"Ears popping"
Until quite late in the descent (if I remember an early post) the cabin was normally pressurised (8-9000 feet ?), so in spite of the climbing and descending (or most of the latter) there would be little or no chage in the pressure on the pilots' eardrums, until the pressurisation controller announced that it was unable to keep up with the rate of descent.
Until that moment, the crew would probably do their own version of the "Valsalva manoeuvre" - i.e just "click" their eardrums without doing the full "hold nose and click" business. At least that's what I remember doing almost automatically in the 1950s designed military aircraft I was privileged to operate, and those aircraft were pressurised to a much lower degree than passenger-carrying aircrtaft, so your eardrums acquired a fair degree of flexibility.
In any case, with all the other things their eyes and brains had to contend with, eardrums would be, to say the least, Low Priority.
Last edited by Jig Peter; 7th Aug 2011 at 16:19.
Reason: Add last sentence