No, but as I said they will ask for it and its a reason why we need to know our altitude.

You aren’t going to lose control of your aircraft if you do not know your altitude (with the obvious caveat of being well above the ground).

It seems you are unwilling to admit that. You do not need to know your altitude to retain control of the aircraft. Hung up on little checklists and unable to realise what the important bits are. Like an administrator and their precious little “procedures” and “processes”.

So considering there was many error messages how could they be so sure the Artificial Horizon was working?

Because it is not dependent on any external factor, it is also a mechanical gyro, if it jams, that will become abundantly clear when it fails to track any change in aircraft attitude.

Of course, if you understand your aircraft – instead of merely pushing button A, B and C in the order prescribed in the FCOM – then you’d know that automatically.

Used to be an ATPL with 20,000hrs… or a PPL student with 5hrs training? I’m not trying to discredit you in any way

Nearer the latter than the former.

But I am not commenting on this based on my personal experience as a pilot. I’m doing it in my professional capacity as an engineer.

but it appears to be that you disagree with every pilot on the forum and are making us out to be incompetent.

Just the majority – obviously there are exceptions to every rule :diablo:

Whether you deem yourself to be an exception is up to you to judge. :dev2:

If you dont include your altitude in your call to ATC they’ll probably ask for it 😉

But they aren’t gonna shoot you down for not saying it. :rolleyes:

I do understand primary and secondary concerns however most of this was started with your AF447 outburst and no one properly knows what went on that night. Assuming they did stall – a stall, over sea in the middle of the night with no visual reference is no laughing matter.

The what happened is very well understood – the telemetry traces show exactly what happened. The why and how is less well understood.

They had a “visual reference” – its called the artificial horizon. They chose to ignore it and chase after airspeed readings instead (incidentally completely ignoring altitude). If they’d paid heed to it, they wouldn’t have stalled – unfortunately it is more or less that simple.

You folks may want to blame it on bad training. I blame allowing an altitude drift of a couple of thousand feet beyond what was known to be the safe flight envelope as stupid and negligent, nothing less.

So, riddle me this. If the stall warning is sounding, and you are climbing (through 37 kft) – why continue to pull back on the stick?
(a) you haven’t been training to realise that pushing forward puts the nose down.
(b) you have been trained but forgot
(c) that stall warning sounds nice – like leaving a mobile ringing ‘cos you like the ringtone
(d) you know pulling back stops us hitting the sea… right?
(e) ANOther

The cockpit voice recorder transcript makes for damning reading.
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/08/12/360432/af447s-initial-altitude-drift-went-virtually-unchallenged.html

You still didnt answer my question as to whether your a pilot of some sort or not?

Used to be.

In my experience, during normal VFR flying in a SEP plane, you rely primarily on the position of the upper edge of the instrument panel, windshield/canopy rails etc. in relation to the outside horizon in order to set the correct attitude for level flight, climbing turns and so on.

Yep – with the implicit assumption what is ahead of you is the same ground height as what is to the side. But thats kinda irrelevant here – what you need is a means of recognising aircraft attitude, whether that is the horizon or the VH, doesn’t really matter to the core of this argument.

A functioning altimeter is very handy even if a failure won’t necessarily ruin the day immediately.

Of course it is – I’m not saying it isn’t a vital piece of equipment. But, if things start failing you need to reduce you sensor inputs to what is absolutely needed – luckily the AH and throttle are relatively reliable sensor suites, the throttle being (to a degree) a closed loop system which self-checks.

Still no need (strictly speaking) for an artificial horizon when flying VFR. You seem to be making a contradiction here as far as VFR flying is concerned.

If you can accurately judge your attitude from the real horizon… then yes, I suppose there is no need for it.

Regaining control – yes. Stall recovery procedures may involve using airspeed readings once the initial attitude and power setting for recovery have been established, though (at least the ones I’ve done in smaller airplanes). Also, regardless of attitude (more or less), other factors such as vertical winds can affect the ROD.

Of course – I’m not discounting the other sensors are important – I’m driving at the core fact that they in themselves, are not absolutely needed to fly an aircraft.

If your instruments start playing up – AH and throttle. Thats it. Give yourself time to diagnose and work-around the problems. Till then – don’t make things worse by making half-assed guesses and focussing on items of secondary concern.

EGTC mentions altitude for air traffic – yep. But thats not gonna kill you unless someone else crashes into you. Also, if your in an air traffic zone and they can track you – you have a completely independent source for ground speed and altitude.

You guys not try engauge?

Pretty useful tool for digitising graphs etc – but can be used for stuff like this.

Its open source (or maybe its actually freeware):

http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/

I don’t understand why you included the AH while excluding the altimeter

‘Cos under VFR if, you can see you are not going to hit the ground, the altimeter is superfluous. You don’t need to know your altitude as long as you know you aren’t gonna hit the ground anytime soon. Nice-to-know and need-to-know.

I include the AH to prevent you trying to climb too quick and stalling. That is something you need-to-know.

If you know what power you have* – you should know the sustained attitude envelope the a/c is capable of – otherwise you don’t really know your aircraft.

*which, as I pointed out earlier, the FADEC will be able to calculate to a reasonable degree as its much more than a passive sensor suite.

In a repeat of AF447 – when you cannot trust the readings of instruments, and you know your stall margin is preciously small due to altitude. The objective should be retaining control of the aircraft, everything else is second to that. Altitude, airspeed, heading – all secondary considerations.

Thus – you aim for a minus 2 deg pitch on the AH and keep your throttles at cruise setting, or (like an AF A340, if you think your approaching Vmax – throttle back and drop the nose to minus 4 or 5 deg). From 35,000 ft that is over 15 minutes of descent time to get yourself sorted out (at -2deg).

The AF crew got fixated on secondary concerns and gave themselves 3 minutes to diagnose the problem, find a solution and implement it.

Hmm.

FADEC uses static pressure for example even for ‘core’ computations. Static pressure is affected by external fluctuations. Therefore, an external influence. Normal control law is derived from sensors from the aircrafts digital air data computers i.e airspeed, altitude etc. All external influences.

Even using basic control law, ram air is a major influence on thrust produced no matter what state the control is on. You can’t get a much bigger external influence that the mass of air entering the inlet!

EDIT: As an aside, does the A330 have standby pitot static instruments available?

You are mis-understanding me.

1. The core FADEC sensors are not reliant on the aircraft interface; it would never be signed off otherwise.

2. If you perturb something, then measure the change and compare to what you would have expected – then you are not relying on an external influence. Hence what I mean when I specifically mention measurements within the compressor/turbine. If the mass of air entering is not the same as expected – your closed loop algorithms will very quickly ascertain that as the turbine temperatures are not matching up. Therefore, the sensor is reliant on an internal influence – if they don’t match, you know there is a problem.

3. You can also derive from fuel rate, turbine temperature and pressure ratios what your likely (it’ll not be perfect, but it’ll be good enough) real gross thrust is.

The two core parameters a pilot controls on an aircraft are aircraft attitude (you can include roll and yaw if you want) and thrust. Everything else stems from that. When the sh!t hits the fan – the artificial horizon and the throttle settings are the things to go to. I don’t know how you folks can’t see that – and I don’t know how the Air France crew didn’t – unless the training is shambolic.