ehwatezedoing
It's not much of an "unusual attitude" from the aircraft itself.
Than "just" a flight instrument(s) caking on you, and you would still continue straight and level without any actions from your part.
Figuring that out when it happen can be the hard part.
Yeah, see point 2 in post # 301
TowerDog. Yes, your 5,000 hours of flight on (I guess) the basic T clockwork instruments has stood you in good stead. Now we have cadets flying about 100 hours on a modern light aircaft and then straight onto a PFD type presentation, and maybe that is the problem - It's not their fault but maybe they can't assimilate it properly.
If you think about it, on a PFD you 'climb up' the pitch angle, the V/S scale and the Altitude tape if you pitch up - to a higher pitch angle, greater vertical speed and higher altitude - and decrease all three if you pitch down, so they all react to pitch changes in the correct sense.
The speed tape though reacts backwards, if you pitch up, the tape moves the wrong way to a lower speed and ditto to a higher speed when pitching down. I wonder if this tape moving the 'wrong' way confuses us on a deep subconscious level? If the speed tape were the other way up, so higher speeds were lower down the scale instead of above, then the speed tape too would react in the correct sense to pitch changes. You pitch down, and you go down the speed tape to a faster speed, pitch up towards a slower speed.
Round clockwork instruments don't have the up and down, but clockwise and anti clockwise movement. If one pitches up, the speed dial rotates anti clockwise, pitch down, it rotates clockwise. Perhaps this round movement is easier to associate with the up or down pitch changes than a 'backwards moving' straight, vertical speed tape is?