Long time lurker, first time poster, but this situation is just too frustrating to stay silent about.
Originally Posted by
wiggy
It might well lead to the sensation of a steep climb (cf. somatogravic illusion) but I don’t see how that sensation, in isolation, could lead a competent pilot to think the aircraft might be in a stall...
The missing link that you're missing, and everyone else whom doesn't understand why the FO thought they were 'stalling,' is THIS:
SOMATOGRAVIC ILLUSION WHILE IN IMC.
The captain inadvertently hitting TOGA while they were IMC descending, causing an immediate and sudden pitch up and negative G while accelerating, imposed the Somatogravic Illusion effect upon the FO, whom suddenly got the erroneous perception that the aircraft was pitching up way past what it actually was. The hard sudden TOGA acceleration combined with IMC caused the FO to feel the aircraft was pitching up 30-40-50-60 degrees, and thus he freaked the hell out, and thought, in his degraded mental capacity state, that the aircraft *must* be stalling, if it was pitching up that much (subjectively in his mind). To him, 767, pitching up to the degree he FELT (erroneously subjectively) it was, would DEFINITELY must be stalling at that AOA state. This explains the max pitch down. Obviously, whether or not his reaction was reasonable, is a completely different point, because it was not.
There has been SEVERAL pilot error crashes lately that are DIRECTLY attributable to Somatogravic Illusion:
- FlyDubai 981
- Tatarstan Airlines 735
- Gulf Air 72
- Japanese F-35 pilot
- Countless more Military + Commercial + GA accidents/incidnets.
To the point of his unreasonable reaction to his perceived erroneous subjective assessment of high pitch, it is explained by this:
The FO, given his egregious history of abysmal flying capacity and ineptitude (which I will paste below), had a documented track record of overreacting in unreasonable, irrational ways to 'stalling' states of aircraft by pushing the nose forward past any remotely reasonable degree of 'recovery'. He was documented to freak the F out when startled in precisely THESE type of situations, as has been documented. He should have never been in the seat that fateful day, and didn't deserve to.
Clipped from another forum:
Training Incompetency and Failures- 6/27/11 - Resigned from CommutAir for failing DHC-8 initial
- 8/13/12 - Resigned from Air Wisconsin for failing CRJ initial
- 4/22/14 - Failed EMB-145 Oral at Trans State Airlines
- 5/11/14 - Failed EMB-145 Type Rating at Trans States Airlines
- 5/17 - Failed EMB-175 Upgrade Attempt at Mesa Airlines
- 5/17 - Nearly failed FO Requal after failing upgrade attempt at Mesa Airlines
- 7/27/17 - Failed B-767 Oral at Atlas Air
- 8/1/17 - Unsat Judgement/Situational Awareness during FBS-1 at Atlas Air
- 8/5/17 - Failed DBS-5 at Atlas Air
- 8/11/17 - Almost Failed FFSI-1 at Atlas Air
- 8/31/17 - "Regression of Situational Awareness" during FFSI-3 at Atlas Air
- 9/22/17 - Failed B-767 Type Rating for "Very Low Situational Awareness", incomplete procedures, and exceeding limitations at Atlas Air
Past Training Notes (directly quoted from the NTSB Docket)
- Air Wisconsin CRJ Initial Failure - "They were conducting the emergency procedure cabin altitude ... where they are at FL350 or so, and he gives the students a cabin altitude message requiring an emergency descent to 10,000 feet" ... "Conrad then goes to descend the simulator. He was not sure of Conrad's background, but instead of descending on the autopilot, Conrad disengaged the autopilot and abruptly pitched down well below horizon. They got stick shaker and overspeed alert together. He was not sure if it was an extreme nose down, but remembered that it was abrupt input on the controls"
- Mesa Airlines ERJ-175 Upgrade Failure (Instructor 1) - "He had previously failed simulator lesson 2 with different instructor, and he had requested a different instructor. She was conducting his retraining for lesson 2. She said his performance was a "train wreck" and he performed very poorly in this lesson. In the briefing room he did well, and explained things well. However, in the simulator and something he wasn't expecting happened he got extremely flustered and could not respond appropriately to the situation." ... "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 he should be a captain. he could not evaluate himself and see that he did not have the right stuff."
- Mesa Airlines ERJ-175 Upgrade Failure (Instructor 2) - "He first met Conrad Aska during a recurrent checking event in March 2016. That session went ok and nothing stood out. He did have some trouble with the stall series. The problems were with his attitude control, and he had a hard time getting the airplane back to level flight" ... "He said when Conrad would make a mistake in training he had an excuse for everything"
The quote that stands out the most to me in this second Mesa instructor interview is, "When asked if Conrad would get startled in the simulator, he said that during one stall recovery,
Conrad pitched down about 40 degrees for recovery, then a pitch up about 20 degrees. His flight path was all over the place."
_____
Thus, massive take-aways from this incident thus far are:
- Somatogravic Illusion is a serious, fatal issue in aviation that needs to be taken seriously and reassessed, and new measures/training/tech needs to be implemented/considered/studied/introduced.
- The FO should NOT have been seated in that seat that fateful day, and Atlas should NOT have hired him, given his ABYSMAL history of sheer and utter ineptitude that was clearly documented.
- Atlas HR is at fault for hiring him given his abysmal past training history and ultimately needs to share a huge responsibility of negligence.
- ACMI training/hiring/qualification/etc needs to be looked at with increased scrutiny, once again
- This is a direct result of Amazon's push for profits over safety, and the repercussions this extends down through the entire process, endangering the lives of the pilots aboard the aircraft, and the world around the aircraft.
- Atlas also flies military charter pax, and it was just a stroke of dumb luck that this wasn't a flight of 250 soldiers that was flown directly into the ground into the center of the Houston city, causing hundreds of deaths, due to egregious sheer pilot error in response to Somatogravic Illusion while in IMC and poor hiring practices at Atlas HR and Amazon's push for maximizing profits.