SA 777 Stall on Departure?
 

This incident has been submitted to Southern’s ASAP and should probably remain there until all the facts are known. Please respect the ASAP process as I’m sure you would wish if you were involved.

Its already public knowledge because of the audio.

While I would normally agree with you, the fact that at least two aviation web sites are reporting this incident means that the crew involved are probably in for a ton of scrutiny. IF, and I emphasize the IF, they made a mistake there is going to be extra pressure on the company when dealing with this due to its public nature.

I will be happy if they did not make a mistake but don’t see how they didn’t at this point. Best case, either Autopilot was on and nobody was monitoring airspeed or it was off and pilot did a poor job of hand flying.

As they say, the Devil will be in the details. I’d expect this from a newbie coming to his first heavy from an RJ. Lots of them just don’t get the whole min clean speed being well above 250, even when under 10k. See it a lot in recent years.

Low speed events became commonplace at the regionals in recent years. They had another surge about 15 years ago. Seems to coincide with hiring booms and lower average experience levels.

Long haul widebody freighters are typically loaded to max landing weight plus fuel burn or max gross for takeoff. These weights often allow little room for error on takeoff especially for an inexperienced crew.

Gotta mind those FMAs.
My guess: Hand flying. Initial level off was 5000, they got cleared to 11,000 very close to level off. 5K was already captured and they were in VNAV ALT. Altitude window gets spun to 11,000 but knob is not pushed to command VNAV SPD and A/T to climb power. PF raises the nose to start the climb and gets slow.

Hey, their training worked and the airplane was recovered from a potential upset.