I was cruising over the British channel with an a320. The plane suddenly pitched up and down. Eventually, the autopilot disconnected and the plane falls straight down to the ground. I was afk during this event and I got 2 level 1 violation because of it. I am not sure was the cruising speed too slow or other reason.
This is the replay of the flight:
ipad gen9
iPadOS 16.5.1
You were going too slow, cruising at M.74. The normal cruise speed for the A320 is M.78 at a minimum.
You were also likely quite heavy which meant that being slow caused a stall at FL350.
Normally I would agree… but this behaviour looks rather odd to me. It’s very… sudden.
@infinite_wing - can you share the replay using sharemyinfiniteflight.com or similar?
I had this “nose rocking up and down” issue yesterday with the A320 but I assume it’s because I was going 500 IAS 200 feet off the ground 🥲
There is a mild turbulence and it stalled during a turn. It is reasonable because of low speed but plz have a look. Thank you very much.
It looks like it’s trying to maintain FL350, and then overcorrects multiple times and stalls out.
Looks like what @tunamkol said.
Can’t say I’ve seen this behaviour with the A320, not like this.
It’s unfortunately the winds aren’t saved in the replay because it feels like this could have occurred in a “section” where the winds shifted a bit drastic…
Still though, speed/weight ratio probably plays a big part here.
in this case if the weight>speed, that could be the only possible reason for this to occur, else i think it could be UFO’s or some Alien Radius Activity going on
Yes, the wind can’t be “seen” in the replay but you can still see the effects of it if you understand what I mean.
This would match up with what Seb said above;
Thank you. I failed to read that he said that.
I had this same problem. I was flying a B788 and my right engine suddenly went out. I started to fall on the right side, and got a level 2 violation.
Since we don’t have failures in the app, you were either using a 3rd party app or someone disengaged it.
It’s not really the same problem either :)
What I’m wondering is, how would a combination of winds cause this? His GS clearly increases indicating he is turning to align with a tailwind or he is speeding up. The mach number also increases, indicating that the aircraft should be applying power. However, the sound in the background doesn’t change at all. How would mach number be increasing while ground speed is increasing when engines are stable? A strong, sudden headwind would increase mach number, but it would also result in engines idle immediately and a decrease in ground speed. A sudden tailwind would increase GS but it would decrease the mach number. A temperature change could also cause this, but OAT is constant. Some weird things going on under the hood.
I didn’t have any 3rd party app. My sister claims she didn’t do anything. But, I may have not had enough fuel going to the right engine. I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter anyways,
I did some poking around. -69 degrees OAT @ FL350 is equivalent to 0 degrees C @ SFC, which leads me to think this is a default value displayed in replays because it is definitely not 0 degrees in England right now. To match the airspeed shown, I need a surface temperature of around 25C, and an OAT of -44C. This gives a GS of 433 @ M 0.74, meaning that there is around 14 knots of tailwind component somewhere. Wind in the channel at altitude is around 90 knots. Replicating these conditions in solo, performing the turn seen in the video would increase GS to 455. I can achieve 470 by cranking the temperature, but this, predictably, causes a decrease in mach number. Between this and the “airspeed suddenly dropping” bug from a week or two ago, I’m convinced there’s some hidden mechanic in the game that works opposite to any conventional wisdom we have.
OP, I know this is a bit accusatory, but are you 100% sure that this isn’t just a pilot-induced (or someone else in your house induced) stall and a coverup? I re-listened to the video and there is a clear and apparent throttle up, conveniently right before mach number starts going up. Autopilot doesn’t just increase mach randomly. Before you say that a wind increase caused it, it would have to increase to 150 knots to even hit the ground speed (not to mention, mach number would decrease).
Engines flame out simultaneously in this game. Someone bumped it.
I’ve cruised at Mach .72 in an A320 at 35,000 before and I’ve never had an issue with stalling.
It gives you less wiggle room than 0.78 but I agree, I don’t think the speed is the driving factor here. I loaded an A320 up to full everything (well beyond MTOW) and then purposefully tried to get it to stall (flipped wind components by 180+ knots, high turbulence, aircraft in a bank) and it was able to sort itself out. Once the airspeed hit like 150 it was unable to accelerate at all but it spent another couple minutes descending before rolling over.
Yeah, hence why we concluded that it’s a mixture of slow speed, heavy aircraft, fairly high altitude, turning and fluctuating winds
I don’t think the wind argument holds here unless you can provide me an explanation on how wind caused both a throttle up and a mach number increase.
Not to mention that this could be another part of the A320 families questionable physics. From the video it seemed like the AP stalled itself due to overcorrecting