Protections
 

Why not protect the plane to REC MAX apogee. Hard limit (Airbus SAS approach)

It is hard to think any pilot at FL350 would think it is a good idea to put any airplane in a 14 degree nose up attitude unless it is a fighter jet. Why?

Why not descent, we know climbing is a problem, why the scared ninny overspeed?

Easier to descend than climb.

Poor training. As I've stated more than once on this topic, my training was no better. What I know on this topic was gleaned almost entirely after AF447. My line's training dept did add the UAS scenario after 447, but it focused more on the lengthy procedure to identify suspect ADR's than flying or recognizing UAS.

A thorough reading of the UAS procedure in my FCOM shows that one should level off for troubleshooting when above circuit alt or MSA. The memory pitch and power settings no longer apply for level flight.

Which brings us back to the obvious. They never recognized UAS. They weren't trying to climb.

The key to preventing another such accident isn't in designing a better set of laws, etc, it's in designing a better way to show the crew what's truly happening.

You might be picking on detail, but the underlying sentiment and
concern about various aspects of the design is, imnsho, quite
correct. If the systems fail and give no information, then fine,
but to fail and give incorrect information is extremely dangerous
and almost certainly contributed to this disaster. The present
systems do not degrade gracefully at the edges and in fact they look
decidedly brittle. Now i'm just an engineer with some, but not
much flying experience, but I would expect any safety critical
design to be far more robust at the limit, irrespective of whether
the designers ever expected those limits to be exceeded.

But hey, let's not criticise the coffee, or cast aspersions about
any aspect of the airbus design, lest we are buried in the smoke
screen of irrelevant detail ;-)...

I got the sense early on that no one had a grip on UAS, that every man jack was taking a stab at some solution....de jour. No airline, no manufacturer, no one...

The chronology was squishy, but no one has come up with any au courant syllabus that would have helped our friends that morning...

That is not cute, but when it came out that the levels of skill in high altitude manual were rock bottom, that is strike two...

After 36 close calls, finally a strike out...Not unexpected. As time went on, the standard defense of ownership of the problem becam ad nominee, repeated ad absurdum.

I have talked to many line pilots in the past three years, and though they don't know what happened, they don't take the PPRuNe attitude either.

TTex, my next door neighbor flew the 320 for ten years for the American counterpart of the legacy. He shared with me a lot of what I hear from you...
He loved the a/c, and he never had a hiccup in ten years, what's not to love?

On another note, he confessed a low level of familiarity with Alternate Law, and he had never heard of alternate Law, 2b....Don't get me wrong, this guy retired off the triple 7, and his skill was at the highest level. He was being honest, and said he would not want to face the issues 447 had, and he had some nice things to say about the AF crew that did not make it. He essentially said no one would ever know exactly what happened, and he couldn't make the call on what appeared to have happened.

Why is it the system calls everything so close? Two more weeks and the probes would have been changed out, six months more and Qantas A380 doesn't lose an engine to explosion, etc. Ba 038 was a Luckymiss, etc.

Things were coming around to a solid solution for UAS, but it seems one or two get sacrificed to the razors edge, and lazy greed.....

"The key to preventing another such accident isn't in designing a better set of laws, etc, it's in designing a better way to show the crew what's truly happening."

.......TTex600

Says it all...

State of the art machines may be improved
 

Quote:

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But hey, let's not criticise the coffee, or cast aspersions about
any aspect of the airbus design, lest we are buried in the smoke
screen of irrelevant detail ;-)...

---

My acid comments were directed to:

1) Lack of Redundancy (wrt AS)
2) GIGO (misleading not properly trained crew)

WRT to A330, she is an State of the art machine. That could and should be improved.

UAS early warning
 

And this is feasible! I hope it will be implemented soon. (UAS EW)*

(*) Why?

Simply because Pitot´s may fail SIMULTANEOUSLY

Simply because System contamination (misleading crew is potentially lethal)

Simply because sierra happens, independant of good designers or good pilots. Someone pay the toll.

Yes, it does, but corporate arrogance being what it is, it perhaps
takes 200+ innocent bystanders to lose their lives before they are
shocked out of their complacency. Give Airbus their due though, they
seemed to have made all the right moves in terms of recommendations,
but they were not legally binding. The real problem was much further
beneath the surface though, in that the system design is not robust
enough to provide consistent and accurate information at all times,
including operation beyond the limits of checklist logic and "painting
by numbers" error recovery procedures. Human error is to be expected
and must be accounted for in the design.

Of course, it's easy to say that the a/c type has millions of safe
flight hours. Doesn't mean that the design is right, just that the
edge case problems haven't showed up yet...

Statistics
 

Quote:

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Of course, it's easy to say that the a/c type has millions of safe
flight hours. Doesn't mean that the design is right, just that the
edge case problems haven't showed up yet...

---

Bold mine

Lyman,
On the A-330, there are 4 thrust lever indents:
- Idle
- Max climb
- Max continuous/flex
- TOGA
As they were cruising at Mach 0.82, 35K, A/T on, the engine N1s were 100% and lever position was in Max climb. It's the way the aircraft works.
Now, when they began to experience turbulence, they manually reduced the speed to Mach 0.80 and the engine N1s reduced to 85%.
Then the event started A/P followed by A/T shut off and they received a warning of "Thrust Lock, move the thrust levers" which they eventually did. Just because the thrust levers are in the Max climb indent does not mean the aircraft will climb like a rocket, at least not at 35K or at a 85% N1. So they weren't boffins at that point. Now if you recall, when the A/P came off, the nose went down and the plane started to bank to starboard and the pilot flying manually tried to make a correction to get the nose up and get the wings level. But, his touch was heavy attempting to do both and we know what resulted.
We have been through this pitch and power settings many times. A pitch setting of anywhere between 2.5 - 5.0° nose up would have worked and the N1 at 85% to maintain Mach 0.80 would have provided time to get out the accurate pitch and power settings base on aircraft weight.
But they didn't do that, yet they knew they had "crazy speeds" which should have lead to the UAS process defined above.
I would not think reducing power and going down would be the thing to do as the speed would rapidly increase leading to a speed-speed warning.
There are times when following directions that, or should be, the basis of the word "Aviate" are really important. This was one of those times. Now the other 33 or so crews that experienced UAS problems didn't follow the exact directions either, but they knew how to aviate and all turned out well.
Well, to me, this is, for lack of a better word, scary! Regardless of an Airbus or a 777, both can go into degraded laws with loss of various protections that would be nice to know, being a pilot flying, should it suddenly happen.

Hiya TD..

Do you not mean "Detent"? Indent is new to me. I think you think I mean
The crew were boffins, now really, I've never met a pilot who is also a boffin.
My meaning was the procedure that should have been followed were created by boffins....

Now as to descent, it is something pilots do at least once every flight, and not too terribly scary...my comment centered round the need to stabilize things, after UAS. Tis easier to stabilize when systems are not maxed out, which for me gets my attention, and I do not need extra worry at this time, UAS?

I have seven miles below me, and as far as 447 was concerned, they had only a half mile UP...push everything to max and what, then worry immediately when to stop? Why not consider UAS an impromptu TOD? Stabilize in a shallow descent, and start trouble shooting... ICE might be a wild card as to AoA vanes, but in truth, don't you think a shallow descent at idle might work, if not, then 60? If fuel is an issue, you may not be ETOPS compliant in the first place, and .....? Now I know you will say, but they need only five degrees, and 100 percent, or a bit less, but isn't it more judicious to demand less of the airframe and engines whilst troubleshooting? Less chance of the "crazy speed?" if one can find five, can one find 0? It brackets cruise AoA?

Let me mention by way of comparison the work around for engine roll back at cruise? Losing power in both engines in a twin is seemingly a bit more worrisome, unless I misunderstand the aces present here....UAS a breeze, a 300 ton glider over the Rockies is...more stressful? Descend, you'll be descending anyway.... Didn't some of the prior crews experiencing UAS decide to descend?

An easy one to compare .. collapse of bridges ..
Most of them were there for years .. and supported millions of crossing .. when one day :uhoh:
List of bridge failures - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Each flight is separate from the next, do not get too comfortable with "millions of flight hours".......how many of those flights had an abnormal? That makes the odds all of a sudden a little shorter.

RR_NDB, #1031

All engineered systems are imperfect. The old joke used to be: Cost,
performance or reliability, pick any two :-). Sometimes the
imperfections are the result of well understood tradeoffs at the
design stage, but also things which have been overlooked, or not
accounted for because the designers never expected those conditions
of operation. However, the requirements spec rules the design. If
the spec misses important issues, or there is a bias in terms of
system operation, then that's what is designed into the product.

If you consider that desktop pc operating systems and apps can take
years to get all the bugs out, I wouldn't expect something as complex
as a modern a/c to be bug free, even allowing for the rigorous design
processes. They are some of the most complex engineered systems on the
planet. Note that i'm not casting aspertions in terms of blame, it's
just the way things are.

I bet there will be loads of changes to the systems design as a result
of this and the recommendations in the report. Two additional things
that would seem to make sense are that the fd's are disabled under all
conditions of UAS and other connected faults. Also, that a clear
indication of which law the a/c is running under is displayed unambiguously
at all times...

Howdy syseng68k....

"I bet there will be loads of changes to the systems design as a result
of this and the recommendations in the report."

Wait, do I have a choice? Cost, performance, and reliability?

I build airliners, I choose cost, and erm, cost...

Tradeoff´s
 

For sure.


On Fukushima / GE:

GE Three - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Safety first?

Not just in airliners...also on "WMD" :E :}

How many heated pitots are there on the upstream of each engine ? 1 or 2 ?
That would make 2 to 4 more than the existing 3 airframe-pitots for a total of 5 to 7.

This could be useful IAS data that could be made available to the Flight management computers and pilots.

Since the engines seem to have performed flawlessly at TOGA, high altitude, and at high AOA I would presume some useful data for the computers to help with valid data correlation.

Different airstream, dependent on demand, not ambient velocity.

I talked to a gent from the NTSB a week ago. He indicated that there were actually over 50 cases of Airbus UAS that they were able to document. With numbers like that, the odds of one landing "jelly side down" are pretty high.