It's even worse than I thought.

They were the proverbial "asses and elbows" as they flew that visual approach.

Very sad.

It now makes perfect sense to me. The CA was coming from an Airbus A320.

But why an instructor pilot lets another pilot get that much in trouble is extreme hard to imagine.

It seems like an airbus would have reacted the same way to FLCH and then autopilot disconnect and throttle override, no?

My point is, I think the Airbus design makes pilots a bit lazy. I trained on a Boeing product with a buddy who spent 8 years on an Airbus. The Asiana scenario was exactly like some of the things I saw him do in the Boeing simulator. He had lost his "stick and rudder" skills .. mainly power and speed management.

I would agree to a slight extent, however when the speed is way back and when you are looking up at the runway....

True, and I wouldn't call it "extreme trouble" but IIRC, FedEx had an issue with a pilot being requal'd and/or checked with an instructor and wrecked a plane.

Also, pretty sure the military has had it's own incidents/accidents with similar situations. Wasn't the C5 at Dover laden with more than 1 IP?

Think there were 2 Instructors, also issues with it being new all glass.

I still don't get it.

Even in the A320, if you are descending in VS and then select an altitude above you (as they set 3000 for go around altitude), then pull the altitude knob (equivalent to FLCH) you will get thrust climb in open climb and the pitch increases with climb thrust and it will climb at the selected airspeed - 152kts in their case. In the Bus if you attempt to "counter" that by turning AP off AND bringing the thrust levers to idle, autothrust will turn off. Although at this point both FDs should be turned off, the Airbus will fly with you manually controlling thrust levers. Last selected was idle which was turning the autothrust off. He then has full manual control of the thrust which is currently at idle. As an Airbus guy, he would have known this.

My question is, on this Boeing, in the same situation when you turn off the AP to avoid the FLCH pitch-up and bring the thrust levers manually to idle, what is "throttle hold" mode? At this point, with the thrust levers brough back manually to idle, is autothrust still on? If it is on, what will it command automatically, and in what situation would it automatically increase? Because unlike the Airbus, it sounds like the pilot through the autothrust would still 'kick in' from idle and maintain speed.

Given this scenario I would actually think this is one place where he should have had more familiarity with this considering an Airbus has more controls in place to keep this type of event from occurring (in normal law anyway) since the airbus generally won't allow the A320 pilot to take the plane outside the flight envelope. I thought it was generally common knowledge a Boeing wouldn't behave this way, so he could have very well applied the same practices and been better off.

In the 777 when A/T is turned off and set to idle hold, that is exactly what it will do. It will not maintain a target speed (ie having 152kn set), it will remain at idle, and when you pull back on the stick it will still not respond with thrust, but it will increase pitch and bleed off speed.

I'm not an instructor. But from what I understand of the Boeing's:

There's only two scenarios when the autothrottles (if armed) automatically activate:

1. No autopilot or flight director is active
2. An autopilot or flight director is in VNAV, FPA, ALT, V/S, or G/S AND
a. airspeed is less than an FMC calculated value for one second AND
i. thrust is below reference thrust or
ii. airplane altitude above 100 feet RA on approach.

When the autothrottles are in HOLD mode, the autoservos are inhibited and the pilot can manually set thrust. The autothrottle system does not reposition the thrust levers once in HOLD mode.

When the pilot manually overrode the thrust levers while in FLCH, the autothrottles reverted to HOLD mode. In this scenario, there would be no speed protection from the autothrottle system as it does not meet any of the criteria above.