Originally Posted by
punkalouver
The fatigue thing is irrelevant. I suspect I know exactly what happened. Why? Because I once reached for the wrong lever(and tried to operate it) when landing flaps was called(damn good thing what I tried to activate didn't activate). Why did this happen? Because I didn't look before touching, which is something all pilots should do. And instead of making a deliberate action at moderate speed, I reached out quickly and grabbed.
Bottom line, the pilot made a huge mistake and we should not try to cover it up with the fatigue excuse again. We should learn from it. Look then activate at a normal pace.
I still remember my memory items for an emergency in skydiving in order to deploy the reserve chute when the main parachute does not deploy: LOOK-REACH-PULL. And that no doubt came from the fact that people died because they were pulling on something other than the reserve handle for the rest of their life.
100% agree on look before activating anything on a flight deck, but this is the equivalent of being asked to push a button and flipping a switch instead. It makes absolutely no sense. There are no physical similarities between the two condition levers and the one flap lever. Plus when you pull the flap lever down to full you need to also confirm on the MFD that the flaps are moving/have moved. This is miles beyond a simple mistake. And for the PF there’s no reason to really think that the props may have been feathered. First because of the above and secondly because they’re simply put in the notch setting at start of taxi and never touched again until engine shutdown.
It’s and absolutely shocking error.