“You can only conclude that they were unsufficiently trained to recover from a stall.”
Not at all, the conclusion is made with hindsight which infers that because an aircraft stalled – was not recovered, crew training was a cause.
A better inference from the data could be that the crew did not fly the aircraft as expected immediately after the failure. This assumes that the ‘expectation’ was that any crew could fly without airspeed, in the prevailing conditions and with all of the consequential system aspects of the initial failure. In support of this was the recent crew training for flight without airspeed.
The accident data might be better interpreted as the crew following the procedure for loss of airspeed after take-off / climb, a memory item which perhaps was better practiced / stressed in teaching (and better recalled in stressed conditions) instead of the level flight case.
The stall resulted from this misapplication. Furthermore the stalled condition was such that few if any crews would have been trained for; full nose-up trim, conflicting alerts and warnings, at night, and near convective weather.
With due respect to the coroner, there did not appear to be any evidence linking public concern, automation dependency, and the adequacy of training.
This and other discussions might similarly falsely conclude that that modern aircraft and automation ‘cause’ accidents due to the reduction in manual flying, yet completely overlook the everyday successes, presumably with some manual flight, and the very low accident rate. Yes the industry can do better, but not by focussing on one aspect.
The UK coroner stated that – ‘The pilots were not adequately trained to handle the aircraft safely in the particular high-altitude emergency situation that night’. There is no inference as to whether the training given was matched to the situation and the prevailing human factors; there appeared to be a systematic weakness. However, with the usual inability to identify the effect of each contribution – regulator, manufacturer, operator, crew, individual, it might be difficult to allocate ‘blame’ which the legal systems prefer, as opposed to understanding the contributors and alleviation sought by aviation.