Originally Posted by 421dog
AirRabbit,
My assertion is that someone who would fight a stick pusher likely does not know what the pusher is trying to avert. Someone who bombed around as a CFI for 1600 hrs would have stalled enough airplanes to avoid that confusion. On the other hand, someone who was trained ab initio that the way out of a stall was to hold attitude and add power..
In a perfect world I would agree ... however, I have seen many a pilot with a lot more than 1600 hours fight a stick pusher simply because they've never seen one in action previously. If my information is correct, the Colgan accident aircraft had a stick shaker that preceeded the stick pusher, and the crews in training were trained to recover at the stick shaker. If so, its very likely that they'd never experienced the pusher.
I have always had a sore spot about the regulatory requirement for stall recovery that required "minimum loss of altitude." And I only say that because, that statement was interpreted to mean exceptionally little or no altitude loss - primarily because, as pilots, we each look for "perfection," and if losing 75 feet is OK, then losing only 25 feet is better, and the perfect solution would be to lose "zero." That's not what the requirement says, I don't believe its what the authors originally intended, but it is clear that is the way it's been interpreted.
Off the top of my head I can give you several accident references where the flight crew attempted to "fly out of the stall," trying to keep the altitude loss to a minimum, when merely pushing forward on the controls would have been sufficient. The most prominent is probably the ABX DC-8 in Virginia. The cost of pushing forward on the controls would have been
some altitude loss - but not the amount it eventually cost those folks - in that case, 17,000 feet. However, when it's in-grained (over, and over, and over again) that you just
don't do that, when you first are subjected to a real stall ... almost everyone will immediately do what they've been trained to do. If I were a betting person, I'd bet that we'll see a change in the stall recovery regulations that will say something like
"airspeed or altitude loss not required for recovery should be avoided" - and that one change just may have significant impact on how that particular set of piloting tasks will be addressed in future training programs.