> What this doesn't address is why the tail of this particular airliner > fell off while it was travelling at a comparatively modest speed. > Anything over 250 kts would have been illegal at that altitude and > would have been REALLY played up by the media. But the point is > valid; the NTSB quizzed a bunch of pilots about Vne issues and > discovered that most of them were clueless about the subject.
Did they quiz the pilots about Vne? I thought I had read that the pilots they interviewed were incorrect in their assumptions about rudder limiting features, and that there did exist an opportunity to enter combinations of rudder movements (specifically a series of opposite rudder commands) that could cause structural failure in the rudder - even well below Vne. I read that the pilots were unaware of this. Probably so were the designers. One would think that, unlike a Bonanza, a modern commercial transport would limit the ability of the pilots to damage their own aircraft via structural filters and limiters. Airbus has had its share of problems with "smart" FCS, though. I still remember the video of that Airbus (A-300?) inaugural flight that plowed a section of forest when trying to takeoff after a low-speed pass over the runway, when the FCS insisted that the aircraft was landing and could not command the engines to takeoff thrust. Wasn't there also an angle to this story where a failed composite structure of the rudder was involved in a previous incident on the same aircraft, or that the failed part was actually an illegally repaired and used part? Jon _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
