Originally Posted by
xcitation
Was it a Titanic belief in the un-stallable nature of the airbus that the warning must be a glitch not even worthy of discussion?
A slight possibility exists, but I very much doubt it - for one thing, the fact that the aircraft can stall when in a degraded flight law is down in black and white in both training and ops materials that I know of. Also, the crews in the other similar incidents I mentioned earlier weren't flying FBW Airbus types, and the PF in those cases disregarded not only the Stall Warning and stick-shaker, but also their crewmates telling them they were in a stall!
@Turbine D:
I have a lot of respect for PJ2, and agree with the vast majority of what he writes. However what bothers me about writing off the consequences of what has recently been termed "startle response" as a
Originally Posted by PJ2
psychobabble notion created by non-pilots/non-aviation people
is that while the industry has - as he said - been dealing with scenarios such as this for a very long time, the fact remains that there is always room for improvement.
I was enjoying one of my periodic re-reads of "Fate Is The Hunter" the other week, and there was an embryonic version of the subject even then. Gann refers to it using the concepts of "fright" and "fear":
Fear and fright are two different things, the emotion of true fear requiring time for culture and preferably a period of helpless inactivity. Then fear breeds upon itself because it is a hermaphrodite capable of endless reproduction. Fear is a contagious disease, spreading from its first victim to others in the vicinity until it is powerful enough to take charge of a group, in which event it becomes panic.
Fear is the afterbirth of reason and calculation. It takes time to recuperate from fear.
Fright is only the percussion of fear. It snaps rather than rumbles and its explosion is instantaneous. Likewise, fright is self-destructive, being more of an instinctive physical reaction than it is an emotion. It hits, explodes, and may be gone as quickly, if it does not have time to ignite the keg of fear
(Emphasis mine)
If no less a legend of aviation than Gann had a handle on it many decades ago, then I'd venture to suggest not just that there may well be something in it, but that there may be some mileage in studying the effect properly.
What bugs me about how a lot of the hearsay around this case has gone down is that there's been a worrying groundswell of dismissive opinions from some quarters along the lines of: "Well, he was low-hours/automation-dependent/a 'magenta child', so he didn't really know how to fly". Which raises the worrying assumption on the part of people making such comments that they're dead certain that it would never happen to them. Part of the reason I've been banging on about the other incidents where captains with in excess of ten thousand hours and/or with a successful military career behind them have ended up doing more-or-less exactly the same thing is because people making those assumptions, in the face of these contrary facts, frankly scare the bejeezus out of me!