Huck,
Agreed 110% - see some of my early posts on this crash.
I've hated the 121 stall maneuver from day 1 (3 airlines ago, the rest do it the "traditional" way too), and am convinced it had a lot to do with the crash of 3407. It's not stall recovery training so much as a demonstration of the ability to return an out of trim airplane from MCA to normal flight.
Just to add a bit, the key point to me about the "traditional" method is that the sim/aircraft is usually hand flown to the stick shaker without trimming, so a lot of back pressure is needed to maintain pitch at the onset of stick shaker. Capt. Renslow was undoubtedly used to applying back pressure (!) at the stick shaker, only this time the aircraft was trimmed. In other words, his completely wrong reaction of pulling back was exactly what he'd been trained to do. So, yeah they screwed up (getting slow, bugging no-ice speeds), but their training set them up to go from shaker to stall..
That said ,I have no idea why they didn't, one of them, remember how to recover from an actual stall. Could it be that the 121 training actually over-rode the Private Pilot 101 training? Or could it be that the puppy mills aren't emphasizing the basics enough? Could it be that neither their initial training nor their 121 training was very good? I don't know, but I am concerned by the implications.
Q.
Last edited by q100; 18th May 2009 at 14:10.
Reason: pore speling