Wow, the record of conversations is something else...
When asked about her comment in her notes about Conrad’s “lack of understanding of how unsafe he was,” she said he was making very frantic mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes, and did a lot of things wrong but did not recognize this was a problem. He thought he was a good pilot never had any problems and thought that he should be a captain. He could not evaluate himself and see that he did not have the right stuff.
...
When asked if the nature of his difficulty was lack of knowledge or skill, or just elevated
stress and anxiety, she said she thought it was mostly anxiety, but it was hard to say, and probably both. There were a few things that he did well, but they were things that he was expecting. Like for a single engine ILS he did good, but he also knew he was going to have to do that on pretty much every check in the simulator. For things he was unfamiliar with, it was a combination of the two (lack of knowledge or skill, or stress). When he did not know what to do, he became extremely anxious. She did not know if frantic was the right word, but he would start pushing a lot of buttons without thinking about what he was pushing, just to do something.