Thank you for this and for fighting my ignorance regarding Captain, co-pilot, etc. I really did not intend to portray the PF as incompetent. I trust my life regularly to the competency of airline pilots.
I know this is guesswork and Monday morning quarterbacking at best and that really speculation should perhaps be withheld, but I can’t help being curious what if any significance these two statements have.
Is it standard procedure to call the Captain back to the flight deck in such a situation?
Given Broomsticks very sensible explanation of why it is unlikely the Captain took the controls. The last statement makes even less sense to me. Why would the PF turn the controls over to the PNF at that point, some 41 seconds before impact?
Another set of eyes and an additional brain in the cockpit might come up with a solution to the problem, help monitor instruments and the situation, and so forth. There have been situations where an off-duty pilot who came forward to offer help proved very helpful. It could be as simple as that.
Two pilots were on the controls at the same time, at least the way I read it. Rather than have them potentially work at cross-purposes one of them yielded control to the other. At least that’s how I interpreted it.
You’ve spent a couple of minutes out of control and are approaching the ocean with a vertical speed of 120 mph - if that doesn’t warrant calling the Captain, what would?
But, realistically, if you’ve been falling towards the ocean for a couple minutes what the hell is the captain going to be able to do about it at that point?
Wasn’t suggesting he should not be called. Just trying to better understand the published sequence of events. As Broomstick pointed out, there probably wasn’t a lot he could do. If so, and if the PF should feel that he is fully in command, I wondered why they would call several times for the captain. I had not however considered what Broomstick pointed out, that in the commotion he could be of aid monitoring critical instruments.:smack: Not being a pilot myself, it is easy to forget the bewildering array of instruments and data they have before them.
I’d like to think it’s possible he could have taken a look at things and said: “Stick forward, trim down, gear down, full power - let’s see if we can get this thing flying again.”
But at least he’s been saved the ignominy of being back in the passenger cabin while the plane for which he was responsible was crashing.
Actually, I’m surprised he wasn’t called much sooner. I’d think the standard captain’s instruction would be “Any abnormality you can’t diagnose and address within 15 seconds means you call me.”
You’re assuming the PF and PNF knew they were in deep doo-doo from the start of the whole mess. If they thought they understood the situation and had it under control, but actually didn’t, that could account for the delay in calling the captain.
Right - and this looks like the best current explanation for the delay. But I’d say that a descent rate of 10,000 ft/min that isn’t changing in response to control inputs qualifies as deep doo-doo.
I’d be interested to hear the comments of professional pilots on this. IANAP but would have thought the intuition Nose Down = Speed and Lift would be etched into a pilot’s subconscious.
The article is old news to pilots - it is counter-intuitive to push the nose down either just before or while in a stall. It’s something every pilot has to get past during initial training, and it’s why pilots are supposed to continue to practice stall recovery.
However, while this is easy to do when you know a stall is imminent, such as in training. When caught by surprise the conditioning and training don’t always kick in.
That’s not intuition, that’s training. Instinct is “crash=bad; stay away from ground.” Training is required in order to suppress the panic that will cause that instinct to irresistably assert itself.