OC, re #1174, I agree with your thoughts on expectation, but any conclusion that the crew should have followed a specific drill (SOP), because it was the obvious course of action, involves hindsight bias.
It is not the physical presence of a drill which is important; it is the mental process which decides to use it. We can establish the presence of a drill and associated training, but not what the crew thought, or what might have influenced their thinking – the effectiveness of the drill / training.
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…the SOPs are there to be used by flight crews …” yes, but when the crew has understood the situation as requiring that specific drill, and thus the drill is selected. Inferring that this is obvious judges the crew’s awareness and decision making after the fact – this is hindsight bias.
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… and therefore to not use them is a demonstration of an incorrect response to the situation”, yes this is one possible hypothesis, another is that the crew did not understand the situation and thus ‘chose’ not to use the drill – it never occurred to them (see ref).
We can construct many hypotheses from the information gathered after the fact, which can be used as valuable tools for investigation and safety response, but instantly a hypothesis is taken as ‘fact’ without evidence, this involves hindsight bias.
In this instance, the bias is our assumption that the crew understood the situation as involving UAS, and thus did not follow the appropriate drill.
It is just as plausible that the crew’s actions were entirely consistent with the situation as they saw it; but we don’t know what that was and currently can only speculate on a rage of alternatives.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the thread discussion is based on a biased starting point, although to be fair some contributions have qualified their points as hypothetical.
There may be some significant safety issues arising from these hypothetical explorations, particularly in the process of awareness in the first few seconds of the event (not the subsequent and more salient stall condition – which also the crew may have not been aware of).
Some significant contributors have been identified:-
UAS drill formulation; is the title relevant, will the crew know when to select it. These are issues of procedure formulation and industry wide communication.
How to identify UAS situations (involving system malfunction): what are the key features, were these explained in training and associated with the range of recovery procedures. These are training issues, but also aspects of memory and recall in context.
Human behaviour in sudden and surprising events; what might effect perception and choice of action, - Human Factors.
Are these a source of the problem or a solution?
Errors in Aviation Decision Making, Orasanu & Martin.