Peter wrote:
Credibility = 0, USflyer…
I’ll let the facts speak… how about an occasional link to back an opinion?
USF here is the link to the AOPA NTSB database search page, not sure where you found your factual source, but somehow NTSB data feels more reliable than the Daily Beast.
Peter wrote:
You mean airliners have been crashed because the pilot was hand flying in IMC and lost control of it, and the co-pilot just sat there and watched?
Not only once. or both of them.
Most recent one was a 737 in Kazan which crashed on go around in 2013. They were neither able to fly the GA by hand nor were they able to recover the upset.
And AF447 goes into the same cathegory. A crew of 3 was unable to recover a simple stall.
There are many others like that.
A crew of 3 was unable to recover a simple stall.
That was no “simple” but a very deep stall, that cannot be easily recovered. AFAIK Tests in A330 simulators showed that only a special maneuver with full engine power could have brought it out of that stall.
But there’s enough other incidents where professional pilots, or even two of them, crashed because of spacial disorientation.
Peter wrote:
If you drive a car (no airbags etc, and crappy seat belts) into a concrete wall at 46mph, you will get well smashed up, or worse.
Peter, I agree, but a normal or perpendicular impact into an immovable hard surface is the worst case and looking down at East Kilbride on my way home from Loch Tay this evening, it seems quite hard to achieve. A glancing impact, and/or hitting something with a bit of “give” is much more likely and crucially, will afford a STOL airframe the six to nine feet deceleration distance which it needs to preserve the lives of the occupants in accordance with FAR 23.
It’s a quadratic function, so the key to CFIT survival is minimum controllable airspeed. Of course, with insufficient practice or an unforgiving aeroplane, slow flight could lead to loss of control, which really is a killer…
I forget which famous pilot said that to survive in a crash, maintain minimum controllable airspeed, don’t hit anything head on, and maybe fly between two trees to take the wings off. I think it also wouldn’t hurt if the plane has a steel tube fuselage structure (like a Maule 
or a Mooney or Bellanca) because of structurally efficient designs, three dimensional frames of crumpling steel tubing tend to absorb a bit more energy before coming apart.
Or pop the chute and hope for the best, I guess 
It doesn’t have to be steel. The Cirrus has a very solid rollover cage made of Carbon Fibre, Airbags in the front belts and energy absorbing seats. The crashworthiness still cannot be compared even with the smallest modern cars.
AF447 etc is utterly irrelevant to the points I was trying to make regarding the topic title.
A carbon fiber roll bar would serve a different purpose, to never deform and thereby prevent deformation of the cabin roof. That’s a good thing. However, if you are trying to absorb energy, metallic materials are good and steel is one of the best. It just keeps bending and bending before it breaks, absorbing energy of motion and turning it into heat. The issue with steel otherwise is that the way to build a light structure with such a dense material is a space frame of hollow tubes, and that takes a lot of labor because the space frame does not form the streamlined outer surface of the fuselage and more parts and labor are required for that.
The energy absorbing seats do exactly what their name would imply, also a good thing I think, but they tend to increase the frontal area of the plane.
Flyer59 wrote:
That was no “simple” but a very deep stall, that cannot be easily recovered. AFAIK Tests in A330 simulators showed that only a special maneuver with full engine power could have brought it out of that stall.
And how do you expect that this “Very deep stall” developed?
If you are in a stall and keep the stick fully aft, what do you expect will happen? And if 3 folks with that paygrade don’t reckognize a stall for what it is, then they and unfortunately all the people who trusted them beyond help.
According to the A330 folks I talked to, all that would have been required is to release the stick. The engines were at maximum all the time.
