Newbie Qs on stalls and spins

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 at 09:43:22 in message
, Bob Gardner
wrote:

You will never experience a stall in a "commercial"
aircraft.

If you do you may not survive it.

Ref: Air Disaster Volume 3 by Macarthur Job
April 26. 1994 A300 Airbus flying from Yaipei to Nagoya in Japan.

On approach to land in clear conditions at night and fully configured
for landing it passed the outer marker. But 3nm from touch down it
briefly levelled off. Descent continued but at decreasing speed and nose
up pitch increased. At 1nm and 500ft to go engine power was increased,
then after a brief interval cut again.

Several seconds later power was increased again and it nosed up into a
steep climb. The crew called 'Going around' but the climb increase
sharply. It climber steeper and steeper with the speed falling and after
gaining 1500ft it stalled. The nose came up a bit after the stall but it
struck the ground very hard. Only 7 passengers survived out of 256.

It is easy to write the above bare facts, what happened required a lot
of pages to explain. It depended on not recognising what was happening,
misunderstanding whether or not the autopilot was engaged and a
misunderstanding of how the aircraft would respond with the autopilot
engaged. Except in Land and Go Around mode the auto pilot disconnects
when force is applied to the control column. In those modes the
autopilot reacts by changing the tail plane trim to cancel the crew
input. It seems the Go Around Lever may have been accidentally engaged.


--
David CL Francis