Many fatal aircraft accidents are caused by stalling and spinning into the ground.
Why not make airplanes stall proof? This is not a unique idea. Aircraft have
been
built with limited control stick travel which prevented stalling. That idea never
caught on.
Maybe landing speed was too high. Boeing patented an AOA limiting system.
As far as I know, no such system exists for general aviation. The attached
drawing shows a wedge intended to move upward to limit how far the control
stick can be pulled back, thus preventing a stall. This system would not prevent
the pilot from flaring and landing normally. In fact the pilot would not even
realize that an anti-stall system existed unless he leveled off too high above
the
runway and kept trying to pull the stick back further. The AOA Limiter would prevent
stalling and the airplane would mush and fall onto to the runway, landing hard
on its main gear.
Compare that to no AOA Limiter installed. The pilot levels off too high above
the runway. Then the plane stalls and noses into the runway. Either way is not
desired.
The AOA Limiter system would monitor the AOA information coming from
either an existing EFIS or from a stand alone AOA device. That data would
be sent to a microcontroller which would command a servomotor to drive the
wedge. A cam could be used instead of a wedge.
Many aircraft builders have the skills and smarts to install an AOA Limiter
system in their homebuilt aircraft. We need an electronics guru to design the
circuit and program the microcontroller. Eric?
Comments anyone?
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Joe Gores
Read this topic online here:
http://forums.matronics.com/viewtopic.php?p=515421#515421
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