Quote:
Originally Posted by worth
So, would any of the passengers have known what was going on? There was a point when the Co-Pilots didn't know if they were descending or climbing, but what would it have been like for the passengers? With no frame of reference to outside the plane, only g-forces to tell your body what is going on, I'm sure they would have known something is wrong, but would they be fully aware that something was really really wrong?
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I would say maybe, maybe not. In the dark of night and with the plane being bumped around from the storm the human body is pretty much useless at sensing ones true orientation. Accelerations feel like a pitch up, a decelerations like a pitch down, and rolls and other inputs the body can interpret in different ways.
I think the engines being at full 100% power would be the one thing that someone familiar with flying would get suspicious of. It would be noticeably louder in the cabin once they went to TOGA power.
I wonder if even the 10,000' descent would have given you that sinking feeling in your stomach? If the plane in a nose up stall built up towards that vertical sink rate you may not have been able to tell. Unlike nosing a plane over and dropping into that kind of descent (kind of like going over the top of a rollercoaster).
Such a damn shame to see that they did get all the pitot information back and still couldn't recognize the problem. But we can all take solace in the fact that this in now another lesson that all pilots around the world will read about and training will take into account the mistakes made that night.
The Transport Canada Aviation Safety Letter has a slogan that sums things up in regards to where we go from incidents like this:
"Learn from the mistakes of others. You'll not live long enough to make them all yourself."