Humbling sim experience
Had an interesting sim session today,
As a result of several high profile loss of control accidents recently my company introduced a special LOC sim session. Interesting training with a lot of background. My particular sim session was done with an ex air force guy. Lot of insight about recovering techniques! In my earlier years I did some acrobatics but no formal training and since then all my flying has been airline type. Aside from the occasional upset recovery during TQ's and occasional type recurrents not much experience in this regime.
One scenario in particular was eye watering/ego killing.
Airplane type: B747-400
Flying at 35.000 with an heavy airplane you climb to 37.000 which is just*
Possible with the weight. Reason for the climb, you are flying just below the clouds in an area of embedded TS and it is bumpy.
Starting the climb(with just a small margin between upper and lower red band but still within normal operating parameters) you notice the the wind shifting to more HW. You anticipate and notice a speed increase and start to reduce power. To no avail, the airspeed keeps inching towards the upper red band. You reduce power more( not excessively) but still, just after level of you get into the upper red band and get an overspeed warning! You reduce power even more, the airspeed drops but still in the upper red band and all of the sudden you get the stick shaker together with the overspend warning!!!
Respect the stick shaker, you add power but there is not much power left and you are on the wrong side of the power curve, increase in power does not increase airspeed so there is no other action than to descend.
As you descend trying to recover from the stick shaker you notice the wind changing again to a TW and increasing(it shifted to a HW during climb, now it shifts back to a TW) correspondingly, you notice the speed to drop even more, causing you to lower the nose even more to get out of the stick shaker.
The TW increases and the speed drops even more! During the entire event you also have the stall buffet. Somewhere, the overspeed warning stops..the stick shacker stops, you still have the stall buffet and your airspeed reads below 30(which is the minimum reading) with a large TW( in excess of 200IAS).
This all happens completely unexpected!!!! And in the timespan of about 30 seconds ( really, to the best of my recollection) you have gone from 37.000 to 22.000.
I'll stop here to see what you can make of this! I have no military training, consider myself an above average pilot), this completely caught me of guard and left me humbled enough to post it here.
Really interested to see what you can make of it and try to figure it out in a short timespan( remember, it happened to me in a short timespan)
I'll post the rest later but interested in opinions
Last edited by flyburg; 8th Jun 2012 at 20:30.