IF
If the last ten minutes had been a sim session....
Pass? Fail? Suspension? I try not to put my feet into this pilot's moccasins, at least not very often.
Dozy: At A/P disconnect, He did not pull "Full back stick".
Master Caution. Cavalry Charge. Loss of Auto Throttle.
First knock. Identify and correct. Manual control required. This means the ship will need handling if the flight path wanders, no a/p to arrest a bad. He input roll left and nose up. I assume to correct a deviation in S/L flight.
Does he know Speeds are duff? Immediately? Because without knowing that, there is immediate danger. Any handling will tip a baseline attitude, and Pitch and Power becomes more difficult. Like an instructor who cobbles together an UA whilst you look at the floor. When you take over, you need a quick and correct read, a nails scan that drives everything you will do subsequently, to recover the aircraft. Did you blow it? Switch off, let's start over.
A nightmarish sim session such as the real deal 447 encountered would have failed (pick a percentage) pilots. Prolly everyone here.
There is no record established to condemn without conclusion. This was one off. Every accident is.
Sim? "Follow me through, right, this, not that. Pass. Off you go." Except for one thing. Not even the Sim could be recovered. The flaws were known, the workarounds were "best guess", not best practice, and the equipment was ready to fail.
He was not ready. Nor was PNF, and later, the Captain. The salient issues remain, and absent the full record, I couldn't possibly condemn this crew. Nor should anyone. Should the full record establish PE as the main cause, it will still be difficult to condemn. The environment that presented at 447's fatal entry was pre-ordained by Human error, and a confluence of Natural and Unnatural settings.
rudderrat. "He was assisting the a/c in maintaining 15 degrees nose up."(At STALL).
This is what I meant earlier when I suggested he may have been attempting to trim into the climb, rather than commanding it. With TOGA, and an effort to PITCH at 15, he is responding to windshear? Now that is not cute, but, in an effort to understand what presents as a rather inexplicable record of manual control, what was in his head? Did speeds indicate a shear? Was there a WARN? There is a record of ACARS that shows a Mx message re: shear and TCAS. If slow (did he know?) how is windshear at altitude different than at lower levels? (To him?) There is still a danger of STALL, and how was he to know the STALL (WARN) wasn't the result of actual shear? How does he know without the normal cues that he is STALLed and needs to recover the STALL? If he is confident the STALL WARN is approach to STALL, when is he supposed to "get" that the a/c is actually STALLed?
Near top of climb, and for whatever reason, this aircraft was essentially operating at what presented as low altitude. Low speed, PITCH up, and clean. Plus quiet, at least until the RoD increased. That is a domain that triggers certain things in all pilots, and I venture it would be difficult to not lapse into muscle memory with all those familiar (but wrong altitude) cues?
Reason enough to not Push the Nose Down? A mistake, of course, but since there never were STALL responses, a mistake quickly forgotten, and an interruption in continuity, repeating all the way down.
There was no recognition of STALL, by anyone. Now one can condemn utterly this crew as incompetent, and an absolute aberration in performance. That would be ill advised. It assumes there were no reasons to behave as they did, which is triply absurd.
Last edited by Lyman; 19th Oct 2011 at 16:01.