Originally Posted by
vilas
When you are caught in a situation to which you have no clue then the fear factor can come in and then action taken have no logic or rationale.
This can be an important yet little discussed factor. The factor where irrational fear takes over and the instinctive overrides the rational. One poster on another forum described it as your lizard-brain.
Does anybody reading this have a strong phobia? It can make one do irrational things. It can be overwhelmingly powerful yet rarely encountered. Example: person with a strong phobia of snakes is walking down the sidewalk of a busy street and suddenly has a close encounter with a snake. They suddenly turn and run and are hit by a car while darting toward what must be a safer place……… the street. People wonder why would anybody run in that direction. Because the lizard brain took over completely and logic disappeared. There was an overwhelming desire to suddenly be anywhere but near the snake. If you don’t have a phobia like this, you may not be able to understand the feeling one gets from it.
A dash-8 pilot flying into Buffalo encounters an artificial stall warning well above the stall speed because of a misconfigured stall warning system. He is on final approach and relatively close to the ground. Inexplicably, he pulls the control column full aft and holds it there until an actual stall occurs. Why would someone ever have such a reaction? It doesn’t make sense. But perhaps the lizard brain has taken over and it doesn’t want to hit the ground by lowering the nose. These sorts of reactions vary.
While the bad reaction of the dash-8 pilot may not be due to a specific phobia, I suspect that it originates from the same of the instinctive survival area of the brain. Phobia reactions can vary from overwhelming fear(snake encounter) to just extreme nervousness(speaking in front of a crowd). The first one is the brain in a life or death situation
Many of us are not fully aware of how we will react under various surprise scenarios. Sudden surprise encounter may be the the important factor.
As for one possible remedy for what happened on AF447 due to it being an Airbus……always be ready to use that takeover button. During takeoff may be a good example. One would think that the pilot not flying, especially when it is the captain, would have their thumb resting on that button as they may only be a very brief time to react…..and that may not be the best time to depend on the summing of side stick inputs.
Of course, the downside of that theory is that the person having the irrational reaction could press the takeover button. But they are acting irrationally, so they will probably forget to do so.