BA's alleged ban on Manual Thrust
Hi Goldenrivett,
"I gather the reason was because there were far more "incidents" on the Airbus fleet than any other fleet with low speed during manual flight."
Thanks for the link to that paper. I can only hazard a guess at the identity of the "senior airline manager" in April 2004 to whom M. Scott refers.
By "manual flight", do you mean manual thrust? Up to the end of 2001, I was aware of at least one serious, windshear-related loss of airspeed in manual flight, leading - IIRC - to a firm-ish impact with the runway during the go-around. But that was using A/THR. Maybe the incidents you heard of happened later?
(It may seem perverse, but I was never entirely convinced that the AI policy of using Flaps 3 for A320-series landings when only light or moderate windshear was expected was justified. Except in a strong headwind, the thrust requirement can be lower than ideal. Sometimes the A/THR reduces the power so much in a temporary headwind shear - almost to flight idle in some cases - that the engines take a while to spool up for the inevitable loss of IAS when the headwind dies away. An experienced pilot would never retard the thrust that much at a low height - say, around 100 ft.)
The understandable desire for cross-fleets standardisation created minor problems for the BA Airbus fleet in my day, but I wonder if BA has reassessed its policy since BA762... Differing beasts can't always be ridden the same way. Pilots can and do adapt. I doubt that any pilots are dual-rated on, say, B744 and A380?