with significantly compromised controls (compared to the aircraft) many gamers become extremely adept at controlling the 'aircraft' and can fly the thing pretty much like the plane. What we do is we LEARN. Humans are good at this.
What's my point? The point is we can throw mud at the Airbus control system, but like or not, thousands of Airbus aircraft are trucking around the worlds airways with millions of passengers and they are not falling out the sky any more often that those from other manufacturers. The point is, the crews of those aircraft learn how they work and understand the behavior of trim, just the same way they learn the response rate to a stick input, and so on. Just because that control system is different to Boeing or Embraer or whatever, doesn't mean it is not as good. Clearly it is, since those planes are certified and make millions of flights daily.
You can argue as much as you like that changing this or that is the hail Mary for the aircraft type, but that just doesn't hold water. Does ANYONE seriously think Airbus is going to change the sidestick to provide force feedback for example? The stick currently is force 'loaded' (spring loaded I believe) and I don't really see the need to change that. But others have previously argued otherwise.
So, why'd AF447 fall out the sky, you might ask? Back to something I wrote earlier - "In any control task, humans are amazingly adept at learning and understanding whatever set of controls we are given (subject to sufficient training/use/learning)". This is what went wrong, not the aircraft design. For whatever reason (pitot icing), the automation dropped out, and as designed, handed the aircraft back to the most sophisticated computing devices on the aircraft - the humans. Unfortunately the most important safety device on the aircraft got it wrong. Unfortunately they got it wrong over and over. Zoom-climb (wrong), pulled into a stall (wrong), continued pull (wrong), TO/GA (wrong - but I'll pass on that since it seems this might have been a trained response), lack of CRM (wrong), and so on. Lot's of wrong here.
But what was really "wrong"? Training. Training. Training. With sufficient training the crews response clearly would/should have been different - very much so. Would it be different today - I suspect emphatically "yes". Because this accident has highlighted so many issues, any Airbus pilot worth his paycheck should have been following the accident investigation and learned a massive amount - mostly what not to do, but I'm sure a lot about the Airbus control systems. The key word in the previous sentence = LEARNED.
How did Gums learn to fly the F-16? Hands on the stick and throw the thing around the sky (some in simulators I hope... job security for me!), but NOT hundreds (or thousands) of hours tooling across the oceans on autopilot.... I see so many references to pilots with 11,000 hours (or whatever) and every time my immediate thought is "subtract ALL autopilot hours off that and what do you REALLY have???". Low hundreds perhaps, if we're lucky...
In my book this is the problem. The time when the crew were needed the most, was exactly when the automation took a timeout - and that corresponds exactly to the skill-set the crew has least ability.
So what am I advocating? More hand-flying on the line? Perhaps not - the autopilot is there for a good reason and does a great job. Simply holding the stick for hours transiting the Atlantic doesn't teach much. We need to get pilots into aerobatic aircraft and get their basic flying skills on the edge of the envelope up to snuff - recover from stalls, spins, etc. Then get those same crew into the training devices (simulators, flat-panel trainers, etc) and fail the automation and get their hands on the stick. Create situations where the control laws degrade. Learn Alt Law. A lot of sim time is spent training one engine out situations on takeoff, etc - are the current training scenarios really relevant today - how often do engines fail? I believe that LOC is the single most significant cause of accidents today - not engines failing/catching fire/etc.
Don't get me wrong - if there are simple changes to the systems within the Airbus cockpit that will help, they surely should be implemented (I suspect the stall warning inhibit below 60 knots should be revisited). But the single most significant change is reprogramming the HUMANS who get to sit in the very front seats.
- GY