Of course, it is true that it would be “nice” if crew members were to be able to “identify” the fact that they are in a stall, if, indeed, that happens to be the case. However, it seems to me that there is at least a possibility that these “pilots” (Colgan and AF447) knew they were in a stall. Why do I say that? Well, both of these pilots responded to something – and what they did, was not only deliberate and continuing, demonstrating to me, at least, that they were committed to do what they were doing. Additionally, the actions they each took seem to have been driven by the fact that what they were doing was just exactly what they wanted to do. That's pretty deliberate. What drives that kind of "deliberateness?"
They each pulled back on the controls: in the Colgan accident, the pilot even went to the point of attempting to over-control the stick pusher; in the AF447 accident the pilot also pulled back on the controls, allowing the airplane to climb (at one point at a rate of 7000 fpm) AND, something, or someone, managed to move the trimmable horizontal stabilizer from a nominal 3 degrees nose up to a whopping 13 degrees nose up position, doing so in about 1 minute and that extreme nose up position was maintained for the duration of the flight; also both pilots managed to advance the power to, or almost to the maximum for go around setting. There is that attitude of being deliberate ... again!
In a previous post of mine, on this thread (at #14), I described an accident that occurred on December 22, 1996, involving ABX Air (Airborne Express), flying a Douglas DC-8-63, in Narrows, Virginia, USA. Both pilots were very experienced instructors with lots of experience in the subject airplane, and were doing a post maintenance flight on an airplane having just recently completed a routine maintenance check and routine servicing. One of the tasks their procedures called for during such a functional check out was to perform a recovery from an approach to stall.
These pilots happened to have been trained on a simulator that was not programmed correctly – and had been trained to recover with an absolute minimum altitude loss, using only an increase in power setting/thrust. Attempting to comply with these 2 “standards,” they attempted to keep the nose of the airplane on or above the horizon (unsuccessfully), while attempting to add power to recover (also, unsuccessfully). What they managed to achieve was a fully developed aerodynamic stall. But, because they apparently understood from their training that the procedures to follow to recover from a fully developed aerodynamic stall were exactly the same as a recovery from an approach to stall. Therefore, they stubbornly attempted to maintain altitude and recover by simply adding power. Even though they could accomplish neither, they continued to attempt to do this until they crashed. Why? Could it be that they wanted to trust their training?
OK, I certainly am aware that there may be some here who can, or would want to, point to at least some facts that may not line up between the ABX accident and these other 2 accidents. But, the fact still remains that these critical actions – attempting to maintain attitude/altitude and adding power – are clearly present in all 3 accidents. This leads me to conclude that they were very likely attempting to do what they were trained to do – but the training let them down. They all were very likely either incompletely or incompetently trained, and very likely left the training school fully confident that they could handle whatever “mother nature” or airplane malfunctions could throw at them … and unfortunately we now know that wasn’t the case.
It is for these kinds of reasons that I continue to work, even fight, for a regular, professional review of training standards and training methods for pilots, instructors, and evaluators.