Salute!
No problem, Doze. I need to express myself more clearly and referring to a post you made a year and a half ago.
- By "feel" and "touch" I am talking about vibrations, noises, thumps and bumps, and even the airframe shaking so badly that it's hard to read the instruments. Ask Retired about flying the F-4 at high AoA.
I am not talking about "artificial" feel in the controls. You know, springs, dampers, bobweights, etc.
Really good pilots will KNOW when something is not right. They might detect a different noise from the motors. They might feel a vibration that wasn't there a second ago. In other words, they are tuned to the aircraft, regardless of the flight control implementation. (On private, ask me about one day I "felt" something and saved the jet)
- The disregard of AoA by the 'bus system in some modes bugs me. I fully appreciate that at very low dynamic pressures, the AoA sensors are close to useless. But seems to me that the 'bus ignores the AoA when the "system" determines that airspeed is invalid, or speed too low. Sad, because the wings certainly know if they are stalled, so the sensors should still be valuable if the crew is in doubt.
So I was not clear about "override". You are correct. The system allowed the pilot to exceed the stall AoA and the pilot may have still thought that he couldn't stall the jet.
Interestingly, our first operational FBW jet ( over 4,000 built) even "protected" the pilot from overriding the system limits until AoA was over 30 degrees. Then we could manually control the horizontal tail and "rock" outta the deep stall by holding a switch with one hand and rocking with the other hand on the side stick.
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I fully agree with Doze and others ( last paragraph of his last post). Why the pilot pulled back and then held the stick back for so long is a mystery. My opinion is he was more concerned about overspeed initially, but after that......
Gums