there's the possibility of contributing to dynamics with respect to the
vertical axis, but only in an extremely-loosely-'coupled' way.
unless stuff is attached to the airframe, it's pretty-much like liquid
in a bottle, and tends to destabilize because it has its own inertia
that doesn't cooperate with the airframe, and actually damps flight
control inputs.
it's why the 'fasten your seatbelts' light comes on during demanding
flight operations.
one-'language' ken
Arthur T. Murray wrote:
>> Somebody wrote in bionet.neuroscience (of all places!):
>> >> the MD-80 plane crash yesterday. the stabilizer problem is analogous to
> >> the nervous system 'lesion'. the pilots tried desperately to correct for
> >> the malfunction induced by the stabilizer failure, but because the
> >> failure of the stabilizer =separated= the stabilizer's functionality
> >> from the rest of the plane's controlable dynamics, the efforts of the
> >> pilots 'only' led to the deterioration of the functionality of the
> >> remaining control systems.
>> The following may be a dumb and naive question, and may have already
> been asked, but:
>> Could the Alaska Airline pilots have saved the aircraft by asking
> all the passengers to walk to the back of the cabin, thus, by their
> body weight, forcing down the tail area which had been elevated by
> a jammed stabilizer wing? Would the weight of 88 passengers and crew
> have been enough to level out the flight of the airplane?
>> A hideous thought because it is in hindsight, but, might it have worked?
>> --
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/mind4th.html PD AI