peteq

Here in San Diego, only few years ago, there was a terrible car accident where an brand new Lexus powered out of control on a freeway. A family of 4 died when the freeway ended at a T intersection and the vehicle collided with terrain.

It appears that the driver, who was a seasoned California Highway Patrol officer, only took one evasive action, he applied full break pressure as the engine was racing.

Because that had such a terrible outcome, no one really questioned the driver's actions. Why didn't he shift the car out of gear, why didn't he shut off the motor… etc.

Don't climb on me if I don't have the facts right with this story, but my point is that sometimes during a panic situation, when there's souls on board, and you don't know what's happening, the body just reacts and common sense doesn't quite kick in.

RI830

No offense taken, but I do have some understanding of the Normal vs Alternate Law on the Airbus design. That's why I don't like it.
In regards to the cre not knowing that the airplane was stalled. Have you noticed that they didn't react to the "stall, stall" aural cue? There are times that a crew will get overloaded with other tasks and they mentally tune out the other noise. There have been crews who landed gear up, while the airplane screamed "too low gear".
My comment abou tknowing that they were stalled is not in regard to the plane masking it....."it's about the crew not "hearing" it.

Although.....IMHO....I'm not a fan of the Airbus logic.

JamesNoBrakes

No kidding. I was giving spin-training to a new-hire once and when they recovered "way too early" we found ourselves upside down. Simply roll level with full aileron deflection right? Not for this guy, he was "frozen" and I had to "save the day". Relatively simple and we briefed it ahead of time, but once in that "totally new" situation, he could not process the information and react correctly.

A good friend had an aerobat and wanted some aerobatic training, but despite my best efforts and demos, I couldn't get him to use the right control inputs/entry to prevent ending up in a dive during aileron rolls, which I recovered from.

Should these people not be pilots? I don't know. I don't believe that unless these people have the extensive aerobatic experience it's fairly unrealistic to expect them to react correctly in "new" situations (wake turbulence, inadvertent spin, etc). I mean I can have someone recover from a spin, that's all fine an dandy, but what if we didn't experience a REAL tight spin that didn't stop right away where the correct inputs did nothing at first (or caused it to tighten further)? I've had many more "frozen pilot" situations or frantic but inadequate control inputs observed from other pilots whil doing these. I've done these many times over and it's more like "slow motion" for me now, but unless they have, is it realistic to expect a positive result?

Maybe this is part of the issue, being put in a totally new situation with only a few seconds to react correctly. Easy to talk about, discuss ahead of time, but realize that when put into that situation, the pilot or whomever has to proceses the situation, recognize it for what it is or what was talked about, decide upon the course of action, and so on. Easy to say, but much harder to process due to it being a new experience. As much as we train, try to form the correct habits, and so on, unless we can experience all the situations prior, we are just going to have a question mark when presented with a totally new situation.

I know we all think we can, but can we REALLY handle something that's far outside of our norm?

Airhoss

I spent several years in the left seat of the A-320/319 and I never became a fan of it either. I got used to it and understood it just fine but plain and simple it is a poor design. I am not defending airbus. rather pointing out that this is not the only airframe to suffer these types of accidents.

The million dollar question isn't it? If I were king all pilots would have to have some extensive aerobatic training before they were allowed to fly any airplane for hire. And in that training they would have to have a very intense stall training series from every imaginable attitude, power setting, airspeed ETC. I'm talking High nose, low nose, inverted, vertical, spins, inverted spins, tail slides, flat spins, deep stalls,etc etc. Then they would have to go through an instrument emergency maneuver training course.

But we all know that stuff is never going to be required. Aerobatic flying increases a pilots perception of the norm and should be an integral part of every pilots training.

xjtguy

My company went to this well over a year ago. It's much more realistic and practical than the crap I was taught and graded on for the 10 years prior.

chuckyt1

I have never liked the basic ideology of the Airbus. Most of my training in the 320/319 fleet consisted of pulling the stick to the aft stop in abnormal situations, (Stall, Windshear, CFIT). Works quite well in normal law. Not so much in alternate or direct law.

We are creatures of habit and are trained by repetition...

USMCFLYR

I just went through recurrent and we of course did the stall series, wind shear, and CFIT avoidance drills. Our instructor, sim partner, and I were discussing the advantages of an AOA gauge and its' usefulness in such situations during a break. My sim partner use to fly the Falcon 10/100 and we walked by the briefing room for it and stopped inside to have a look at the panel. Right there in the upper left hand corner was an AOA gauge!

USMCFLYR

jungle

All modern airliners have an AOA system(usually two), but the output is usually integrated into the FCC, the pilot gets no direct AOA readout.

AF 447 was a case of three pilots flying a perfectly(or at least fully functional) good aircraft into the water.

High altitude stalls in a heavy are an entirely different animal than the low level stalls used in type ratings, much lower available thrust and if the A/P disconnects at a relatively high speed you might be left with limited control authority that requires trimming. It seems that this is finally being addressed in training.

xjtguy

I'm just going off of the fantasy world that is sim land. And I don't know if it applies to all sims or not. But the ones my company has use upsdated data from real flights to best simulate flight characteristics of the aircraft for things below FL250 IIRC. Anything above that just goes by how the programmers put all the 1's and 0's in place, anyway. At least, from what an instructor told me, with that being said......

The high altitude stall is VERY interesting. It's quite the opposite from the low altitude where things can happen quickly for recovery, on a relative scale at least. It's can seem like an eternity as the aircraft is losing thousands of feet to recover airspeed at a slow rate while the aircraft has the slippery feel from the high altitude.

FastDEW

Note in the article that the captain got what was happening and told the PF to descend. The captain said "no" to the climb call out. But the PF pulled back anyway. Could it be that if the captain had visual cues of the yokes being pulled full aft, he would have been more aggressive about getting the PF to descend? We will never know, but it shows that the lack of coordination between the crew and the lack of visual reference for where the flight controls were, added to the situation. Not a Boeing vs Airbus thing, although I can't help but wonder if this was a Boeing, would the captain have known with certainty that the PF was trying to climb and this certainty not created a far more aggressive response by the captain.......

Sad situation