Originally Posted by
bubbers44
Then why did he pull up into an impossible climb that all of us know would end up in a stall? No airliner can go into a 15 degree climb at FL350 and not stall. He either trusted Airbus protections in normal law or was incredibly stupid.
That's two possible conclusions. Other conjecture has included the ideas that he tried to chase the intermittent FD bars and/or that the pull up was a panic reaction - and through a possible combination of body-clock offset, having just come off of holiday (and still getting used to being back in the saddle) - or even just that the shock completely threw him, all training went out the window.
Unfortunately there'll never be any irrefutable proof which of these theories, or any combination of them, caused him to react the way he did.
I think somewhere in his training he was told you can't stall in normal law so pull it up and let the automation handle it.
I've said this before, but it's very important to draw a distinction between FBW/protections and automation (in the autoflight sense). The ColganAir Q400 did not have FBW or protections and yet the captain still pulled the aircraft into a stall when the warning startled him.
The distinction is important because (for better or worse) a pilot expects to be using the automation on almost every flight, whereas in an ideal world the pilot would never have to rely on the protections (and in the real world, most never have). The protections are there primarily to help the pilot stay within the load limits of the airframe when aggressive maneouvres are required - but in this case there was no requirement for an aggressive maneouvre and hence no need to bring the protections into play.
These two spent most of their careers monitoring autopilots so probably depended on them a lot more than us old timers to fly the airplane.
The "old timers" didn't have to deal with RVSM airspace.
More seriously though, the industry needs to have a serious look at maintaining basic aeronautical knowledge, now that automation has become a necessity.
The cockpit voice recorder shows how confused both pilots were when AS and AP went away. It didn't happen like that years ago before full automation took over.
It did on Dynasty 006 in 1985 and Eastern 401 way back in 1972. We need to be careful when generalising.