Buffalo Q400 crash

On May 13, 2:14*pm, Ron Garret wrote:
In article
,



*bod43 wrote:
On 13 May, 12:57, Robert Moore wrote:
James Robinson *wrote

The drop in airspeed was unnoticed, and the stall seemed
to catch them completely by surprise.

I wonder what the stall warning was doing all of this time?

Bob Moore

It appears that it was the stall warning (stick shaker) that the
captain (pilot flying) reacted to.

The reaction was to immediately pull back pretty hard
quickly precipitating an actual stall. 80% power was also
selected immediately. The stick was held back pretty much
until impact.

This boggles my mind. *I'm just a PP but throughout my training I've had
it drilled in to me to lower the nose on an impending stall. *How can
any pilot not know that, let alone one who is getting paid to fly
passengers?

It may boggle the mind of a PP like you (or me for that matter) who
seldom or never flies in icing conditions. However in icing
conditions a tail stall is possible, and the recovery from that is
exactly what this flight crew did. Yes, I know the Q400 is alleged
not to be suspectible to this but the captain had just come from a
type that is, and the FO spent a good part of the five minutes before
the crash chatting about how she feared icing, had never experienced
it before, and how would she handle it, etc. So then after chatting
and worrying about icing, they got something that felt/looked like it
could be an ice-induced tail stall and since it was on their minds
they did the recovery from that. They acted on instinct and it was
the wrong instinct. IMO.

This crew has come in for lots of criticism and I think a lot of it,
especially on their attentiveness and lack of discipline, appears to
be well-deserved, but there comes a point where it just becomes piling
on.