Trial by Fire: The crash of Aeroflot flight 1492

Yevdokimov was now in the grip of a divergent PIO event. However, because the sidestick has a nearly direct relationship with elevator position in Normal Mode below 50 feet anyway, the fact that the controls were in Direct Mode played almost no direct role in the events described in the above paragraph. Rather, if Direct Mode had any influence on these events at all, it was to accustom Yevdokimov to making excessive control inputs, as I discussed earlier. This explains why the magnitude of his inputs was so much larger on flight 1492 than on previous flights, even though the active pitch philosophy below 50 feet was essentially the same. In any case, the pitch angle had only just begun to rise above its nadir of -1.7˚ when the plane touched down on the runway with all three landing gears almost simultaneously. The descent rate at touchdown was around 630 feet per minute (3.2 m/s), well above the desired value, due to the windshear and the low pitch attitude. Instead of easing onto the ... Read full article.