Originally Posted by
gums
AF447 PROVED that you could stall the jet if you climbed at such an angle and ran outta speed before the magic FCS could help.
To be fair, that particular scenario (i.e. hard protections are void outside of Normal Law) was explicitly highlighted in the manuals from the beginning. Even the most strident Airbus evangelist wouldn't have claimed the protections to be a universal remedy - though the press may have muddied the waters there. The company received a tragic object lesson in that when one of their chief test pilots was killed during a training/demonstration exercise in an A330. From that point onwards, they tended to be even more circumspect.
I think the reason this particular accident still causes discussion and debate today hinges - at least partially - on the fact that the report was only ever published in French (which was standard practice when no international body was involved), and most of what the Anglophone world knows about it was filtered through the press.
Asseline's argument was that the aircraft did not respond to his full back-stick command. The BEA research indicates that it did respond, but due to the late application of thrust and even later application of the back-stick command, the rate of response was initially slower than it might have been. This was not a routine operation - far from it - and if it had been, then maybe the details which this thread has uncovered would have been more widely known. As it was, the investigation concluded (rightly so, in my opinion) that the systemic lack of oversight was the primary factor in the accident, with the somewhat poor airmanship during the conduct of the flight also contributing. A radical overhaul of the practices regarding commercial aircraft performing demonstrations at airshows was thus sufficient to prevent a recurrence.
[EDIT : I must say that while I'm appreciative of the namecheck, IMO the dynamite work on this thread has come from Owain Glyndwyr, HazelNuts39 and Chris Scott as well as OK465!
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