Originally Posted by
80ktsClamp
Renslow responded in a manner similar to what I have seen of people of his personality type and training/experience background (in the simulator and in real life). Something happened that startled him and he jumped at it and made some control inputs, and hoped he guessed right. Why would his first reaction be to haul back on the stick at the onset of the shaker? Because that is what he has as a rote response to a shaker because of the maintaining altitude training in stalls that Pinnacle/Colgan taught.
As far as why they didn't recognize the speed reduction, I would be willing to bet that due to both of their own poor rest in the preceding 24 hours (him sleeping in the crew lounge and her commuting in on a redeye sick- both due to financial burden rather than rest rules burden), that they were both probably just along for the ride and lost focus. They had a long delay in getting out which I've found sharply contributes to my fatigue level. Their lack of focus is also why it was such a startled reaction to the shaker.
I wondered when somebody would mention approach to stall training. It would be interesting to see if AF trained the same way seeing as the pilot response was much the same. I think it was in the mid seventies we started using the approach to stall maneuver as basically a scan improvement exercises.Nobody would ever really stall a big airplane I remember being told. But a DC 8 was lost in much the same way as this on a test flight in the mid 80's. After that a note was added to training manuals, lower the nose if you really stall the a/c etc.