JohnBurke

It would have made no difference whatsoever.

Your dismissive viewpoint abandons decades of experience that the commenters here have, individually, and the centuries, collectively. Call nearly four decades of doing it, teaching it, observing it, studying it, etc, mere bias (and an objective view of a mishap that's been picked apart every which way from sunday) a "feel good" biased view if you like (and you do), but it's wrong, and such dismissiveness is hardly beneficial.

Yes, we can view the mishap based on hindsight, because very clearly we cannot view it with foresight. It existed in time, and exists now as a detailed mass of data. We know that the participants were minimally experienced, the F/O woefully so, and the captain one who bought his job, had numerous failures in his training and past, and who bragged on the transcribed cockpit conversation of shortcutting his career by buying his job with Gulfstream. The F/O made uncommanded changes in configuration.

The response to the events, which had ample margin from the stall and were not close to the critical AoA at the time of initial warning, was wholly inadequate, despite considerable warning and data providing information about the aircraft state. Upon recognition of the problem, the crew's response was similar to a tailplane icing encounter, though the airline taught no such response, and the procedure didn't exist for the airframe. It was the opposite of what was required, both increasing AoA to the stall and use of partial power, and far worse, was continued from an altitude that allowed far more than enough time for recovery, right to impact.

Numerous cues were available, active, and presenting, from shaker to pusher to airframe buffeting to visual cockpit indications and stall warnings, airspeed indications, power indications, configuration indications, and the event is one trained for at every initial, every recurrent, and one emphasized on every checkride from the time of a student pilot onward. None of this was new, none of this was deceptive or subtle. Further, the crew had misset the stall warning switch, allowing an additional 20 knot margin above the usual alerts; the crew received this warning and continued through that gate all the way to a stall by using partial power and an increasing AoA and then held it.

To suggest that it might or might not have happened to us is a straw-man argument which holds no merit. It's irrelevant. It DID happen to them. We know exactly what happened. We know their state of mind, their background, their personal and professional history, their rest history, their family situation, everything, including training records and cockpit conversation leading up to and throughout the event, as we do with most transport category mishaps. We have all the CVR transcript, the report, and the FDR information to provide us excruciating detail on control inputs, responses, and aircraft behavior, second by second, through the entire event.

This is not a matter of making ourselves feel good. This crew unquestionably had an ample plethora of data giving good, solid indications of the aircraft state, airspeed, and flight condition throughout the entire event, and far more than enough warning that it was coming, impending, happening, and continuing to happen. Physics are the same before, during, and after. The correct responses before, during, and after remain the same, and the crew simply followed their standardized training, they'd have been okay. There was nothing at any time wrong with the aircraft. There was no unrecoverable situation. This was not a challenging event. This was not hard to decipher, nor were the clues vague or easy to misinterpret.

The same clues, in fact the same hard data, the same warnings and progression that the crew in question received are handled and used by tens of thousands of pilots working in the field today; the same that we all train with and use on a daily basis and which still work very effecitvely. Stall recognition is not a murky, mysterious, unfathomable phenomena, particularly a straight ahead, unaccelerated stall as the Colgan crew not only experienced, but caused.

To suggest that the crew suffered from a lack of warning, a lack of flight data, a lack of useful, easily interpreted information, is ridiculous and far misses the mark. There are many things that can be taken from that event, but insufficient cockpit data is NOT one of them.

Certainly the issue of proper stall recovery has been addressed as a result of this mishap: the long-taught, ill-conceived concept of no altitude loss and powering out of a high AoA situation might have merit to prevent ground contact in a windshear situation at extremely low altitudes, but a reduction in AoA has always been and remains the only way to preclude the stall, and the drawn-out process of holding pitch, holding altitude and using power for recovery (especially in this case of partial power) was a poor and inappropriate concept propagated in the industry for far too long. That, fortunately, has been mitigated somewhat by alleviating the hard line for minimal altitude loss in the recovery in training.

The crew might be in part absolved by the problematic training standard of minimal altitude loss and no manual AoA reduction (beyond pusher) in training, except that despite all the warning received, the crew did NOT follow their training.

Be dismissive all you want, but gimmicks and fresh display formats wouldn't have fixed this. This was a human error, not the result of the lack of data.