[tuna-piano]

Just to put their "mistakes" in context - Sully, America's favorite hero pilot, accidentally put his airplane into an almost stall as he was performing the Miracle on the Hudson (due to the A320's design philosophy, the airplane prevented the stall...). It goes to show- even great pilots doing good work in a stressful time can make critical oversights.

[cjbprime]

That's the opposite to the actual conclusion of this story! He intentionally tried to flare, but the Airbus flight envelope protections disallowed it, so they hit the water harder than they ought to have.

[bbojan]

Do you have a reference for that statement?

Because the story that I heard is that he purposefully commanded max pitch knowing that alpha protection would prevent the airplane from stalling, as his landing speed would be lowest at max AoA.

[cjbprime]

And I heard a third story, which is that the aircraft nearly botched his deliberate attempt at flaring for the water landing due to envelope protections he hadn't known about:

> I was commanding for more, pulling back full aft on the stick and the flight control computers prevented me from getting more lift therefore we hit harder than we would have (...) It turns out there's a little-known software feature known only then to a few Airbus software engineers, and to no pilots to no airlines that was the case. It's called a phugoid mode. And it was not the way we were trained the airplane should work, apparently it is the way the airplane does work. But that was not apparent to us.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/52147/why-cant-...