Feds: Pilot triggered steep climb in Buffalo air crash - USATODAY.com

Quote:
“As the plane prepared to land, a warning device known as a "stick shaker" activated, the NTSB said. The stick shaker alerts pilots that they are flying too slowly by vibrating the control column. If a plane gets too slow, it can "stall" — not an engine stall, but an aerodynamic stall where air flowing over the wings can no longer keep the plane aloft.

Pilots are trained to respond to the stick shaker by immediately lowering a plane's nose and increasing power. But the pilots on the Colgan Air flight instead pulled the nose up aggressively. A control column movement to lift the nose was captured by the plane's crash-proof data recorder, the NTSB said.”

I'm waiting for the final report but I can see this happening. They’re flying along with the AP on when the airplane got to slow setting the shaker off, once the shaker goes off the AP disconnects and the PF’s knee jerk reaction is to quickly grad the yoke and pull back causing the full stall. I’ve seen many pilots do this exact thing in the sim and on average it takes them thousands of feet in altitude to recover. Once you start the large pitch oscillations they can get pretty hard to control.

One more note, the article mentioned how we are trained to lower the nose during a stall and that the pilot pulled back “aggressively” instead of lowering the nose. Well when the PF pulled back they hadn’t stalled yet seeing that the shaker is not the stall, just the onset, and we are taught to hold pitch (no increase and very little relaxation if any at all) and power through the shaker.

RIP 3407