Originally Posted by
tdracer
What I can't understand (and can't forgive) is why Bonin didn't know that basic fact...
To me, the answer is easy. There are 2 types of knowledge in play.
First, there's academic knowledge, like the facts recited by your hypothetical aero student. For the lazy, it amounts to little more than flashcard-type question and response that's unconnected to anything. Sometimes, for a more diligent pilot, some of these facts can start getting processed into logical relationships and connected into some small webs of theory. And
maaaybe, if we're lucky, sometimes even connected to... the physical realm of actual flight!
Second (and, unfortunately, a world apart) is the other type of knowledge, which isn't really a type of knowledge, but I'm talking about the gut-level, split-second urges to make various control inputs in response to aircraft states. For the most part, these urges aren't at all informed by any theory of flight from the first type of knowledge, but rather quick-reacting, unthinking, "twitch" type responses that are either instinctual, or drilled to a level where they might as well be instinctual. Now in some areas of flight, this is fine. If you're flying straight and level, the gut response to a slight bank upset is to roll the wings level. If a gust of turbulence knocks the nose up, you push it back down. If it knocks it down, you pull it back up. If you're rolling down the centerline and the plane starts coming left, you push on the right rudder, etc.
(Note that this drilling for the responses of these simple situations can come not just from the beginning of that person's flight training, but since they are a child. The pertinent example of this is the general principle that you control a vehicle by pointing its front end in the direction you want to go. We know (and have internalized this) since we were children and learned basically how cars work.)
But in other areas, this gut-level instinctual knowledge will lead us astray. If have a large attitdue upset, that leaves you upside down and with the nose below the horizon, the drilled response of the "pull the yoke back" (which is normally the go-up control) will of course only exacerbate the situation. A successful outcome requires an application of the first type of (academic) knowledge, an understanding of the lift vector and its manipulations (I wrote more about this
here in the recent thread about upset recovery). Understanding aerodynamics is not just for answering test questions for getting your license, it really really applies! But too many only take it as far as it satisfies the licensure task.
This yoke-pull go-up response is unfortunately drilled into us way too far not only from the common-sense notion that vehicles go where you point their noses (outside aviation) but even inside aviation-
- from the 99% of our flying time which is spent on the front side of the power curve and therefore the airplane indeed does go up when the nose goes up
- from lazy and unknowledgable instructors that don't explain the real-life ramifications of the drag curve and the relationship between excess thrust and flight path angle
- from lazy application of technology, i.e., autothrottles that also hide that same ramification, ...
- from all those things that suffuse a pilot's career and drill the yoke-pull go-up response so deep into a pilot't gut reaction. Considering all these factors, it's absolutely unsurprising that when this pilot was suddenly faced with mismatching info, and every alarm under the sun going off at once, that he was too wide-eyed and unable to use some dim factoid he used to pass a written test decades ago, to override the gut-level reaction to pull the stick back.
You just can't overcome this starting with when the **** hits the fan in flight. It starts with an intellectual drive to
deeply understand the mechanics of flight, and to
apply that academic knowledge into thinking (on the ground) about what and why the airplane is gonna do when this and that happens, and what and why would then the proper pilot response be. It's a process that starts when you first crack your student pilot manual, repeats itself continuously throughout your career, and doesn't end until your last flight.
One of the chief tasks of a good instructor (for other peoples minds) and a good learner (for one's own mind) is to bridge the gap between these 2 types of knowledge. The first one is useless without application to the secondd, and the second is deadly without application from the first.