G27, the pilots didn't follow the AB manual and if they were above obstacles not do the low altitude procedure but do the cruise prosedure of just hold present attitude for level flight and get out the UAS check list. They were new and inexperienced. They needed the only qualified pilot in the airplane to be in the cockpit but he was taking his break and they couldn't handle it. Hiring 300 hr pilots on automatic airplanes is not safe.

Flap flap flap:mad: - no they were not (for the fithtieth time). They were not '300hr' pilots (for the thirtieth time.. - they WERE 'qualified'.

For g27 - there was NO severe turb

Either of you read the report?
B44 page 29 et seq
G27 page 60

Give it a break?

This sidestick visibility thing is all well and good but I do not understand why the cpt didn't at least ASK the pf what he was doing never mind instruct him as to control inputs. There were enough pax behind him, situation didn't need one more.

Every rotation is done in direct law, and any undesirable erratic movement would be immediately evident due the instantaneous response of the aircraft.

Did he try to trim up to the FULL stop of 14 degrees ... ?
If the pilot wanted to trim up, let him make such a silly thing himself, Please. We really don’t need any automation to do it for him.
If the guy had done it himself, I would not show up here to defend his action.

And nothing to compare with what would have been obtain in direct law in terms of ND movement and AoA reducing in order to achieve stall exit.

If you think you can get below 60 knots on elevators only, it is your call. What I want to see is the BEA calling the shot. That should be detailed already.

So we agree.
It was the duty of the BEA to make recommendations to Airbus to include in their documentation how the sidestick concept does not permit the same type of supervision allowed by more conventional flight control commands.

The crews operating the Airbus must be made aware of such characteristic.

That's something we can keep for later, but for now I could resume it that way : Do not write too much in the technical as the judiciary could be too well at ease to use it afterwards …

As soon as the captain is back, the stall warning quits. For him a stall has been properly exited. He has no clue the stall warning can quit for other reasons than a stall exit. The Airbus documentation makes absolutely no mention of anything like it, and on the contrary it is specified that a stall warning won’t stop before a stall is actually exited, which follows both regulation and logic.

This stall warning thing puts everything up side down for the captain ability to properly evaluate the situation.

What do you want him to instruct if he cannot make sense himself of the situation ?

But it is a remarkable that the captain would need to ask the PF what he was doing, just because the sidestick concept deprives him to naturally know about the inputs made on the flight control commands.

Interesting and neat report about AFR1896 (from the Moroccan investigation authority)
Only in french unfortunately
http://89.30.127.37/docspa/2011/f-xc...f-xc110808.pdf
The event is from last year
This show again a real problem at AF about CRM .. respect of the laws .. etc ...
Extracts (Google translator)

BOAC, for the 50th time, they were hired with low time and monitored Airbus autopilots for years until their actual piloting skills were required with no autopilot and they failed. They could not hand fly.

- I've heard tell a lot of pilots start with 'low time', and in the 21st Century where most of us live, they then monitor autopilots for years (including the AF447 Captain).

They were NOT 'new and inexperienced' - get your terminology right - unless, of course, you consider 10 years on AB, 39 SA route rotations and 6500 hrs 'new and inexperienced'?

It seems you may have dozed off for a decade or two. Exactly WHAT do you expect a crew to have as minimum 'experience'?

"They could not hand fly." That much is obvious, but I would add for accuracy "They could not hand fly an AB340 in Alt Law.". How they would have fared in a different a/c we will never know.

I guess this is a waste of time but in my 23,000 hrs my airline never required me to be on autopilot and monitor it 95 % of the time and only take off and some times land manually. I always hand flew enough to know I could do what the autopilot quit doing. These two couldn't and what they did by pulling up into a full stall shows what automation does if you don't maintain basic flying skills.

BOAC, you are wrong even though you have 10 times the posts I have. No pilot should depend on automation if he can't do it himself. Yes I am in the 21st Century too but letting automation make you a monitor and not handle a simple situation like they had, UAS, isn't the answer. If the automatic stuff quits it is no big deal unless you don't know how to fly.

I think whoever said (Ziegler) that Airbus could be controlled ( monitored ? ) by his concierge was right
He just forgot to say that it was the plane had to be configured on autopilot and normal law

@HazelNuts39
To emphasis CONFiture´s position: Elevator only reduced from full NU to 15° NU (time 02:12.46 and 02:13:55) after a significant time delay, whereas in direct law the elevators would have responded immidiately according to the SS position, meaning SS neutral, elevators neutral, SS Full ND (02:12:32, 02:13:40) elevators equivalent full ND. Just superimpose the SS command over the elevator position and the outcome is obvious.

RetiredF4;

Thanks for emphasizing Confiture's position. I was aware of that when I wrote my reply. But would a brisker response of the airplane have altered what the PF was trying to achieve? Have you considered why he briefly released his pull on the stick? I submit he did because the airplane pitched up when he increased thrust. Nothing indicates that he had any intention to get the nose down to an angle that would have unstalled the airplane. When the attitude reached 8 degrees and stopped increasing he started pulling again and kept pulling for over a minute. Yes, the airplane would probably have responded more briskly in direct law, but it is somewhat of a stretch to say that that would have changed everything.

To answer that question we would have to come to a conclusion, what PF tried to achieve firsthand. Neither BEA nor our efforts here come to a final result.

Several options had been discussed here, and can be grouped into the intentional climb and the unintentional climb. By that i refer mainly to the amount and intensity of the climb, not the climb as the opposite of the descent or the equivalent of an maintaining level. That the PF intended at least to correct the indicated altitude loss and the deviating pitch and VS should be agreed to. Everything else later on is not clear anymore.

If the climb in that intensity was intentional, then nothing would have influenced or changed the end result. But do we have ultimate proof of that theorie? I dont think so. When PNF told the PF to go down, he acknowledged to do so, he did not argue against the PNF, although he didn´t comply in deeds. Was he not willing to do so or was he not capable to do so (intention to do so was present, but the means to accomplish it were unsuitable)?

We know almost, that the manual flying expierience of the PF on the A330 was mainly accomplished during takeoff and landing. In T/O it´s afaik comparable to a direct law behaviour, and during landing phase when SS inputs are necessary close to ground it´s flare law. During flare law the PF is maintaining the trajectory by compensating the system induced ND force by a NU SS input, and to reduce the trajectory he just has to relax some of this NU SS input. The normal feeling on the SS from day to day flying therefore is holding some backpressure to maintain the flightpath during landing or to rotate and climb during T/O. The necessity of ND SS input and the required amount of ND SS input in normal daily operation therefore differed grossly to that one needed to correct this unintentional climb.

Additionally in day to day flying the roll channel doesn´t need much attention, except when a change of direction is desired, but otherwise the aircraft is stable in bank. PF was occupied by getting the wings back to level and maintaining them there, with roll law in direct a task he was not used to do. He might have associated the prooblems in achieving the correct pitch with the deviations in changing bank angles.

My position was from the beginning and still is, that the initial climb in the recorded intensity and duration was unitentional due to lack of manual handling at altitude and in degraded law. That PF was more occupied by roll control than pitch control, the last one may be doing by feel like he was used to during landing phase in flare mode. His corrective action to the announced and acknowledged deviation from altitude and pitch targets was ineffective from the beginning, leading only to a little decrease of VS without correcting the main problem, the beginning trajectory through the propulsion ceiling and the lift ceiling. Selecting TOGA in honour of the stall warning 2 made those inadequate amounts of SS relaxing useless, increased the pitch even more and led to the final stall.

From that point on the crew was helpless, as they did not know what brought them into this situation, what that situation actually was and therefore denied them the insight, what actions would bring them out of this situation. Therefore the SS inputs in that phase after the stall are no pointer to the initial intent.

In this assumed unintentional sequence the mentioned points by CONFiture are more than valid.

Thankfully the other F-4 guy (Franzl) has more time to post than I do, but I'm in full agreement with his analysis.

Full nose up after the stall, was simply an attempt to stabilize the aircraft's pitch attitude by a pilot who didn't understand WTF was happening.

There is sufficient reason to attribute the initial nose up leading to the stall as coming from the roll instability leading to inadvertent nose up inputs and the tendency of the aircraft's pitch channel to mathematically integrate those inputs. (For those who did not take calculus, it means add them all together). When did the initial nose up occur? Answer: When PF was fighting the roll problem the hardest. Did he have time to formulate a strategy of setting a nose up attitude? I doubt it. His computing power had to be focused on the roll problem.

Why doesn't the aircraft stop trimming in Alt2 Law when approaching the stall like it does in Normal Law?

More than likely, the engineers couldn't figure out a reliable way to do it. With stall AOA a function of Mach and gross weight/configuration, they didn't know how to make the Mach correction without airspeed inputs. They really should re-examine this more closely.

1. You can likely make a fairly good Mach approximation from inertial data. With that data, altitude data, and a safety factor, they could stop the trim from running up to the limits.
2. By considering alternate sensors for determining a stall state, they could probably stop trim from running up despite what would seem to be reasonable AOA at lower altitudes. What happens to the airflow over a wing during a stall anyway? Don't you think we can make a sensor to detect that state? I do.

A tendency to pull rather than push, combined with a concern for overspeed, in direct law as in alternate law, that sums it up nicely.

RetiredF4
The BEA report includes a exaggerated number of
Probably
Likely
If
Maybe
In the technical and human factors sections
It is rare to see a report containing so many conditional , uncertainties and inaccuracies while investigators have all the records (CVR-FDR) in perfect condition and many visual ( material - physical ) evidences
How aviation safety can be enhanced with the findings and recommendations originating from :
Probably
Likely
If
Maybe
That I do not know ...

Good analysis Retired and 'bird.

Without a "brain recording" we shall never know why the pilot kept pulling back. And I don't agree with 'bird about roll PIO and such. May have been there, but not to any serious influence versus the constant back stick.

If there is one good thing about the 'bus and our primitive system in the Viper, it was that HAL would use every control surface available to achieve the trimmed gee ( ours could be trimmed, but the 'bus was one gee all the time, corrected for pitch attitude). So simply relaxing the stick pressure would let HAL do what he was supposed to, allowing you to figure out what the hell was going on.

Another poster provided an excellent discussion of AoA WRT mach and altitude and such. But I am personally here to tell you that our primitive system handled the problem really well. We never exceeded the AoA limits while hard maneuvering, and the only way we got into a true "deep stall" was to hold a high pitch attitude as our energy decayed faster than the control system could get the nose down. Sound familiar?

Gotta go. Dodging hurricane in Florida.

Addendum:

It still distrubs me to see some pilots here that don't seem to understand how their jet flies. The new jets, with all the augmentation and such, may appear to be real easy to fly. Then you look into all the control laws and such and see what HAL is doing.

What do you do when HAL gives up?

I can't find one commercial jet with FBW or basic/advanced augmentation that doesn't fly like we old dinosaurs were used to.

As several here have pointed out, the 'bus is a basic "direct law" until well up in the air or in the "flare" ( not sure what the flare mode does, but whatthehell).

Ours was "direct" until weight off wheels. Then it was blended AoA, pitch rate and gee command until gear was fully up. Worked for me, and thousands of fighter pilots that have flown the jet since 1973.

I have a lot more confidence as a SLF after reading some of the "war stories" here from the professional pilots than I had three years ago. But make no mistake! If I am on board and you are the PF/PIC/AC or whatever, I shall be back there analyzing every move you make, heh heh.

Huzah
 

The Peanut Gallery heartily endorses the views of Misters F4 and Birds.

:D:D:D:D:D

EEG for all pilots? A horrible idea whose time may have come.

:E

Hi Gums,
I agree. He may have been attempting to out climb the CB in front of him - I have heard of other pilots who would attempt to fly over the top of a CB rather than through it despite being far to close to their ceiling.