Originally Posted by
AviatorDave
It‘s hard to believe that a 11.000 hour captain cannot recover from a power-surge related pitch up at 6000ft in daylight if that‘s the only condition the crew would have had to deal with.
That is if they immediately identified the thrust surge and the reason for it. If not, in IMC it would drastically amplify the Nose Up feeling. The somatogravic illusion of a combination of a sudden and massive thrust increase (from almost flight idle to TOGA?) combined with the resulting real pitch up moment will be massive. Combined with a startle effect while their minds were focussed on going around weather this could have led to temporary confusion. In the Rostov Crash the Crew even deliberately set TOGA and still drove it manually into the ground, despite a planned thrust change. In IMC surprise plus illusion is a serious adversary...
And 10 - 15s (when they came out of the clouds they apparently started the recovery but obviously too late) is not that long, if we look at LoC accidents of the last 10 Years where Crews were confused for up to minutes when outside reference was missing.
So, unfortunately, I would not completely rule out such a scenario.