Flyinheavy;
[quote]The memory drill's first question is, "is the safety of the flight at risk?"
That is a crew decision which directs their response one way or another.
I think, they never applied this procedure anyway.
We actually don't know if the PF was applying this procedure or not as his actions were never announced nor was the PNF included in what was happening as the PFs actions took place. What we do know from the CVR is that no normal/abnormal ops SOPs and no CRM procedures took place. We cannot attribute the pitch-up to anything, with any certainty, we can only consider what may be plausible or not and look for minute clues which are always interpreted. If we are not mindful in this process of attributing cause, the risk is that we get into the problems that
alf5071h has made contributions on,
hindsight bias, or that willingness to substitute or at least think about what we think should have happened for what we can only, actually hear and see in the recordings.
I have long posited the notion that perhaps the pitch-up was due to a remembered response in training, right after takeoff, of the UAS memory items, but there are equally interesting notions that explain the pitch-up in quite different ways.
And even after the pitch-up and before the stall the airplane was controllable using normal control inputs, (getting the nose down), but in absolute terms, the stick was in the NU position more often than it was not, prior to the stall. The potential for a complete and rapid loss of situational awareness is high in these circumstances.
To be sure, there is much more behind this than a mere pitching-up of the airplane for which we do not know the reasons. In terms of manual flight the airplane is very easy to handle at cruise altitudes and it would have been straightforward to return the airplane to cruise flight. The task is to understand why it went the other way.