Originally Posted by
rnzoli
. ... What can make 2 experienced people make this basic mistake? ... We will never know, what went on in their heads ...
Could "what went on in their heads" be what was described 75 years ago by Langewiesche in "Stick and Rudder"?
[QUOTE] Unfortunately, as the airplane drops out from under the pilot and as its nose dips earthward, the pilot’s "instinctive" reaction will be to haul back all the harder on the stick. If his imagination works with faulty images, if he imagines that the stick is the airplanes up-and-down control, he can hardly help hauling back on the stick. This instinctive reaction will be especially impulsive and uncontrollable if the pilot has failed to sense the coming of the stall, and the stall takes him by surprise.
And that is the real danger of stalling: this faulty reaction to the stall, rather than the stall itself. It is quite rare that a pilot is killed simply because he stalled. But it happens with tragic monotony that a pilot is killed because, stalled when he did not expect it, he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick: he clamps the stick back against his stomach in a terrified cramplike effort to hold the airplane up, and thereby makes the stall worse or converts it into a spin. [END QUOTE]
The "tragic monotony" continues to this day.