Further Preventing Loss of Control In-flight
Loss of Control In-flight (LOC-I) has been one of the main categories of fatal accidents since the beginning of commercial jet aviation. While flight envelope protections in fourth-generation aircraft have reduced LOC-I incidents by 90% compared to third-generation aircraft, the continuous enhancement of aircraft systems is necessary to further prevent potential future accidents. Airbus has leveraged lessons learned from in-service events to implement advanced safety improvements in A350 aircraft, further mitigating the risk of LOC-I accidents. The objective is now to upgrade the A320 family, A330, and A380 aircraft to get as close as possible to the A350 standard for LOC-I prevention.This article will describe these safety improvements, and outline a strategy for implementing them across the Airbus fleet.
Preventing Tailstrike During Go-around Near the Ground
The focus of this article is go-around near the ground, sometimes called, “rejected landing”. This follows our previous article: “A Focus on the Landing Flare” article published September 2020 and “A Focus on the Takeoff Rotation” published January 2021. Those articles provided recommendations for avoiding tailstrikes when performing landing flare and takeoff rotation. There is also a higher risk of tailstrike when a go-around is required near the ground. This article provides additional recommendations and observations for flight crews to help them avoid tailstrike events during this phase.
A Focus on the Takeoff Rotation
An appropriate takeoff rotation maneuver is a balance between good takeoff performance and sufficient margin versus tail strike, stall speed, and minimum control speeds.Applying the 3°/s rotation rate requested in the SOPs is the key to ensure that the aircraft meets the expected takeoff performance. Flight data monitoring shows that the rotation rate values in service vary and a lower rotation rate is observed in some cases with the associated degradation of takeoff performance. This article describes both the takeoff rotation laws available on Airbus Fly-by-Wire (FBW) aircraft and the recommended rotation techniques that will enable flight crew to achieve consistent takeoff rotations at the requested rotation rate.
High-altitude manual flying
Flying an aircraft manually at high altitudes, and therefore necessarily at high Mach number, is a completely different discipline to what it may be like at low altitudes. As it turns out, opportunities to experience manual flying at high altitudes are rare in a pilot’s career. Yet, regulations do require it in certain circumstances, such as when the Auto Pilot is unavailable.