For those who don’t know: Pilots setting up a commercial airliner commonly program in the departure that is expected before obtaining the departure clearance. This is because there is plenty to do during the turnaround, and the clearance is often not available until 15 mins before scheduled off blocks time. We don’t normally wait and program in the departure at this late point, because there is too much to do with coordinating with ATC, ground crews, cabin crew, checklists etc to get away on time. What we do is put in what we expect from the filed flight plan coupled with experience and knowledge of the particular airfield. However, if the departure we read states the cleared altitude or level will be X, many operators/pilots will set X-100’ to remind themselves that the departure clearance and/or cleared level has not been confirmed by ATC.
Departure block altitudes or levels tend to be a whole number, so something like 6900 or 2900 instead of 7000 or 3000 respectively will stand out as being wrong and need checking. During departure if the cleared level was completely missed and not reset, at least the aircraft would climb away towards an expected level for that normal published departure.
This operator obviously sets 0000 altitude before clearance had been obtained, but in the light of this incident, and the way the Q400 flight director works; perhaps Q400 SOP should now be changed so that zero altitude is never set, and their before take-off checks re-written to include a positive check of the cleared level that has been set before lining up.
The incident is very worrying in that the FD pitch down command was either not noticed or not queried before AP engagement, and then once engaged, neither pilot appears to have noticed the abrupt pitch down of the aircraft until the GPWS alerted them. I would recommend some FD and AP misbehaviour scenarios soon after take-off during the next year or so of SIM tests to improve pilots’ scan and monitoring at such critical times.