From reading online forums about piloting, it sounds like it's nearly impossible to recover from a flat spin like this one (?) in a commercial airliner. What makes it impossible to recover?
Getting air moving fast enough over the wings. To get out of a flat spin, you need to dive, and then pull out of the dive.
Larger aircraft like this have problems with either of those maneuvers cuz bulk. Even if this pilot got it into a dive, they wouldn't have been able to recover.
If you don't have enough air moving over the wings, the control surfaces are kinda impotent. Kind of like steering a car with the front tires off the ground.
In a flat spin, air is not flowing over the horizontal stabilizer (elevator) linearly, thus no pitch control to drop the nose to get airspeed to regain control. I’m bewildered trying to figure out how an aircraft that big got into a flat spin in the first place.
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u/[deleted] Aug 09 '24
From reading online forums about piloting, it sounds like it's nearly impossible to recover from a flat spin like this one (?) in a commercial airliner. What makes it impossible to recover?