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Old 19th Apr 2012, 09:47
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Owain Glyndwr
 
Join Date: Jun 2011
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Recovery trajectories

I'm sympathetic to Dozy's pov that missing new data the subject has been done to death, but we need not expect to see any new factual data ex BEA since their "cartoons" already give much more information than is customary in accident reporting. The data has, after all, been enough to keep these threads going for a year or so!

OTOH, with HN39's help (but any errors are mine!) I have been able to construct a means of calculating performance at and beyond the stall, and this in turn allows a systematic study of recovery possibilities - something that AFAIK has not been presented here before, so perhaps it qualifies as "new data"?

On the diagram, the yellow line is the actual AF447 flight path derived from BEA traces of inertial ground speed and barometric altitude, corrected for wind effects wherever possible.

The purple line is a theoretical calculation of that flight path using the developed method with actual flight pitch and power (N1) as input data. Given the fact that the aircraft was gyrating with six degrees of freedom and the model is restricted to three, I think it a reasonable match which gives some credence to any recovery calculations. Others may differ.



Wherever you see a red line the stall warning was, or would be, operative.
The blue bits on the recovery trajectories are the final pull ups.
All recoveries assume 104% N1 throughout.

The interesting finding for me was that it is not necessary to go to extreme nose down attitudes to recover - in fact it may even be counterproductive, since although you arrive at a good 'flying' speed at a higher altitude, you have further to go in pitch and if you do that at a moderate rate the extra time uses up all the benefit. Countering that by a more aggressive pitch up rate looks as if it may get you into secondary stall territory.

The other point is that the actual rate of pitch down at entry into the recovery is not all that important either. If you are going to be in a 10 deg ND dive for 60 seconds it really makes little difference if it takes you a few seconds more or less to get there.
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