Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore

[Coagie]

I think how QZ8501 and AF447 got into stalls and attempted to recover will be different. The pilot flying in the AF447 crash, Bonin, makes it difficult to compare it to other air accidents. Reading the CVR transcript, makes it clear to me, even through translation from French to English, that Bonin was very uncomfortable, even frightened, well before the UAS incident even took place. He was spooked (frightened) by his first exposure to St Elmo's Fire and the the "electrical smell" AF447 encountered. Most, especially when the phenomena were explained to them, would think "That's cool" or "neat", but Bonin reacted as if they were supernatural, as if he'd seen a ghost. He may have even known something about what to do in a stall situation (wasn't one of his hobbies flying gliders?), but he was already in "fight or flight" mode (wrong kind of "flight" mode. No pun intended), and using his reptilian brain instead of his reasoning brain. He didn't think things through or go back to his training. Each person is different, but Bonin "cracked up". Some people would use the term, "freaked out". The threshold to "crack up" is different for everyone, but can change with training and experience. This is why some training/testing involves putting the student in pressure (stressful) situations, to see if they can still perform. Some people perform and pass testing fine, when not under pressure, only to falter, when pressure is applied. Military training is often known for this, but so are some civilian training regimens. I think the amount of "Pressure Testing" and "Trickery Testing" in airline pilot training and testing, needs reviewing and revising to better insure, that a pilot's "cracking up" threshold isn't too low. Some schools and airlines may already have it "right" and some may have it "wrong" or some degree in between.
Bonin had a low "cracking up" threshold in the situation he found himself in, and since every person can be vastly different, it may be apples and oranges to compare his incident and the Air Asia QZ8501 incident, as far as how they got in a stall, and how they attempted to get out of it. I think his "cracking up" threshold just happened to be lower than an average person, and, I imagine, much lower than an average pilot. I can't bring myself to blame the computer in the AF447 crash, as it didn't throw an unmanageable situation in Bonin's lap. He created the unmanageable situation. It could prove different in QZ8501
Anyway, hopefully, we'll see, when an Air Asia QZ8501 CVR transcript is published. I don't think the chances are that another pilot, with a low cracking up threshold, slipped through the cracks and caused a crash in the same way. Hopefully, I'm not wrong, or things are worse than I thought.