On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:32:48 +0100, Dave wrote:

Nightjar "cpb"@ insertmysurnamehere wrote:
Chris J Dixon wrote:
"Nightjar \"cpb\"@" "insertmysurnamehere wrote:

It was not a fall, but a deliberate fast descent to a level where
oxygen was not needed - one of the crew's oxygen masks was broken -
and where engine restart procedures might be expected to work, which
they did.

It's a pretty steep glide angle isn't it? I reckon it would feel
close enough to a fall for the passengers

The glide angle is 15:1, but he had to go down a lot faster than that
because of the oxygen mask problem.

The angle of attack would also be beneficial to re staring the engines
as well, by using the ram air to turn the compressor fan blades

Dave

Apparently they had to keep varying their angle, as the engines require a
specific range of airspeed to re-ignite, but they'd lost their airspeed
indication. They chanced losing altitude more quickly than required in
return for continual variations, hoping that one of their ignition attempts
would co-incide with the right airspeed.

I don't know how true this is, but that was what was stated on Air Crash
Investigation - funnily enough repeated a couple of nights ago.

SteveW