Originally Posted by Machinbird
One of my instrument instructor's favorite tricks was to tell you to look down at your lap while he roughly maneuvered the aircraft, freezing the attitude indicator in a near upright position, then rolling nose high or nose low inverted and saying, "You have the aircraft." We did not have a standby attitude indicator. We had to recover to level flight by needle-ball-altimeter-airspeed techniques.
Interesting, yet isn't it true in both AF447 and AirAsia cases the EADI horizon on the PFD was fully functional throughout each event? I just re-read both reports and I don't see any indication they were malfunctioning.
If so it wasn't a case of the pilots having to decode the attitude from other instruments. Rather the EADI was accurately showing pitch attitude.
How could the EADI show a big blue sky, extreme pitch angles, yet either PF or PNF be confused about why the aircraft was buffeting and acting funny? Even the original Sperry artificial horizon from 1929 was painted blue and black to immediately convey an instinctive grasp of aircraft attitude.
There is a picture of the 1929 Sperry horizon here, and some discussion of how pilots can nonetheless get spatially confused even with newer designs. However most of these involve a tumbling horizon:
THE SOLUTION
Has there been any discussion or human factors research on why the AF447 and AirAsia pilots did not take action based on the indicated EADI pitch attitude?