Originally Posted by
F-16GUY
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But hey, if everybody is happy when the dead pilots are blamed, then lets not learn anything from this and move on to the next event that will look more or less like this one.
This is probably the way you see it! Then who is to blame if both pilots did everything wrong with their controls? That is the pure truth and we must face it, not try to deviate it! The only 2 reasons why Airbus could be blamed for being a contributor to this is because:
1. The stall alpha protection was not doing it's job or have not been implemented at all on A-330s. The stall alpha protection should control the horizontal stab, more than just the elevators, by not allowing "X" AoA to be passed, yet by looking at the DFDR the horizontal stab was moving freely towards increasing the pilot commanded elevator input until it reached -13 local angle, having the alpha reached more than 50 at some point during the fall.
2. The idiotic philosophy of having a left mounted side stick for captain and right mounted side stick for co-pilot, having both invisible from one pilot to the other was and still is "a remarkable achievement" for this disaster! Even with that option (which is kind of intriguing) to set "priority left", "priority right" or "dual input", the only pilot (on the left seat) who was sometimes pushing forward still couldn't command the horizontal stab towards a more positive value. Even on 787s, Boeing knows why they want both pilots to think and do things in the same way, not allowing conflicting data or inputs.
But anyway..., even with these kind of challenging Airbus planes problems, the pilot should've listened carefully to the strong "STALL" alarms (both aural and sound) and know what a stall actually is. I'm very convinced they both misinterpreted the definition of stall and thought that it's related to airspeed only, as many dummies behind the stick do. They were only juggling the throttles all the time, but not ONCE ever thought of listening to that stall alarm more thoroughly and get the idea of pushing full forward for a little while and see what happens, not once they have thought about it (except for the captain) until too late.
Here's the DFDR video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR5kFOHVnUU&t=73s
* Stall = flow separation *
Flow separation has nothing ever to do with the relative speed between a fluid and a contacted solid material or with the indicated IAS or TAS. The only thing it can be triggered from is by having a relative angle between the flow and the surface exceeding "X" value above which the fluid cannot follow the surface, even if this angle may vary with speed.
It's always been and will always be the alpha that you command to get into or out of stall. For some reason though, depending on how the pilots learned or interpreted this, the term of stall is more generally or almost always seen as a lack of airspeed, which is totally totally wrong. Even if the plane can no longer sustain 1G below a given combination of airspeed and alpha, the plane is perfectly controllable even with reduced response rates, but no matter the airspeed (can be Mach 1), the plane's wings will always get flow separation (aka stall) above "X" angle of attack and the controls (especially lateral control) get almost non-responsive, which ANY PILOT must learn about in flight school before encountering it alone for the first time.
In the end, it proved that the pilots were more incapable of staying away from trouble or recovering from it than the plane itself. Nobody said "let's not learn anything from this", but the crude truth regarding the pilots should not be altered.