Lyman;
There's "startled", "surprised" and then being merely spring-loaded.
I can appreciate and even understand being startled over an engine failure, (loud bang, big yaw swing, vibration, bevy of cockpit warnings), but really...full-blown "negligence" when the airplane had not suffered a catastrophic engine or structural failure and was in, and could have remained in controlled flight but for its crews' actions? I think some perspective is in order.
rgbrock, good story. I can appreciate your example because being shot at has a clearly-defined possibility.
Honestly though?...I think perhaps a connection between refusing to leave the airplane when bullets await one outside, and being unable to respond as per training when faced with an aircraft abnormality because one is "startled", is a bit of a stretch.
Consider the QANTAS A380 crew, their A330 crew, their B747 crew; the QATAR Airways A310 crew, the BOAC B747 crew that lost all engines - Startled, scared, wide-eyed, shaking a bit...yes. But completely unable to function rationally and as per training and experience? No, quite the opposite.
"Startled" is an invented, psychobabble notion created by non-pilots/non-aviation people in an industry that has been dealing with transport emergencies and abnormals and improving on checklist design, system design and crew performance for same, for over fifty years. Why suddenly does the notion of being "startled" in an airliner cockpit have the currency that it does instead of being examined for what it is actually saying?
Is the trend towards relatively low cockpit experience with commensurate reducing skill standards in combination with highly-automated aircraft technologies where a pilot can now be overwhelmed by anything just beyond training and experience, finding new expressions in terms like "startled"?
Pulling the stick back and achieving such pitch attitudes because someone was "startled"?
What should have startled, no, scared this crew into action was getting to such a pitch attitude in the first place.
If "startled" is the new metric when examining human factors in aircraft accidents then there are some serious questions to be asked of those processes upstream from putting crews into transport cockpits who can handle the profession and the job.