Old-Fashioned Stick & Rudder Skills - Who Needs Them?

[Hedley]

I got the following from avweb this morning. Read the last sentence.

-- cut --

AIRLINER MAY HAVE STALLED AT 33,000 FEET

(http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/a ... tml#191429)

An MD-82 that crashed in Venezuela last August, killing 160, may have
been behaving just the way Boeing had warned it might in a 2002 service
bulletin. The bulletin warned that the autopilot might reduce engine
power too much after a rapid climb, allowing airspeed to bleed off to
the point of a stall. Pilots of the West Caribbean Airways flight, out
of Panama for Martinique, may have been unaware, unnamed French
investigators (Martinique is a French island) told the International
Herald-Tribune.

An interim report on the crash released by the Venezuelan government
last November said the plane climbed from 31,000 feet to 33,000 feet
and held the altitude for eight minutes before the autopilot turned itself off.

The plane then descended for a minute before the stall horn sounded.
It then fell to the ground at about 10,000 feet per minute, with the pilots
pulling full back on the control yoke (!!!!)

[Edo]

WTF?? I hope that the last sentence is media inaccuracy.

And decending for a full minute, and needing the stall horn to tell you something was wrong.

[Hedley]

It's amazing that those two supposed airline pilots could NOT be aware of this thing called the "coffin corner":

http://www.aviationshop.com.au/avfacts/ ... efault.asp

Or for that matter, being able to recognize and recover from a "low speed" (ie vanilla) stall.

What are they teaching kids these days?!

[Doc]

FAR more training goes into the FMS, and the auto-land systems than how to actually FLY the fucker!