Danny and MPN11
That must be a classic pilot's nightmare: catastrophically losing flying speed on take-off. One's first, incorrect, instinct must be to keep the nose up, and the second one to head back to the airfield and thus to 'safety'. A friend of mine is a glider pilot. One of his instructor colleagues was giving a paying visitor a joyride. On taking-off, the towline, drawing them up into the air, broke. This pilot then forgot standard procedure ('stick your nose down and land ahead of you') and turned back for the landing ground. They stalled and a wing hit the ground, thus cartwheeling them and causing considerable damage to the aircraft. I think everyone rushed to reassure the poor passenger and made light of it:
'Haha!... bit of a bumpy landing!'. There was some expectation that the pilot would lose his instructor qualification, but apparently, he got away with it.
Another recent example comes to mind, where 'impulse' over-rode 'knowledge and training'. This was the Air France Airbus, Flight 447, that came down in 2009, crashing into the Atlantic on its way back to Paris from Rio de Janeiro. There's been a couple of TV programmes about it. As I recall, they had zero visibility, at night, in poor weather conditions. The auto-pilot had handed control back to the aircrew, as the sensors gauging airspeed etc, had frozen-up. The Junior Pilot had control of the aircraft and kept the nose up despite the aircraft continuing to lose height. The stall alarm went off, but the Captain, having just returned from the bunk-bed, didn't realise the nose was being held high by the Junior pilot. By the time he worked out what on earth was going on, they were too low to put the nose down and thus accelerate and regain flying speed. It seems that the Junior Pilot's intuition was that they were losing height, so the aircraft had to be pointed upwards. All the while, the aircraft was in a stall attitude, falling, nose high, out of the sky. One of the conclusions of the experts was that airline pilots were being trained to fly sophisticated computerised aircraft, but fundamental, hands-on, piloting skills were being neglected.
This is also an example of where advances in automation have the effect of de-skilling humans. Likewise, the modern-age mountain walker who finds himself lost and utterly in a pickle when the batteries of his GPS run flat.
