Originally Posted by
bubbers44
None of this applies to this incident. Two pilots let an aircraft go into a full stall for no reason because the autopilot clicked off. End of story.
Bubbers, it's not that simple. It may be comforting to paint it as a symptom of degrading flying skills in the "Magenta Line" era, but some of the evidence contradicts this. For example, the PF was a sailplane pilot (ref: Final Report [English] p.28) and by rights should have had a better working knowledge of aerodynamics and flight envelopes than many on the line.
I've been a dedicated follower of aviation and aviation safety for most of my life, and one of the things I've come to realise over the years is that most fatal accidents that do not have a direct technical cause are not indicative of the crews in those cases being generally sub-par, but tend to stem from making an error or series of errors that they would not normally make. I like to think this is because the minimum level of competence in a line pilot is actually pretty high by the standards of a lot of professions (case in point, the Captain of ColganAir 3407 was considered to be of below-average ability and yet it took levels of fatigue that would not be permitted in any other safety-critical industry to get him to make a fatal mistake).
So the big question is as it has always been - why? Why did the PF pull up into a zoom climb, pull up into a stall and for the most part keep pulling up all the way down? Why did neither of the other crew members try to stop him? Why the seemingly complete breakdown of CRM?
Unfortunately, like other accidents in which some crew actions seem -at least at first glance - so aberrant as to border on inexplicable, I don't think there'll ever be answers to these questions that will satisfy a majority of people, let alone everyone.