Originally Posted by
HundredPercentPlease
We get it. You think they were sub-standard. You would have used your greater "airmanship" to keep the basic parameters in line and therefore the aircraft flying. Your lack of appreciation of human factors in a real scenario with real line pilots in the real world is what you should address.
Applying the steps I have outlined is not "greater" airmanship. It is
basic airmanship. These steps have been preached in aviation circles pretty much since the Wright Brother days. I really don't understand why this is such a difficult or controversial topic.
I definitely appreciate the human factors issue. The crew performance is one HUGE human factors issue. And that issue is this: What were the factors impacting these crews (experience? training? environment? stress?) that kept them from applying basic airmanship skills to stabilize the aircraft so they could then successfully deal with the malfunction?
In my model, the captain wanted to get the thing cleaned up, then reduce the workload, then work out what was wrong. They cleaned up - he used the a/p to reduce the workload, and as they were starting to diagnose the aircraft bit them. His workload reduced his SA (along with the stick shaker) to a critical point. The pilot failed due to excess workload, not due to lack of "airmanship".
Here's the hard reality: "Your" model (or the ET Captain's model, if you rather) resulted in the deaths of all the passengers and crew.
There is not a single universe in which selecting A/P at low altitude was the right choice with an active stick shaker. Raising the flaps prior to properly diagnosing the problem is also highly suspect. What I see instead is a Captain who was so unclear as to what was going on that he simply reverted to what he did on every previous takeoff - engage the A/P at 400', climb to 1000', retract the flaps. Trimming was handled poorly because he had not hand-flown sufficiently to wire this skill into procedural memory. This was not airmanship, this was rote behavior.
In comparison the "model" I have repeated flogged, a model that has been around for probably a century of aviation, a model that has saved many an aircraft when followed and doomed quite a few when not, would have at a minimum allowed this crew to stabilize the aircraft and get it to a safe altitude. Whether they would then have correctly resolved a subsequent problem with MCAS is impossible to say, but they would have been dealing with it from a stabilized platform at a much higher altitude.