Re: Colgan 3407
Washington Post:
According to a source familiar with the direction of the NTSB's investigation, neither pilot was fully trained to use the aircraft's stall warning and protection system, which includes a feature called the "stick pusher" that automatically presses the nose of the plane down to keep it from stalling.
How can you be trained to "use" a SPS?
It's automatic, not something in the pilot's 'tool kit' to employ as a stall evasion device, if you will. I understand training to recover
after the activation of the SPS (if it gets that far), or an understanding about why the SPS is activating, and, if you have the ability to override it, whether or not you should do so (if you override, you better do something at least as effective as what the stick pusher was doing to address the
immediate situation, if this is the case), but not how you'd "use" the SPS, other than as an alert that the AoA indicator tied to the slat/flap position indicator (as well as other systems tied to the SPS system, if applicable) is triggering b/c you've entered the 'SPS' activation parameters.
As a former check airman on an aircraft with a stick pusher and someone familiar with SPS, I'm filing this one under 'news media wording', but I just want to make sure. The Colgan investigation starts next week, so obviously, I'll figure out what the NTSB thinks of all this soon.