Originally Posted by
RichardKenner
First of all, there was no "stall situation" before the response. The NTSB report is very clear that it was the response to the stickshaker that causes the stall: there was no stall before the captain's input.
However, I don't believe the lack of cockpit sterility was blamed for the inappropriate response to the stickshaker. I believe (and agree!) that the lack of cockpit sterility was blamed for the lack of care given to airspeed that caused the stickshaker in the first place.
That brings up a related topic. Was the plane on autopilot. I think autopilot is what encourages departures from "sterile cockpit" but you can't really take it away because so many things are kept finely tuned by the flight computer. Again, just exactly like my IT environment. Yet somehow, despite a LOT of talk unrelated to work, we do notice all kinds of errors in time. So I'm really baffled why chat in the cockpit is so bad a thing. I envision people keeping a pretty good eye on the instruments while making jokes or talking family or whatever. Now, we don't have ANYTHING like a stickshaker. That really qualifies as a 2 by 4 to the side of the head. But surely the airspeed, if its that serious, must be easy to check on a pretty regular basis. Yeh, I know the flight computer is supposed to keep it right, but
it's a computer!!!. Haven't they heard "to err is human, to really screw t hings up takes a computer"? Everything is a computer where I work, so I guess we have a more realistic view of the perfection that can be expected of computers.