you know, I wish my world was as black and white as yours . . . I really would love to sit in judgement of others so easily, but I guess I just don't have the resume yet.
That's what this whole thread is, an exercise in monday morning quarter backing. I don't exactly know why you're defending the crew so much, and no, my world isn't black and white, it's filled with shades of gray, but I will stick my neck out on this one and say pilot error. Primarily because of the circumstances surrounding the accident.
Here's what we know:
The crew was probably fatigued (see CA sleeping in crew lounge, and FO's commute, then texting during when she should have been sleeping)
The crew was relatively inexperienced. Qualified, but relatively inexperienced.
The crew had recently been trained in recovery from Tailplane icing stalls (someone else on the forum said that IIRC).
The training program did not adequately cover stall recovery techniques.
The FDR shows that the airplane experienced a stick shaker, then proper action wasn't taken to alleviate the stall and recover.
Frankly, having read the CVR transcript, and listened to the audio file of their last contact with tower, combined with all of the talk about how "last winter I would never have been qualified for this..." etc etc. I'm not entirely suprised. Yeah, it sucks, yeah it's not good. But in my opinion, they screwed up and 48 innocent people died.
What did we learn from this? The public doesn't really care about working rules, and pilot pay, they care about safety when they climb on to do the colgan. We also learned that even big airplanes can stall, and that icing is still a factor. Wow, I thought we knew that already.
