Airline disasters
- Thread starter birch
- Start date
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
This is not heroism. This is trained and intelligent people trying to stay alive.
True
But without hydraulics , almost impossible to do . And I doubt their training included being without hydraulics .
I read a book by a man who flew Lancasters during WW2. They were trained to fly the 4-engine bomber on 3 or 2 engines. One time, instead of turning the 3rd engine back on he accidentally turned the 2nd engine off. He claims to be the only person on earth who ever flew a Lancaster on 1 engine.
Well, I mean, technically there are people that flew Lancaster's with no functioning engines...
Granted, they only flew to the scene of the crash, but they still flew.
I get what you mean though (Just made me think of a Ron White joke and it made me giggle a little)One of the eeriest recordings I've heard is the AF 447 recording. The pilots stalled the plane at 38,000 feet and held it in a stall all the way to impact - four minutes and thirty seconds later. For almost five minutes, the pilots held the sticks all the way back, keeping the plane in the stall and preventing it from recovering, despite warnings and a recorded voice saying "STALL STALL" over and over again - from first stall to impact, the computer said "STALL" 75 times.
After a few minutes, the captain (who was sleeping in the back) came forward to see was going on. He didn't see anything wrong, because in an A330 it's hard to see what the pilots are doing with the controls. As they passed through 10,000 feet you can hear on the recording the pilots saying "climb - climb - why can't we climb?" Finally one of the pilots told the others what he has been doing - "But I've had the stick back the whole time!" The captain finally realized what happened and said "NO! NO! NO!" while the other pilot yelled "Descend! Give me the controls!" - but it was too late for the aircraft to recover.
Not stalling an airplane is one of the first things you learn when you learn to fly. In this case, the computer's "envelope protection" algorithm, which prevents stalling, actually ended up hurting them. Since they trusted the computer 100%, they assumed they couldn't stall. But when water vapor and unusually high temperatures caused the pitot tubes (airspeed sensors) to ice over, the computer automatically switched to a simpler control system, one more like a normal airplane's - and in that simpler system it _was_ possible to stall the airplane.
Still, it's amazing to me that two presumably-competent pilots held that airplane in a stall for almost five minutes, and hit the water with every system functioning well, the engines at full power, and the instruments reporting the right information.
The hydraulic instruments weren't actually functioning well .
Instruments aren't hydraulic. The _airspeed_ indicator (an instrument) stopped working for about 30 seconds due to icing. All three hydraulic systems were working just fine, and were doing exactly what the pilot was telling them to do (i.e. hold the aircraft in a stall.)
Stupid post. The two are not only not mutually exclusive, they usually affiliated.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
While what you say may be true, I don't see how it negates what Exchemist said, let alone labels it as "stupid".
He was, after all, speaking about this incident, not some hypothetical incident(s) you might be alluding to.
As for heroism, consider: what choice did they have? What would the non-heroic option look like by comparison?
Exchemist is not being disrespectful, he is simply being rational. This is a discussion forum, not a eulogy. And as far as we know, no one reading this was related to anyone on the plane, so there's no feelings to be hurt.
the heroism is more a euphemism, not literal. also, because no other teams in simulation could keep the plane aloft that long so they were very good pilots. the heroism part is how they never gave up, even when they were doomed from the start.