Which reminds me of another helicopter crash (this one fatal). IIRC the pilot dropped her kneeboard between the console and the seat, and couldn’t move the collective.
(I don’t mean to hijack. It’s just the two posts reminded me of these.)
Cockpits both large and small are notorious for requiring the pilots to use certain personal gear while flying however the engineers designing the cockpits make exactly zero provision for that stuff.
Nowhere to secure it, nowhere safe to use it, no way to properly store it, nowhere to set it down where it won’t tumble to the floor and become unreachable. Or as you say, foul something truly real-time essential and thereby kill people.
Pure insanity.
Here’s a link to a professional engineers forum, including forensic engineering, that discusses various disasters such as plane crashes. Not a ton of info there yet, but they are usually very thorough at gathering info, and in every discussion I’ve followed there, they’ve sussed out the cause pretty early in the process.
They mention the severe icing conditions at 17k feet.
There’s also an unattributed mention that “some said” that they’d heard the aircraft request to descend, were told no, then they just informed that they were descending. But I haven’t watched the video that is the origin of that bit.
One comment I’ve not seen made: you generally don’t get severe icing in clear air. And doubly not in the tropics.
They may well have been in clear air the last couple / few thousand feet as they spun / spiraled / gyrated / fell / whatever-ed into the ground. But it’s a decent bet the original loss of control took place in significant clouds and turbulence.
Totally off topic, but that sounds a lot like the Michael Crichton novel Airframe. The novel follows a fictional investigation of an incident caused by the slats deploying at cruise, and now I wonder if he was inspired by that real life incident.
My dad, a career pilot, said that when something unexpected started happening, try to remember the last thing you did, since that probably caused it.
In my own case, I was landing a 172 when it started slowing down. I added power, and added power, and landed. Then I noticed that the switch to extend the flaps had stuck in the down position. I had pressed the switch down, and when the flaps got to 20-degrees, I let go. It was supposed to spring back to the neutral position (and always had in the past), but this time it didn’t. The flaps had continued to extend all the way to 45-degrees.
There was another incident with slat extenion in cruise in a 727. The strong speculation is that it was caused by the pilots. While the flight engineeer was in the lavatory, the pilot and co-pilot used an unauthorized, but apparently common, procedure to increase their speed. They pulled a circuit breaker that controlled slat extension, then extended the flaps 2-degrees. When the flight engineer came back, he noticed the popped breaker, and reset it. That caused the slates to extend. Bad things happened after that, with the airplane dropping 34,000 in just over a minute. The crew were able to regain control and land safely.
Similar incident: a pilot was taking pictures of the lovely evening skies with an SLR camera. It got wedged between the sidestick and the seat when he moved the seat forward, inducing a nose-down plunge. When the pilot recovered from the bad upset a good minute later, he threw the camera behind him. He knew it (he) was the culprit, but tried to pretend it was some mechanical issue.
For want of a cupholder…