Beafis I think you nailed it. Especially with 1200RPM selected (likely if they encountered heavy turbulence in approach) the plane looses speed rapidly when leveling off without power added.
In such a configurationn the time between onset of stick shaker and onset of stick pusher is rather short.
How could the crew have overlooked the speed decrease? One theorie would be, that they both had the wing inspection light on and were looking backwards to watch their respective outer wing section shreding ice.
It is a bad habit found in many DH100 - DH400 Drivers. The ability to watch the ice buildup on the outer wings comes from the DH8-100 (no ice detector) and the old fear of ice bridgeing on the deice boots.
When the policy of wing deicing got changed (deice contantly ON when there is ice buildup) the reason for the wing inspection light disappeared. On the Q-400 there was never a reason but the necessity for Cross Crew Qualification with the older models.
Still many pilots get fascinated by that view of ice comming off their wing. In many thousand hours on DH8 100,300 and 400 I was never ever concerned about icing (and I have seen very heavy ice on approach into the valleys of the alps) But I was often concerned about a FO who kept supervising the right outer wing. Often you have to remind him/her to stay in the instrument scan and let the ice protection do what ist was commissioned for and what it proves able to do in hundreds of flights every day.
Last edited by maxrpm; 18th Feb 2009 at 06:49.