Originally Posted by
wwings
I feel like I'm completely stating the obvious, but it seems like most people in their ranting on APC the past few days have been missing the point of this accident.
This crew executed the procedure to recover from a tailplane stall situation. This was everyone's initial first reaction the day after this incident. This message forum was rife with people discussing tailplane stalls. (Turboprops with T-tails+Icing, correct procedure: reduce power, reduce flaps, pull back)
I'm sure both pilots were knowledgeable about how and why an airplane stalls. The crew members acted together to fix a wrong scenario.
Tragic.
Listen to the CVR again. They were scared and were way too fatigued to know what was going on. The Captain freaked out and in a desperate attempt to save the airplane, ignored all of his training and just pulled back hoping the airplane would go up. They were not thinking tail stall, just "jesus christ". The first officer thought to reduce drag and all she could do was retract flaps, while that reduced drag, it also reduced lift. Then she retracted the gear. All the while the Captain was still pulling back over powering the pusher. Let's not bring up "they thought it was a tail stall" again because they didn't. Look at his training record, and look at her voice on the CVR repeatedly revealing her inexperience with icing and how she wouldn't want to make any decisions involving ice.