[abk]

Surely there must be more to it. Clearly all of us who've played a flight simulator know that going up too fast will cause you to lose speed and eventually stall and fall until you regain enough speed to stabilize.

Sadly in this case it sounds like a mix of overconfidence (not avoiding the storm, trusting the plane more than the stall warnings, not waking up the captain until it was too late) and a lack of training for unexpected situations were the major factors in the crash.

[nikcub]

I was thinking about that after reading the report. From our perspective it might be obvious, but we can't put ourselves into that situation.

I wonder if civillian pilots can be trained in the same way as military pilots to handle stresses in emergencies and to think clearly. Or to at least learn something from military techniques

[abk]

Yeah I'm curious about that too.

It seems that in the very rare cases where a commercial plane goes down spectacularly, the ones that make it alive were flown by formerly non-commercial pilots (military or otherwise), who've flown planes that give them much less assistance and in much more stressful situations and so "doing the right thing" has almost become second nature to them.

The problem with people is that even if you know what you should be doing in theory, when you're put in an extremely stressful situation you're unlikely to be able to come up with a creative solution... and few situations are more stressful than the moment you realize that something completely unexpected is happening, at night, in a thunderstorm, over the ocean, with 200+ lives depending 100% on your actions.

[einhverfr]

Interestingly I have not played flight simulators since the 1980's, but I know of overspeed stalls (usually mach tucks) in part from being fascinated about historical engineering, and ran into the issue when looking at WWII aircraft (interestingly the first confirmed incidents of overspeed stalls were with the propeller-driven Lightening aircraft in WWII).