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Old 6th Apr 2016, 15:08
  #71 (permalink)  
Centaurus
 
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Australia
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If you are way out of trim on the stabiliser, at some point you’re going to have to trim it otherwise you’re going to spend the rest of the flight going around in small circles until the fuel runs out.
If I recall correctly, some early Canberra bombers were lost due to runaway stabilizer (or was it elevator?) trim. The immediate action if the runaway was upward was to go into a steep turn to get the nose back to the horizon and appropriate power to maintain a safe speed. If you were then stuck in the steep turns forever because of inability to counter the runaway if you tried to straighten out, the only other option was to eject. The point being it was vital to combat the runaway trim by acting instantly to lower the nose from extreme high attitude into a steep turn rather than allow the aircraft to stall.

If the nose of (say) a Boeing has been allowed to pitch up excessively (45 degrees or more) during a go-around because of delayed reaction by the pilot (poor instrument scan in IMC), then such will be the rapidity of airspeed reduction, that seconds may count to prevent the aircraft from stalling.
At slow speeds, elevator effectiveness is less. In addition, trimming the stab trim forward to a guesstimate appropriate position, takes a few seconds of time, keeping in mind the 737 QRH warning to: "Use pitch trim sparingly." The angle of change from 45 degrees or more nose up, to just below the horizon, takes a few valuable seconds but is needed to get airspeed increasing again.

Depending upon the rate and angle of pitch up, as well as pilot competency, there may not be time to wait and see if elevator and stab trim combined is working quickly enough before control is lost. The QRH continues: "Roll (adjust bank angle) to obtain a nose down pitch rate"

Clearly the pilot is racing against time to get the pitch down to safe manageable levels. Unloading and simultaneously rolling to get the nose dropping is more or less guaranteed to get the nose going down immediately. On the other hand, leaving those corrective actions too late by first waiting for full forward elevator and appropriate forward stab trim to take positive effect before resorting to a roll, might be the straw that broke the camel's back.
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