I know all the facts aren’t in, but I just can’t get my head around what appears to be an “initiative” driven by what seems to be a complete loss of faith in pilots.
A system that can induce a nose down trim, that’s right trim, if the angle of attack exceeds (or the system believes it has exceeded) certain limits. Who the F#ck came up with that idea?
A lot has been said and written about the Colgan crash. Sure the Captain allowed himself to be distracted at a critical phase of fight. Certainly he reacted incorrectly to the onset of the stall warning, and we pretty well know the rest. I know this falls into the realms of speculation, but what if the Captain of Colgan 3407 noticed the decreasing airspeed before the normal stall warning activated. This would have occurred at a much lower airspeed if the ice speed system had been disabled, or not fitted at all? I flew for a company who had fitted the ice speed system to our regional turboprops. The initial results were less than encouraging. False warnings, failure to activate correctly and an enormous spike in inadvertent stall warnings. As a result, this new system that was supposed to save pilots from themselves, was deactivated for more than a year so it could be sorted out.
The role of the ice speed system in the Colgan crash, although touched upon, didn’t get the type of attention that I believe it deserved. I have a feeling however that this latest “Safety initiative” might be a little more difficult to justify.