Having read most of the posts, (not all, I will; admit, ) in the previous thread and in this one it does seem to me that many have advanced points that are valid but no one seems to tie them all together under sensible headings, say The aircraft and controls, training and flight management.
I realise, of course, that apparent shortcomings are not always so, and some are compromises that avoid others, however that doesn’t mean they are not worthy of discussion. I have also mentioned a distrust of fly by wire before and was upbraided because, as someone pointed out, direct controls, hydraulics and cables have been known to fail too. Again, given the complexities of the ‘laws’ that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of discussion.
Just from my own reading items that need further consideration in the aircraft might be,
1) Stability of modern aircraft in ‘coffin corner’ and the extent to which we allow designers to rely on computers to maintain control while aircraft are configured at the very edge of the envelope for better economics.
2) The sidesticks. No feedback. It may be something in French mechanical philosophy, we had a Citroen Safari once. The power steering and the brake, especially, had an entirely different feel to contemporary power augmented controls. Feedback to the steering was artificial, I think, and there was none to the brake button.
3) Automatic Trim. Given the lack of feedback in the sidesticks automatic trim is almost a necessity. The problem with that is, as has been pointed out, that after the stick has been held full back for some time trim is full up and it requires full forward stick to get the nose down and there are suggestions that even that would not be enough. (But surely after some time of full forward stick the trim would go ‘down?’)
4) The aircraft drops out of Normal Law into manual control immediately and without prior warning when more than one pitot appears to give an erroneous reading. It’s entirely logical but it is flawed. It means the pilots don’t really have time to get their head in the game before they have to act.
5) The stall alarm is disabled below 60 knots ( so it does not annoy while taxi-ing.) It seems reasonable, but if your head is not in the game . . . . . . . . . . I can easily imagine putting the nose down a little, hearing an alarm and thinking “Can’t do that, it triggers the alarm . . . . . . .” Surely the alarm cancel could be connected to the U/C load switches?
Training and Aircrew.
1) Most aircrew don’t do stall training once they get onto airline aircraft. Some say they have never done it, even simulated, at high altitude.
2) The primacy of instinct rather than training in stressful situations is well known and especially when the training is several years ago. For training to ‘kick in’ it must be frequent, current and automatic. I understand that training for extremely rare events is awfully expensive but so is the alternative.
3) There’s little comment on here about disorientation and illusion. I understand that pilots are trained to read the aircraft’s situation from the instruments however in the dark and with the aircraft being tossed around it might be easy to be disoriented. I have read often of pilots who commented after an event (eg, Gann.) that they had only survived because they had experienced the exact same thing before while in the care of an old timer. How many pilots have experienced a high altitude stall, in a storm, in the dark, with suspect airspeed, even in a sim?
4) There have been several comments that indirect indicators should have alerted the pilots to their situation, eg, “They should have realised if they were climbing on fixed power they would eventually stall,” ( and therefore no need for an AoA,) and some pilots may have that kind of presence of mind, however I don’t think we can rely on that when people are under pressure. I always used to think that I was good under stress, however I have discovered that actually I am useless, under stress I am pretty well unable to reason, I don’t suppose I am alone in that. It is, perhaps, important that we make sure that direct indicators are always available.
5) There is also the “I have decided that’s what is wrong . . . “ syndrome so we stop looking for other causes and adapt all the symptoms to our expectation. I don’t know how we train against this.
Flight management.
1) The decision to fly the most direct route, even though storms were known along it must be questionable. If airlines don’t make money we’ll not be travelling so freely, however how do we balance risk and economics?
2) Crew relief, given that one of the pilots had six thousand hours, hardly seems unreasonable. On the other hand one might reflect that makes it all the longer since he practiced stalls in the real world. It has to be a concern, though, that the captain wouldn’t be ‘au fait’ with the course of events when he returned to the flight deck and the other pilots didn’t seem able to tell him.