Originally Posted by
roulishollandais
Since four years posters are unable to get a complete list of the flight laws
The list has appeared several times over the course of these threads, try the search function.
that list seems long like a day without bread, they are thousand (perhaps a little less I agree) exceptions, inhibitions, considerations, litterary-philosophical descriptions instead of equations.
Oh, believe me there are equations - I've seen a lot of them! But they wouldn't make sense to anyone without a background in software engineering, just as most pilots without an engineering or mathematical background would not fully understand all the physics equations in HTBJ without Dai Davies' prose explaining it to them.
No reason to think that in a normal flight things are simpler they are only hidden until they pop-up when the captain takes his rest crossing Inter Topical Front and then all these hidden things, appear with an orchester of warnings and alarms, THS does is dance alone, zoom climbs appear, Wonderful! Everything but simple in the final "design" . Something works not as wanted!
Nothing's hidden. Throughout the sequence the aircraft did it's level best to tell the crew what was happening - from the initial "ADR DISAGREE" on the ECAM, through the Stall Warning sounding for over a minute - finally to the rapidly unwinding altimeter and everything inbetween. The zoom climb did not just "appear" - it was explicitly ordered through the PF's flight control commands, as was the THS. The THS didn't really become an issue until well into the stall regime, which - and let's not mince words here - it should be reasonable to expect that with the warnings they had that a crew should have been able to diagnose and either avoid or recover from. All they had to do was push forward on that stick.
Today nor Airbus nor Boeing keep it simple in facts and result. It is theory, dream and narcicism.
Depends on your definition of "simple", really.
Put it this way - throughout the history of civil aviation and its technical advances, pilots have not needed to understand the principles of things like cams, tensile strength of metals, hydraulic flow management and the like to fly the aircraft of those eras - because all of those technologies required specialist knowledge to some extent, and as such were not actually that simple. Some pilots did go the extra mile in understanding, some continue to do so and some in this era have extended that understanding to the modern electronics and computer technology behind their aircraft.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's no different. Whether we're talking about tensile load on a cable, hydraulic fluid flow to actuators or electronic signals it's all the same thing.
Did you see the part of my post where I likened modern aircraft management systems to an electronic flight engineer? I think it's a useful concept to understand. I'm sure some will argue that it would be better to just bring back the flight engineer, to which I'll say this; I had the pleasure of visiting the Hiller Aviation Museum in California a little while ago, and had a walk around their exhibit of a B747-100 flight deck. Now for its time, the B747 was a technically advanced aircraft - though by the standards of today the systems were relatively basic in themselves. I stuck my head into the flight deck and what jumped out at me was the sheer number of dials, switches, controls etc. at the FE station - to say nothing of the humungous bank of CBs overhead. I have to admit that to the layman's eye, the amount of things that needed monitoring, checking, activating and deactivating looked to be pretty close to the limit of what one human being could be reasonably expected to manage. This is absolutely no slight on FEs - if anything, seeing that in front of me elevated my level of respect even further - it just looked incredibly daunting, and far from "simple". Now bear in mind that "under the hood", the systems on more modern aircraft - not just Brand A, but even the venerable B757 and 767, are massively more technically involved in many ways (not because of the technology as such, but purely because of the greater number of parameters involved), and you can see why managing those systems with computers had to happen.
"The Alpha floor can also be inhibited by the FMGEC under certain engine failure conditions with flaps extended". Why all these secrecy theater? I suppose these "certain conditions" are no so simple.
Think about it for a second - why would you not want full thrust commanded with flaps extended and an engine out? Sudden asymmetric thrust during take off/climb-out or final approach/landing could really ruin your day!
@tdracer - Correct. Though I'd be inclined to be a bit less harsh on the Birgenair crew - the LHS ASI did "come alive" during the takeoff roll, and in that circumstance there was very little time to cross-check. By the book it was a major error, but nevertheless understandable. What was common to both, if I recall correctly, was that at various points both the overspeed warning and stall warning (stick-shaker) were active. Additionally, and I've said this in the past, the Birgenair Captain was an ex-Air Force pilot - no "child of the magenta" - and even he was flummoxed by the information he was being given.