Originally Posted by
CurtainTwitcher
The trim wheel sound would have been inaudible with the stick shaker continuously sounding. Not easy to think or communicate with that continuously sounding. Any attempt to communicate subtleties would have been very difficult.
I can give you a very practical demonstration, the video below is a 5 min loop of the B737 stick shaker (half the flight time of this flight).
put in on, and try to a complex cognitive puzzle task that requires you to solve a problem that no line pilot has ever seen, nor could have reasonably anticipate. Just because other crews succeeded, does prove this is a satisfactory state of affairs for an RPT line flight.
Thank you CT, that is precisely the point.
It is all rather simple after the event.
Imagine being in that environment, an overload of sound, noise and that old primal fear? We do not know exactly what transpired as the two souls who could tell us are no longer here.
What seems to be missed is that the system that kept driving the nose down was a system Boeing decided the pilots did not need to know about.
To borrow from Donald Rumsfeld,
'There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns'.
Not having the FDR recorder ought suggest to the astute that there is more that we do not know, that we do not know.