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by dcrazy 25 days ago
The first officer wasn’t solo-flying a 172 with a six-pack cluster. They were flying an airplane that will refuse to stall in normal law. The plane had switched to alternate law 2, but the indication to the pilots was an autopilot disengage. That is bad design.

I also fault Airbus’s philosophy on countermanding inputs, though that warning is unambiguous and the pilots should have communicated about that. But when the damn “un-stallable” aircraft is yelling at you for putting the nose down, while also yelling at you for opposing inputs, you can’t not fault the plane.

1 comments

I'd think we'd have outgrown things like claims of "unstallibility" given prior experience with ships claimed to be "unsinkable". There's what the marketing says, and then there's reality. You will never build a technical system incapable of being coaxed into an error state. Period.

Too many years as Quality Assurance grinds into you that when engineers claim perfection, you start questioning their assumptions, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down shortly thereafter.