“The tale here starts with the fact they should have never been flying a turboprop airplane into these icing conditions, equipped with these antiquated de-icing boots,” he said. “This is 1920s, 1930s technology, which has not been brought up to date in any revolutionary way.”
So he wants every turboprop in the world, that is equipped with boots, to be grounded if icing conditions might be encountered? What an Idiot....
The pneumatic boots on the edge of the wings expand and cause the ice to shake off, but NASA tests have shown the boots cannot clear all the ice, and there are no boots on the tail.
The ice is broken off, or cracked, off. Where does he get the idea "shake off"?
The next problem, Goldman said, is that the Colgan Air pilots continued flying the plane on autopilot, even as they noticed the ice building up.
“What this does is, it deprives the pilots of the information of the degradation of the airplane’s performance,” Goldman said, “because the autopilot automatically adjusts for it. So they don’t know they are flying too close to the edge of a stall, at all.”
Autopilot is fine for all normal icicng. It should only be disconnected in SEVERE icing.
He said the 1972 crash of a British European Airways flight showed that, in certain conditions, when the flaps come down and the configuration of the wings change, the plane goes into an immediate stall, and the pilot is often unable to recover.
That was a tail stall. The Q400 is not prone to tail stall. The selection of flaps in this accdent probably had nothing to do with tail stall.
“When the nose was shoved down,” he said, “[the pilot] didn’t understand why and followed a gut reaction rather than a trained reaction and yanked the nose way up into a super stall, causing it to spin and crash.”
Speculation only, but may prove to be correct.