Originally Posted by DMEarc

I would venture to say his training prepared himself for this. The blatant disregard for situational awareness is the obvious cause of the accident. Let's look at the facts.

-Capt. Renslow was had just come off 3 consecutive stand-up overnights.
-He could not afford a crashpad and therefore slept in loud an noisy crewroom.
-First Officer Shaw had commuted in on red-eye FedEx flight from SEA via Memphis
-Shaw had been awake since her 0600 arrival in EWR

Here are two people, obviously tired flying a late night flight, after a 1 1/2 hour taxi. On the approach to Buffalo that night, they were talking. Breaching Sterile Cockpit? Yes! But you all do it and you know you do.

So now we have these two, forgetting to put the power up, talking to eachother about absolutely pointless topics, he calls for the gear and flaps and the airplane goes crazy. For all they know the airplane was flying normally. Stick shaker, AP disconnect and he pulled up and applied power. She took it upon herself to retract the flaps to ZERO. (Procedure prob calls for Power, MAINTAIN ALTITUDE, wait for POSITIVE RATE and GEAR....THEN FLAPS to 5? ETC ETC ETC) Now he has aggravated the stall to the point of no returns (At this point they had already lost too much ALT).

Those are all facts. It caught them by surprise.



She probably shouldn't have done that. Not standard.

This was an accident. It was most likely human nature to pull back and add power after being surprised with the airplane going out of control like that.