While staying on list I’ll address this part of your lengthy post, Ken.
Stick position is a bit tricky to discern, I’ll admit, but the main problem is
that they weren’t looking at the instruments and interpreting them properly.
Yes, they should have been able to spot altimeters rapidly winding down (they
probably did and wondered what to do about it), but it would have been more
instructive to watch the attitude indicator and fly a level attitude with a
reasonable power setting.
It’s useless to employ feeling or sensation when you are on instruments,
especially when the aircraft is passing through turbulent air; the human being
has no sensation that is of any use when there is no visual input to his
orientation system. “Seat of the pants” flying does not exist to any useful
level: when you sit in a seat on the ground you sense that you are sitting in
the seat. When you sit in a seat that is an aircraft you are still just
sitting in a seat and there is insufficient information from your body’s
sensors to help you with understanding the attitude of the aircraft, much less
its air speed or other parameter.
Each of the pilots was disorientated, none understood how they got to that
position nor what to do about it. For a student of flying the 2 main signs of
an approaching stall are air speed and buffet, neither of which was available
to the Air France pilots. Another sign was the audio stall warner, but that
stopped sounding when their AOA reached a certain value, when the computer
assessed it as unreliable. All they had left was attitude and a power setting.
They used plenty of power – the engines barely left full power after a certain
point – but they were at 40 deg AOA because they had an inappropriate attitude.
I’ve spoken to a Virgin pilot who thought that no other airliners flew that
route that night; no one else traversed that weather as it was too risky.
I disagree with you about the problems with Airbus controls, but I do agree
with the need for better training, and I think that Air France did address that
shortcoming afterwards; but spatial disorientation remains a major cause of
aircraft accidents for all aircraft types, civilian or military.
Chris
> On 8 Jun 15, at 16:18, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> So, to the Air France crash, ANY flight crew member should have been
> able to identify that something wasn't right and should have been
> using secondary guages and clues to identify and address it. But when
> the FO had the stick all the way back, the captain wasn't able to see
> what he was doing because of the the control stick design.
>
> Yet, they overlooked other clues: Sound, deck motion, slow, mushy
> control response, deck angle, and of course, the altimeter spinning
> backwards. By the time they realized what was going on, they still had
> time for recovery, but then failed to really lean on basic flight
> operation instincts that should have been hammered into them from
> their first 8 hours of flight instruction. It's sad when a first-time
> solo student pilot is better equipped to recover from this type of
> attitude upset than this flight crew. The cascade of errors never
> stopped.
--
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