Not at all - a brand new Great Wall pickup runs to around 13,000 Euros which is well within budget, but I know nothing about them. Good warranty, 1-tonne Euro sized truck, but I’m going to be abusing whatever it is I get quite severely with building materials as well as commuting duty.

Hat tip to that man. There are tonnes of those things lying around Eastern Europe which you forgot to take back with you, looking at Ebay and Google.

It’s clear they *did* recognise the stall situation at some point but the crew pulled hard back on the stick expecting to get alpha floor from the aircraft - maximum AoA for the airspeed. In Alternate Law that gives you maximum up elevator which just keeps the aircraft in its stalled configuration.

Bulgaria is in the EU now and my major concern at the moment is learning the Cyrillic alphabet and getting some of the language under my belt - it’s not easy for Westerners as the syntax is completely different. As long as I can say ‘hello’, ‘thank you’, ‘please call me a taxi’ and, most importantly, ‘four beers…

With the pitot system blocked, the airspeed will vary as a function of altitude - the static system. The lower the aircraft descended, the higher the airspeed would read and I suspect it was actually giving them an overspeed warning, rather than a stall warning.

The ‘80s and ‘90s ones are cheap but the ‘70s ones seem to be into proper classic money. My Google-fu might be letting me down here, but I will have the opportunity to browse Texas car lots before the contract expires at the end of the year.

All I can do is refer you to my previous answer. The autopilot is not a substitute for being, well, a pilot. It is there to offload some of the tedious work but when it drops out (and it will do - I doubt there’s an experienced commercial pilot out there that hasn’t had this happen at some point in their career) you…

How much would one of those F100s run to these days? My Asian contract is coming to an end, my next one is in Bulgaria and I’ve looked at the roads on various mapping tools. When I say roads, I mean potholes surrounded by gravel. And snow in the winter. Proper snow. Not your American snow. Except where you get proper…

Indeed. As I’ve said to someone else I think at least the last 100ft - 50ft or so are going to require the skills and reflexes of a naval aviator; this isn’t autoland, it’s an approach-assist system.

I’d agree with that. A max crosswind landing in driving rain at night, after 12 hours having been bounced about all the way in, is what we’re there for. The automatics can’t handle that anyway, as they have quite moderate limitations for autoland - they’re designed for fog which only forms in relatively calm air.

The crash wasn’t *caused* by the systems failure though. An iced up pitot system (that is a bit of a can of worms on the A330 and beyond the scope of my reply) shouldn’t result in an airliner falling out of the sky.

I suspect it won’t help with that. The data for the deck’s pitch and roll is available... from the ship... but it would have to be broadcast to the aircraft and there would be an element of lag involved.

The thrust levers not moving whilst the autothrottle was active always struck me as odd, during my brief foray into the world of the electric death jet. Stick them in a detent and it merrily does its own thing with no feedback other than what you can hear or see on the ECAM.

It’s rare to practice it these days. We used to be able to hand fly the aircraft to top of climb or from top of descent for practice if the weather conditions were good, but now we have to have the autopilot in above 10,000ft.

Unfortunately not - fly-by-wire doesn’t turn rough air into smooth air! Unlike human pilots who can feel a change in an aircraft’s attitude coming and react almost before anything happens, flight control computers have to wait for an event to actually occur before they can counter it.

There is a warning - ‘ALTN LAW - PROT LOST’ (Alternate Law - Protection Lost) on the central screens but it would be easy to miss in a high stress environment. In addition, several other indicators on the PFDs show that flight envelope protection is lost. Alternate Law.

Mmm... they do warn of dual inputs by shouting.. you guessed it.. ‘DUAL INPUT!!’ at the crew. Sidestick inputs are then mathematically summed. That was not the issue though. The ‘Bus went into alternate law, the crew thought it was in normal law and pulled back hard expecting to get alpha floor when what they actually…

I don’t think the systems or the aircraft can be blamed for that one. A competent crew would have had no difficulty with that scenario, and the error chain goes all the way back to the training dept.

The Air France crash was a lack of awareness of how the aircraft’s Laws operated and a basic failure of airmanship. You can’t blame that on the aircraft or its systems.

Sure, but it’s nice to have something like that in the toolchest if the occasion arises when an electronic helping hand wouldn’t go amiss.