Buffalo Q400 crash

In article
,
xyzzy wrote:

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.

Thanks for the input. However, there is something about what you say
which worries me greatly. You say that pulling back on the stick is the
correct response to a tail stall, the exact opposite of what you do for
a normal stall. Well, if you have a normal stall and react to it like a
tail stall, then you die, as evidenced by what happened here.

Do you also die if you react to a tail stall as though it were a normal
stall? Assuming the answer is "yes", how exactly are you supposed to
handle a situation where you don't know which is which?

You seem to be implying that the answer is "guess" (and please forgive
me if that's not what you meant to imply), which seems to be extremely
dangerous if you're basically flipping a coin to decide whether or not
you get to survive the stall.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon