PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Pitch trim - poorly understood?
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Old 1st Apr 2016, 22:53
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gonebutnotforgotten
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
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FGD

The incident I quoted was (probably) a little different to the FlyDubai in that what I saw was a simulated Cat 3a GA from the flare following an Autopilot failure. In that case the speed was very low, so trim is more nose-up + there was the nose up bias that's fed in at low level (nominally at 400ft Radio), and the control deflection to counteract the nose up pitch from the engines is large. As I understand it, the the flyDubai went around from a higher altitude , possibly above the height at which the auto pitch trim is applied, and logically at a much higher speed than in the flare, both of which should have minimised the difficulty of trimming for the go-around. There are also reports that the airline did all approaches manually using a HUD, in which case I would assume no auto pitch trim would have been applied. Finally, the incident I quoted happened very quickly, very close to the ground, whileFlyDubai seems to have climbed a few thousand feet before losing it. All in all quite a different scenario. I wouldn't exclude the possibility of confusion over the functioning of the pitch control system as I described in the Roger-Wilco article, because as I've said, so few people seem to understand it, and that understanding matters most when large pitch changes occur (as in any GA). But if it did play a part, I suspect there were other errors too. We'll just have to wait for the report.

Thanks for the interest from you and framer
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