PlaneTruth, no sooner did you compliment us all for the good discussion when a load of old nonsense started coming up about TW800 and missiles. Pur-lease.
Just to add to the discussion about the questionable logic of 'getting on the rudders' after a wake encounter, I have to ask myself how good the aviating skills of some line pilots at commercial airlines actually are. Obviously that's a contentious statement at Pprune, but I just replied to another thread in here about cruise pilots, and I was reminded of an incident that was so close to being an accident that it will make your hair stand up. To recount briefly, an engine on a UAL 744 failed on rotation at SFO. The F/O who was flying used ailerons instead of rudder to correct the yaw / drift, which turned out be almost fatal since the amount of control input required lifted the spoilers along one wing, with an engine out on the other. Even with full power on the remaining engines, the aircraft decelerated as it was fully loaded with "freight, both self-loading and the good kind", plus full tanks for the 15 hour flight to Sydney. They drifted off course as they slowed down, heading right for a hill covered in highrise apartment buildings (invisible in mist). Things really started to go wrong when they got a stall warning and a ground proximity warning at the same time, and swooped over the residential district with only feet to spare, control surfaces all pointing in the wrong directions, unable to climb. The reports of hundreds of car alarms being set off is graphic enough to give you an idea how close they came to disaster (ATC thought the plane had actually gone in).
This is a well documented case, but the reason I tell it here (as well as giving us all a vicarious shiver) is to raise once again the problem of pilots becoming mere systems managers and not real aviators. The UAL pilot at the wheel above had performed a take off the previous week, but before that hadn't done one on a real 747 for a YEAR. Maybe a good pilot can become so flabby that a routine level-off can become a stall and a simple (if unusual) stall recovery can be dangerously botched; and maybe a simple wake encounter can become a catastrophe; and a simple engine failure can almost become a precursor to 9/11.
We're edging into a discussion about automation / duty time / etc here. But these AA situations and indeed the UAL incident as well have nothing to do with Airbus or composites or whatever (let alone missiles) and everything to do with well trained, able pilots in non-threatening, routine, elemental situations taking the kind of action that would get a PPL wannabe chucked out of flight school.
Thoughts?