Hovering A330

[PhilDernerJr]

Nick, this is a great example of Alpha Floor. The aircraft would not let the pilot pull up into a stall situation.. Your example was also good in showing a failure for the flight crew to stay at the 100 feet it was suppose to during this maneuver. The engines did not spool up until it was hitting the trees.

There is a lot of controversy over the Airbus aircraft going into the trees...the only thing that is not a controversy is the fact that the aircraft handled the situation well, it was the pilots or the engine controls that did not add power....depending on who you ask.

Yes, and it's one thing that I don't like so much about Airbus, though they are all fine aircraft. The pilots hit the throttles, but they don't respond to manual input like in other aircraft types. They pilots had the auto-throttle activated, so no matter what they did to the actual thrust levers, no change in thrust was occurring. It all would have been changed if they just hit the auto-throttle button.

This problem has since been fixed, and the aircraft can receive emergency override inputs from the pilots in those situations.

[NIKV69]

Yes, and it's one thing that I don't like so much about Airbus, though they are all fine aircraft. The pilots hit the throttles, but they don't respond to manual input like in other aircraft types. They pilots had the auto-throttle activated, so no matter what they did to the actual thrust levers, no change in thrust was occurring. It all would have been changed if they just hit the auto-throttle button.

This problem has since been fixed, and the aircraft can receive emergency override inputs from the pilots in those situations.

Phil took the words out of my mouth.

[hiss srq]

A few things about the Airbus and the various modes. The Airbus is actually a very easy airplane to understand once you release yourself from the single flight mode peramiter. In the A320 when you are in normal law for example, when the RA detects gear down and flaps 3 or full, the airplane begins to start trimming forward. The purpose of this is to smooth out the flare into touchdown. A lot of little cool tools the engineers designed into the airplane to make life easy. The airplane will fly the predetermined pitch or roll that you set with your control imputs as well. It is very likely that the pilots for example were flying the buffer in that video totally hands off the power with the airplane adjusting power itself to maintain that pitch and flight vector speed wise. If you ever want to know about the bus, all you have to do is ask. Spend alot of time intimately with the A320 suite of jets.