Posted on 02/19/2009 5:19:10 AM PST by GBA
Did you watch the video posted above? If it was a tail stall, the reaction has to be opposite of a normal wing stall. If it was a tail stall, pulling power and pulling the yoke is absolutely the right thing to do.
The horizontal stabilizer is a wing that produces downward lift. If it stalls, the downward lift to the rear of the aircraft goes away, leading to a nose-over, and the tail stall is worse with higher power.
And the average age of a pilot in the military is?
Point I'm making is what does her age have to do with it? We have a sky full of 23, 24, 25, 26 years olds men and women, protecting our butts, and they are strapping on aircraft much more complex than this commuter plane.
You need to be willing to pay for experience, most of these regionals won't. According to Airline Pilot Central the first officer, who most likely had less than a years experience, was making $21 an hour for a 75 hour work month. Do the math, that's about $1600 per month. The pilot made maybe double that. Sullenburger probably makes between $150 and $200K.
I’m still trying to figure this out. If it was a normal icing condition, and stall, there would be no reason to pull back on the stick. Shoving the throttles forward would be correct, and pushing forward on the stick.
If it was indeed a tail stall, there would be lots of reason to pull back on the stick because the pilot would have suddenly found himself pointing at the ground. If that was the case, pulling back on the stick was correct, but he over did it, to overcome the stick-shaker thing. Adrenaline? He pushed the throttles forward which would be correct for a normal wing stall, though.
A micro-timeline of what happened when would help. Did he pulled back too hard, THEN pushed the throttles forward?
None of this makes sense without more information.
Your inane comments annoy me. Grand Pianos don't generate lift either.
Are you a pilot? Have you ever flown an airplane? The plane supposedly pancaked into the ground. Hmmm. Let's see. What direction would the engine thrust be if the plane pancaked. Did you study physics? I mean real physics, not the stuff they teach in high school?
ML/NJ
Check out the NASA film on tailplane stalls via the link provided in the original site's comments section. Another commenter suggested pitot icing may very well have caused inaccurate airspeed reading.
She had more experience.
He may have mistook the stall warning as the ground proximity alarm. They were flying IFR and couldn’t see the ground or horizon. It’s natural to want to climb too fast after an aborted approach. Instead the pilot is trained to gain speed, slowly retract flaps, and go easy on the initial climb.
As opposed to the autopilot. I also wonder where his co-pilot was in all of this. When you're low and slow you tend to pay A LOT of attention to airspeed. Of course, airspeed is something your instruments sense, and if they are wrong then you have to recognize that they are wrong. I don't know anything about the aircraft involved here. I only flew single engine stuff, but a lot of instrument training for me was about recognizing bad data from the instruments.
ML/NJ
From other articles I've read there is speculation that he was following the procedures for a tail stall in the type of aircraft he used to fly.
You must know G to a lot more decimal places than I do !
ML/NJ
After watching the film, it appears the pilots did everything they should have; they just didn’t have the altitude to recover.
..and then, after much time, service & accumulated flying hours... used all that experience to fly the commercial jets loaded with people.
Yes I have flown airplanes.
And who, exactly, said the the plane “pancaked” into the ground (i.e. fell straight down, flat on its belly).
If the engines/propellors are generating thrust, and the plane’s attitude ends up nose down, which quite often happens after a stall, then the plane will accelerate towards the ground at a rate greater than that caused by the force of gravity alone.
PS - Thank you for letting me know that my inane comments annoy you, your highness, that means they have achieved their desired result. ;^)
The first thing that gets drilled into a Student Naval Aviator during instrument training is to trust the aircraft instruments over the seat of the pants. In fact, the way to overcome spacial disorientation (vertigo) is to get back on the instument scan and trust the instruments. Airspeed, attitude, needle ball.
There are a lot of dead pilots who failed to trust their instruments in the clag.
OK. If you dropped a player piano....
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