Originally Posted by
Switchbait
Why on earth would you “skip that step”???
Because the instructions look like this:
Now, I can stand to be corrected. Is the format of the checklist officially described anywhere? How are the indented statements to be read? Are they simply independent instructions to be executed always?
They don't look like it to me. They each look like a dependency or continuation of the numbered step immediately above. My natural reading is to get through "2. Autopilot (if engaged) ....." and think
Okay, autopilot is definitely disengaged. The rest of this is irrelevant. What's step 3? Then move onto step 3.
I don't fly planes but I
have dealt with crappy instructions, which I have followed, gotten a bad result, and then when I asked about it I had someone tell me, "Oh, well, that part's technically wrong, but
everyone knows you just do this other thing instead." I'm left to wonder: If the instructions are wrong, then what's the point of having them at all? If "everyone knows" what the wrong steps should be, why were they written down?
If all one needs to do is "fly the plane" and "possess airmanship", why have a checklist?
The interim report starting at section 1.16 strongly suggests that the pilots were unable to manually trim because the forces on the manual trim wheel are too great to move it with the aircraft 2.5 units out-of-trim. Did the pilots
expect that would be the case? It's a difficult case to make. Let us remember, these people did not want to crash their plane. They did not want to die. They did what they
thought was correct in the circumstances presented to them, based on their knowledge and training.
The old Runaway Stabilizer checklist sure looks like a hole in the cheese to me. And the new one is a distinctly smaller, but still present, hole.