Originally Posted by
Bob Viking
Thankyou for your very detailed and thoughtful post.
I fully appreciate that when IMC at night the situation the pilots were presented with was confusing and terrifying in equal measure. Who knows what I would have done on that Airbus that day. I’m not a large aircraft pilot of course. However, I know what I would have done in my fast jet. It has happened to me, albeit during the day, and my knowledge of power settings and attitudes meant that I was able to conclude fairly quickly that it was obviously a faulty ASI.
I still can’t quite get my head around the idea that you think they didn’t hold it in a stall just because they didn’t know they were in one.
At a lower altitude in my fast jet if I kept pulling back on the stick it would loop. At 35000’ it would stall. The AI and AoA gauges would tell me that along with airframe buffet and all the other constituents of SABIRS.
BV
The evidence suggests that the PF in AF447 did not recognize that he had the stick back, perhaps because he had not properly settled into the left seat when the Captain gave him the nod rather than the more senior PM.
He promptly climbed to excess altitude and stalled, keeping back pressure on the stick almost continuously till impact. The PM did not intervene sufficiently forcefully, perhaps because he had just been put down. CRM here was not effective.