Sriajuda, #242:
While it appears a mystery to almost anyone as to why all three pilots
seemed unable to recognize the stall, I wonder even more about the
apparent lack of the computer's abilities to detect the same.
This is something that I was quite shocked about, expecting a much
higher degree of proactive intelligence from the system design, but
perhaps this is the subtext of a company with a corporate mindset of
"it cannot crash, cannot stall". I keep harping on about this, but
in the absence of normal speed and attitude data, subsystems such
as the ins generate more than enough information for some other
part of the system to monitor current and historical state. Use of
this data could provide improved warning and predictive capability.
This sort of on going "big picture" global monitoring would be mandatory
for applications such as nuclear power, but seems sadly lacking in
aircraft.
While there is no doubt that the crew made serious errors, the plethora of
warnings, not warnings and other inconsistent data presented to the crew,
probably already in a state of panic, can only have made the situation much
worse. It's the duty of the system designers to anticipate the worst
possible conditions, design the system so that it is consistent at
the ragged edge and provide accurate data at all times. Clearly not the
case here and from that point of view, the overall system design failed
the crew.
A trivial example: How difficult would it be to prevent a full back stick
6k/minute vs command at 35k ?...