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Comment by dcrazy | Hacker News Reader

Are you type rated on any Airbus models?

Like someone else said - there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input. Literally doesn't exist. So if you're doing that.....what exactly are you hoping to achieve? Is a fundamental lack of understanding of how planes work.

Says you, while sitting comfortably on a couch sipping coffee, with zero risk of death, able to take as much time as you'd like to analyze the situation, with perfect information available and a fresh, unstressed mind.

Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Bravado and macho mindset are explicitly frowned upon in aviation for a reason.

Reminds me of "aviation experts" claiming Sulley didn't have to ditch in the Hudson at all, since some pilots in the simulator were later able to turn around and land back at the airport.

Sure they were! I'd be able to do so too, and I'm no pilot — I'm safe in a simulator, I already know I'm going to have a double engine failure x seconds after takeoff, and I get to try to land an infinite amount of times until I get it right. Easy peasy.

Things look a bit different when it's your ass in the seat and you lose both engines on a random takeoff.

They also look different when you're subjected to massive G forces, your plane isn't listening to your inputs, the computer is shouting erratic warnings at you, you're rapidly losing altitude, and your training didn't cover this scenario.

Other than writing a lot about obvious things, what is your actual point?

On Airbus, the GPWS “pull up” escape maneuver requires full backstick until clear of obstacle. It can also be done for a windshear escape maneuver.

Are you going to be performing a terrain escape maneuver or a stall recovery maneuver over the open ocean?

GP claimed “there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input. Literally doesn't exist.” That's what I was replying to.

Also TCAS, no?

> there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input

What about the Boeing crashes?

The plane was actively telling them to pitch up. Every training they had received from Air France and Airbus told them that in normal law, the plane will not stall.

Then why was the captain pitching nose down? Why was the F/O ignoring the dual input warning?

The court’s conclusion was that this is because Air France and Airbus failed to sufficiently train the pilots.

Because a court said it does not make it true. The captain made the correct choices. The first officer made inexplicably incorrect choices continuously; choices which nobody would ever make regardless of training, unless perhaps you had literally never flown a plane before.

At no point in time would the correct response to a stall warning be to pull the nose up. This is something taught well before you enter the cockpit of a commercial airliner. If you continue to pitch the nose up excessively, you will stall the aircraft. This is also something you learn on day 2 or 3 of flight school.

If the first officer had done literally nothing at all, 228 people would be alive.

The first officer wasn’t solo-flying a 172 with a six-pack cluster. They were flying an airplane that will refuse to stall in normal law. The plane had switched to alternate law 2, but the indication to the pilots was an autopilot disengage. That is bad design.

I also fault Airbus’s philosophy on countermanding inputs, though that warning is unambiguous and the pilots should have communicated about that. But when the damn “un-stallable” aircraft is yelling at you for putting the nose down, while also yelling at you for opposing inputs, you can’t not fault the plane.

I'd think we'd have outgrown things like claims of "unstallibility" given prior experience with ships claimed to be "unsinkable". There's what the marketing says, and then there's reality. You will never build a technical system incapable of being coaxed into an error state. Period.

Too many years as Quality Assurance grinds into you that when engineers claim perfection, you start questioning their assumptions, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down shortly thereafter.

Do you need to be to understand that nose up is not how to recover from a stall?

I’m not a pilot. Zero experience except remote controlled airplanes.

But IIRC, it happened by night, over the ocean. If the instruments fail you, this is really hard to “perceive” your speed and orientation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256023

The artificial horizon hadn't failed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com