Originally Posted by
lasitter
With things gone bad-wrong by 1500-1700 feet, what kind of Superman could have escaped disaster at that point?
Super Heroes don't fly airplanes.
The pilots who could best deal with an upset of a Dash8-Q400 are the pilots who fly Dash8-Q400s 80 to 100 hours per month. That kind of familiarity is worth much more than any test pilot training program.
Originally Posted by
BoeingBoy
I don't remember anything that indicated that they were either below Vref for their flap setting or that they believed they were below the appropriate speed for the flap setting prior to the nose pitching up.
That's exactly the problem here. People are taking one data point and making that airspeed causal when we don't know where that data point fits into the upset time-line. With a pitch-up of 31° ANU, and the known descent profile, it's obvious that they ended up very slow but we have no idea if that was a cause or a result of the upset.
Originally Posted by
Bobster
I obtained speed information and Vref from here:
You are confusing yourself with too much data and not enough context. We don't have enough information about the upset event to draw the conclusions that you are trying to draw.
Even if we had enough information to say that they were "too slow", whatever that number might be, before the upset that still doesn't tell us WHY they were too slow. Being too slow could be the
result of the ultimate proximate event which led to the upset, not the proximate event itself.
While there's a lot to be learned about this accident, and general flying issues, from discussing this information, don't you find it a bit strange that a number of non-pilots are trying to convince us career professional pilots that they've figure out the cause before we did?