Originally Posted by
Check Essential
If you roll a widebody transport 90 degrees and drop the nose far enough below the horizon to make airspeed rapidly increase you would have to be trading quite a bit of altitude.
First off, the fact that we're talking about a wide body has no relevance to aerodynamics and physics. Second, you're not purely "trading" altitude for airspeed because the engines are at full thrust. This is how you are able to maintain a net altitude gain with every roll reversal cycle.
Originally Posted by
Check Essential
Might work at 10,000 feet but I don't think you'd have enough room to perform a maneuver like that right after takeoff.
Actually, you do. In my case we started at 10,000 feet only to provide the required altitude to recover if we departed controlled flight. We began the test at 10,000 feet and V2+10. We bottomed out from the first roll reversal cycle at about 10,500 then gained about 500 to 600 feet with every subsequent cycle.
Again, I don't know if this would have worked for this incident since we don't know how bad the CG shift was, or even if there was a CG shift. I'm just saying it may have been a way to prevent a full aerodynamic stall. For me, even if my first cycle resulted in ground contact, I'd rather hit the ground in controlled flight because the airplane slides after it hits. In uncontrolled flight, the airplane wreckage is all in one area and nobody can survive those kind of G loads.
Carl