PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - American Airlines Flight 742 "flight control system" problems
Old 23rd Apr 2013, 15:18
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Ashling
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
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Depends how far back you trim, essential point being you have to ensure you lower the nose to remove the warning

Thought this was interesting from the performance study relating to the accident

The elevator response plotted in Figure 15b indicates that during this time, the elevators move trailing-edge up starting at 15:30:37, reaching about 4° at 15:30:38, and then move abruptly down to about -1° at 15:30:39 before increasing again to about 4.5° at 15:30:41. In the last 2 seconds of flight, the elevator deflection increases about 1°, from 4.5° to 5.5°.

Figure 7 shows that between 15:30:36 and the touchdown at 15:30:43, the pitch angle increases from 9.5° to 11° and then settles back to 9.5°, even though in the last two seconds the left longitudinal side stick is at its aft limit, and α is below αmax.

… the aircraft was in angle-of attack (AoA) protection from about 150 ft RA. When in AoA protection law, stick command is AoA objective. Stick neutral commands alpha-prot and full back stick commands alpha-max.

However, AoA protection shall take care of the A/C trajectory and, thus, looks after phugoid damping as well as AoA control: there are feedbacks within the AoA protection law aiming at damping the phugoid mode (low frequency mode). The feedbacks are CAS and pitch attitude variations. Without these feedbacks, an aircraft upset from its stabilized flight point up to constant high AoA would enter a phugoid (which is, by definition, a constant AoA oscillation) without possibility to stabilize the trajectory. As a consequence, commanded AoA is modulated as a function of speed and attitude variations: for instance, if A/C speed is decreasing and/or pitch attitude is increasing, pilot's commanded AoA is lowered in order to avoid such a situation to degrade.

On the last 10 sec of the "Hudson" event, it is confirmed that pitch attitude is increasing and CAS decreasing. Then, the phugoid damping terms are non nul and are acting in the sense to decrease the finally commanded AoA vs. the stick command, in order to prevent the aircraft from increasing the phugoid features.
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