Originally Posted by
Flightcap
I've always wondered whether they thought they had a tailplane stall....... for which correct recovery is aft elevator, retract the flaps, power to a specified (not necessarily full) setting. Given the fact that tailplane stalls occur more readily with flaps extended, and that the stall occurred at the moment of flap extension, the "recovery" they tried to perform would have made sense. Obviously, it would have sense EXCEPT for the super low airspeed and stick shaker. There is no excuse for missing these cues. But I'm still curious what any Q drivers would think. Could the conditions of flight have suggested a tailplane stall?
No. The Q tail was designed to prevent a tail stalls. That is why there is a large bulge on the top of the tail that the smaller Dash-8s do not have. Because of this, there was no tail stall training given in training then. After the crash, they did incorporate it into the training only because the NTSB thought of that was the cause early in the investigation, so Colgan rushed to include that into training. Then the NTSB figured icing was not a cause, but Colgan left it in the training. I find it very unlikely that two pilots concluded they were in a tail stall without any discussion and executed a recovery procedure they didn't teach in training.