After 71 pages some points:
How come so many professional pilots are so intolerant when they come on to this site? CRM what CRM? Or possibly could it be that they are not pilots at all?
Experts who know exactly how systems work on a plane they have never flown, never read the manuals for and have only ever seen from the outside or on flightsim.
Rants over - and relax.
Back to the thread.
From the CVR transcript and the video presentation It is clear that the capt was situationaly aware (up to a point).He is listning out on the radio and corrects the Fo a couple of times, he knows where he is geographicaly and aware of loc alive etc.
As the aircraft levels and is on the intercept heading he maintains the speed around 180. after flap 5 is selected again power adjustments are made and speed is maintained.
The aircraft is aproaching GS intercept and the 4dme point. Presumably he would have liked the aircraft to be stabalised by then or at the least configured and aproaching vref. Max v for flap 5 is 200, gear down 200 and flap 10 172.
He therefore allows the gear down and condition levers max to to decelarate the aircraft alowing flap 15 - we cannot mind read but presumably he would have adjusted power to aprox 15% to maintain vref once on the glide flap 15.
If this Aircraft had not had the incr ref on the plan would probably have worked. Not exactly like I would have done it but it would have worked.
The big questions are why did he ignore the red bricks and why did he react as he did to the stick shaker?
First a couple of points - on the presentation there is no torque value or indication where the flight idle or rated detents are. My suspicion is that the graphic represents the full power lever angle allowed. It would therefore include the proportion above the detent which allows for emergency power selection. If this is the case max power (to the rating detent) was aplied during the 'recovery'.
Second on his previous aircraft the saab 340 there is no inc ref switch. the stall protection system works in the same way and has stick shake and stick push but there is no acoutnt taken of icing however. To account for this you add an increment of 20kts. You can do mental arithmatic and calculate minimum manouver speeds for each weight and flap setting or follow conservative manouver speeds which asumes max weight.
There are no red bricks just plastic bugs for the ref speeds (if they have not fallen off)
Only the very early saabs had aleged problems with tail stall but I belive all production models had overcome this certainly I was not made aware of it as an issue.
If the aircraft is clear of ice ie the airframe is clean then the inc ref can be switched off during the aproach even if there is moisture outside. that would make the calculated v values correct.
We therefore have a pilot who has relatively little experiance of the inc ref switch, who is used to mentally adding corections for ice, who is relativly unused to seing red bricks, who is intentially decreasing speed towards his desired vref.
You see what you want sometimes and the red bricks should not have been there in his mental model It is possible that he simply ignored it or did not register it.
The onset of the stick shake must have come as an extreme shock, combined with the noise of the ap disconect disorentation would be very easy.
The recovery:
Some posts above there is a statement that most Colgan pilots would pull against stick push presumably to avoid height loss. If we presume that this was a typical pilot then the problem lies completely with the training that they recieved. It is possibly that his reaction was to maintain altitude - links above refere to problems with stall recovery training undar faa rules.
At this level training needs to be aircraft specific and not include spurious information relevant to other types. And Training is where I think the fault lies.