I agree with the bold portion of your statement. To me, the accounts don’t seem conflicting at all. CA was distracted by the flap issue & lost SA. Got into an unusual attitude by fixating on EICAS/flap indicator. It doesn’t seem he was pitching down intentionally due to airspeed (which as mentioned earlier wouldn’t make sense, anyway), just altogether lost focus on pitch attitude.

FO notices the unusual flight path but is confused by the oddness of it & doesn’t immediately diagnose the problem correctly. (Assumes his instruments could be reading erroneously, or that the CA could be responding to something he isn’t seeing.) They’re IMC so disorientation exacerbates the problem. Ideally the FO would verbalize what he’s seeing immediately, but his response is not shocking considering what we know about stress & human factors.

Basically, distraction leads to loss of SA. The unexpected disruption while in IMC leads to confusion & a delay in clear communications. Scary stuff, but it’s a scary thing that could happen to any of us. Big takeaways for me are:

1. Don’t multitask in low altitude IMC. It only takes a couple seconds away from your instruments to lose orientation in the soup- even for the most experienced of us. Most things that might be grabbing your attention (like a flap overspeed) are far easier to deal with after the fact than is a CFIT.

2. Don’t assume the other guy knows what he’s doing. If you see something non-standard, verbalize what you’re seeing & let the other guy explain to you why it’s happening. If that means you end up looking like the knucklehead who wasn’t paying attention, see my conclusion to #1.

Thanks for the link!

I agree, something just doesn’t seem right. If you were concerned that the flaps were at a different position (higher degree ie 15 vs 5), why would you let the pitch drop to such an excessively nose low attitude?? Sounds like it was an experienced crew with a bunch of hours. But dare I say that most widebody flying is a crapload of straight and level. Most people that I see coming over to the NB from a WB seat are “a little rusty” when it comes to hand-flying. Thats not meant to be derogatory, just a result of the type of flying. It’s a perishable skill. Throw in fatigue, back side of the clock flying and whatever other human factors you want to throw in there and the Swiss cheese model becomes apparent. We all need to learn from this and do a “gut check”, as it can happen to any of us. Stay safe and stay free!!

that’s why it is pointless to speculate. Everyone who posted on this the day after it happened was guessing….Just like the recent IAH incident.

if you weren’t there and don’t know what happened shut up, it doesn’t do anyone any good to spout off about **** you don’t know.

Now that we have a good amount of information from an official report, I disagree. It’s important to talk about it as it’s something all pilots can learn from and can work to prevent from happening again.

I agree NOW is the time…..once the info is out

spouting off before anyone knows anything is pointless

yup yup, simple loss of instrument cross check/SA during hand flying, distraction-induced in this case, and complacency in attempting to troubleshoot instead of respecting how quickly IMC unusual attitudes can mort you. Occam's razor really. And yes, we're all human and capable of falling prey to it, some of us due to inexperience, some of us due to experience-induced complacency.

This is all I do (handfly and flight instruct/evaluate) for a living on the mil side (AETC), and can stand witness to how significantly eroding to hand flying, heavy aircraft flying and automation writ large, can be for otherwise experienced pilots. But instrument cross check atrophy is another one of those "we don't talk about fight club" among high experience crowd, to say nothing of 121 as a community.

And before the herbivore white knight brigade comes @ me, this isn't unique to crew planes, most fighter fatalities in the last 20 years have been due to loss of control in recovery or launch, than weapons employment or enemy action.

Everybody stay safe out there, and keep the lift vector where you intended to.

Read the captain’s narrative. He never says he intentionally lowered the nose. He says he was puzzled by the flap & speed indications & looked at the indicator & flap lever- then realized the aircraft was in a nose down attitude as he heard the GPWS. IOW, he was not conscious of the airplane’s attitude until it had become dangerous.

What he did do to address the airspeed issue was to reduce the power. Obviously, without compensating with elevator pressure, this will cause the pitch angle to naturally come down. He also calls for flaps 5. Assuming he hasn’t made too drastic a power reduction, the aircraft would still be accelerating which, in IMC can create the sense of pitching up. Now you’ve got an airplane with a tendency toward pitching down & a distracted & stressed flying pilot who senses his aircraft is pitching up. It’s likely he would be applying forward yoke pressure while fixating on the flap lever without even knowing he was doing it. At any rate, changes in pitch, power, & airspeed in IMC will throw your vestibular system out of whack. Throw in a distraction that takes your eyes off the instruments & it isn’t surprising at all. To me the outcome fits the pilots’ accounts quite clearly.

I don't really understand. Your reply is logical, grounded in reality, and lacks any hyperbole or vitriol. How can this be? I thought for certain that the cause of this was DEI, or inexperience, or some other boomer dogwhistle / gatekeeping?

Really well said though.

I think we all understand what you are writing but to go from @15 degrees pitch up to -16 degrees pitch down is very extreme. GPWS likely saved their bacon. We can all learn something from this event. Glad everyone came out ok.