Ethiopian airliner down in Africa

[Loose rivets]

I've tried to look into the minds of the pilots in the latter part of this thread. I've even suggested that the ET PF's prior knowledge may have been counterproductive. The realisation that he is experiencing the same set of issues that were disastrous only months ago may have been truly alarming, countering any advantage he could have gained by having prior knowledge.

Suppose he was fixating on the attitude - he knows it's what he's supposed to do in this scenario. But he's also learned the autopilot could take the technical problem away and so frantically stabs at that a few times. Remember, things are very, very unreal to him at this time. Someone retorted that he didn't remember the flaps shouldn't be raised. Fair comment, but only recalling part of a briefing is not surprising at this moment.

So what's happening if he was focussing on the attitude? One thing's reasonably certain - he will* experience some tunnel vision. Not optical, but a kind of narrowed visual processing. Could it conceivably be enough to stop him seeing the wheel's white flashes? It seems impossible but how else is that protracted period of automatic spining explained? Is it the STS working harder, since the power is still high? I doubt he was that analytical with his hands full and being deluged with bad news.

*Being human is having more sub-processing going on that in the Boeing. We've all seen the spinning radar head change direction, despite knowing it hasn't. Or the Necker wire frame cube. We know that a sudden change happens, but what is incredible is that in most humans, it happens after a given number of seconds. That is very serious interference with our concious processing. Just an amusing bit of psychology, until you realise just how susceptible we are to our minds doing their own thing. A lot goes on that we can not escape from. Training around illusionary effects of acceleration and the products of fear is all we can do, and that's easier said than done.
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