Originally Posted by
peteq
Don't climb on me if I don't have the facts right with this story, but my point is that sometimes during a panic situation, when there's souls on board, and you don't know what's happening, the body just reacts and common sense doesn't quite kick in.
No kidding. I was giving spin-training to a new-hire once and when they recovered "way too early" we found ourselves upside down. Simply roll level with full aileron deflection right? Not for this guy, he was "frozen" and I had to "save the day". Relatively simple and we briefed it ahead of time, but once in that "totally new" situation, he could not process the information and react correctly.
A good friend had an aerobat and wanted some aerobatic training, but despite my best efforts and demos, I couldn't get him to use the right control inputs/entry to prevent ending up in a dive during aileron rolls, which I recovered from.
Should these people not be pilots? I don't know. I don't believe that unless these people have the extensive aerobatic experience it's fairly unrealistic to expect them to react correctly in "new" situations (wake turbulence, inadvertent spin, etc). I mean I can have someone recover from a spin, that's all fine an dandy, but what if we didn't experience a REAL tight spin that didn't stop right away where the correct inputs did nothing at first (or caused it to tighten further)? I've had many more "frozen pilot" situations or frantic but inadequate control inputs observed from other pilots whil doing these. I've done these many times over and it's more like "slow motion" for me now, but unless they have, is it realistic to expect a positive result?
Maybe this is part of the issue, being put in a totally new situation with only a few seconds to react correctly. Easy to talk about, discuss ahead of time, but realize that when put into that situation, the pilot or whomever has to proceses the situation, recognize it for what it is or what was talked about, decide upon the course of action, and so on. Easy to say, but much harder to process due to it being a new experience. As much as we train, try to form the correct habits, and so on, unless we can experience all the situations prior, we are just going to have a question mark when presented with a totally new situation.
I know we all think we can, but can we REALLY handle something that's far outside of our norm?