pull back in response to stall warning?

[450knotOffice]

The newer airbuses do, in fact, add power to prevent a stall. In fact, those airplanes go so far as to never allow the aircraft to stall, unless it senses it is near the ground in a landing configuration. The pilot can command anything he wants, but the flight control computers will only allow him to explore the edge of the envelope, not go outside it. Airbus used to demonstrate a tight wind up maneuver to pilots that involved reducing the thrust to idle and pulling the joystick into the far aft left or right corner of it's range. Basically he was commanding a max pitch up and max roll rate - at idle thrust. Normally this would be bad...very bad. But this airplane will start to pitch up to a high deck angle, while rolling to a max bank of something like 66 degrees. The airplane will start a steep ever-tightening turn as it slows down to near stall, and then the thrust will increase to max (without the thrust levers moving at all - they're still in the idle position) and the airplane will begin to climb in a tight upward corkscrew at max angle of attack - perfectly controllable. Pretty amazing demo.

[widgeon13]

More info on the Colgan flight.

http://www.maxtrescott.com/max_trescott_on_general_a/2009/05/colgan-air-flight-3407-crash-info-latest-details-suggest-loss-of-airspeed-was-cause.html#more

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by rick-l

So were they just twisting knobs and typing in numbers when the autopilot horn went off?

Most pilots, especially ones flying the more modern airplanes are taught from day one to let the autopilot fly the plane. The powers that be feel that its smoother but in fact its turning the pilots into a "cockpit manager" and when things get difficult and the autopilot kicks off they are not used to hand flying, which is not a good thing.

The recent Air France had the pilots flying for up to 4 minutes at altitude with no autopilot. It will be interesting to see if this played a factor. "At altitude" hand flying is not fun and they were doing this in the dark with a heavy airplane in the middle of bad weather, just where you would really appreciate an autopilot.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by 450knotOffice

Absolutely true. Non essential banter during a high workload period simply takes the crew's focus away from the job at hand (talking strategically about the weather though is not considered idle chit chat - it IS essential, but that's not what they were doing.)

Sterile cockpit should be observed anytime when flying below 10,000 feet. This is a worldwide industry standard.

They did not observe this simple premise and now are not with us. There is a reason for this safety net and its to keep you thinking on flying the jet and only flying the jet.