I share the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) suspicions that excess rudder correction might have originated the fin separation in the fatal AA587 disaster I do not share Tim Price's view (Letters, Flight International 4-10 December 2001): "If you're not expecting it, let go." I might accept it if the event happened at least 10,000fi (3,000m) above the ground, in clear conditions and the pilot had become panic stricken.
In 1955, in my early flying days, instructors taught us about the importance of the rudder. An old combat pilot told me that, for him, of all the flight controls the rudder was the life saver, it being the last flight control to lose its efficiency at low air speed or in a stalling situation. It's the control that stops a spin.
My instructor showed me how, flying formation in the wake of another aircraft, that you could fly the aircraft straight, in rough conditions without the use of the ailerons. Power, elevator and rudder would do it, the latter helping to keep the wings level. The rudder must be used swiftly and with sudden short inputs, meaning that the pilot must be fully alert almost pre-empting the drop of the wing. It looks difficult but it's not.
Once I learned this technique, l found it useful in windshear as well as in wake- turbulence conditions during approaches and take-offs. During these phases of flight, all pilots are normally alert and ready to face unforeseeable conditions. Now, if you think that most modern aircraft use the spoilers more than the ailerons to drop the wing, it becomes obvious that ample aileron corrections at low speed, close to the ground in landing or take-off configuration, could become tricky and sometimes dangerous. The fact is that by using ailerons you think you lift the dropped wing while what you really are doing is dropping the opposite lifted wing. So the rudder is the saviour after all.
When the NTSB talks about reviewing American Airlines' recovery from extreme attitudes training programmes I wonder how good these programmes are. l don't think simulators can reproduce the feel that pilots get when flying in true wake turbulence or windshear conditions. On the other hand, l can't see airlines putting their pilots through the sort of exercises I learned in the air force. Maybe in the flying schools?
Capt Orlando Giacich (retired)
Weston super Mare, UK
Source: Flight International