Pilot stalls the plane out of panic to get out of the storm, ignoring 75 reminders that you are stalling and losing altitude, does nothing to remedy the stall until it is too late.
Unless you empathize with mistakes like this, it's very difficult to prevent them in the future. You're always going to have people who make mistakes in any system you design. The trick is to design the system so that mistakes are easily corrected, even when multiple ones are compounded.
It's akin to someone dropping a table of unrecoverable user data. Sure, it was dumb on their part, but why the hell is it possible for you to lose all your data from a single mistake?
The problem was Panic. In a panic situation humans revert back to a time when we need to run away from the bear that is chasing us in the woods. To fix this, I propose a "panic awareness system", where the machine says: "Don't panic". and tells the pilots to take some anti-panic medicine.
way too easy for you to say without being in the situation.
heavy turbulence, no visibility, confusing situation, very likely that he was disoriented, operating a very complex set of computer programs hooked up to a very complex set of physical controls that have a myriad of potential configurations and points of failure while trying to debug it at the same time in a panic and making quick decisions.
from his vantage point, it is likely that the stall warning is a symptom of something malfunctioning and not an actual stall.
that said, i thought that "if stall, you push forward" was instilled into pilots to the point of 2nd nature. i'm very surprised at the reaction to the stall warning.
The not pushing forward while stalling really does say to me by the time they thought to analyze the situation, they were in a state of absolute panic. I would be curious to know if any of the flight crew were military trained, or if all came from a civilian flight instruction background?
Exactly.But how do you do what is right (push forward - which is go down) when all your instincts tell you want up (pull)?
This is the same as driving a car in a rally. Drivers there know to drive into the slippage to recover control. But if you're a normal driver you'll do exactly the opposite.
My question is - do they train enough to break their instinct?
This is a lot more akin to a sober driver with a car that constantly blinks "service" and not realizing that they're stepping on the gas instead of the brakes, and it's not pedals, but a joystick, and it's a blizzard, and you can't feel simply by inertia which which direction you're going.
I expect blunders like that from drunk drivers.