Originally Posted by
silverstrata
Sure about that? Someone new to the aircraft, captain average, and a bit tired.
At 3,000 ft, the stick shaker starts going like mad, causing a hell of a racket, and you think you have an airspeed problem and might be stalling. Sure, the controls are getting heavier and heavier, and you trim a bit for that, but this is caused by the aircraft stalling - isn’t it? (You cannot hear the trimmer, over the din of the stick-shaker.) So you have to let the nose drop, untill you are sure you have enough airspeed.
Ok, you are getting a bit low now, time to pull back. Ahh, but the aircraft will not respond - pull as hard as you like, but the stick feels jammed (you need 60 kg of force to counter full stab-trim). You shout to the f/o to help pull, but the ground is coming up fast.... End of short story...
This is one of the better comments in this discussion. As a long-time flight test engineer with personal experience flying jumpseat aboard Boeing commercial-class airplanes during many test flights, and many hundreds of hours in the related simulators both testing and flying the simulators, I have personally witnessed aircrew in simulated emergency situations with all four feet standing on the bottom of the forward display panel to gain enough leverage to pull with >100 lb on the yoke to control the airplane (and specifically in runaway stab trim and hyd-fail situations). Nobody had a hand free to fiddle with manual trim or deal with the stab trim cutout switch and its guard (at least on the aircraft types I've tested).
Yes, these things are addressed in pilot training. But I've also watched extremely-intelligent and supremely-trained flight test pilots miss very obvious things due to the confusion surrounding automation (I helped test a major glass-cockpit upgrade to a Boeing 707-derived military jet, which included adding modern-day Honeywell autopilot systems). I've personally sat behind them in the jump seat and watched them completely miss what was going on outside the window, as two pilots and a flight engineer got wrapped up trying to figure out some stupid aspect of VNAV operation, to the point where a safety "knock it off" call had to be made to get them to break their "target fixation" on the troubleshooting.
Watch the video of the recreation of the cockpit troubleshooting in the AeroPeru crash due to tape covering the Pitot-static ports... two well-trained pilots so confounded by an airplane acting differently than they expected, that some very basic hand-flying principles and alternate information sources were missed for nearly an hour.
It's easy to armchair-quarterback a situation after the fact - but I've seen it all happen enough times to recognize the reality of the man-machine interfaces.
Ultimately, if a design is such that a pilot can get confused enough to lose all situational awareness, the problem fundamentally is a poor design, not just pilot training or problem-fixation.