Comment by fweimer
10 hours ago
The article from this subthread contradicts this, though. Regarding recoverability of the situation, it says this:
> By now the airspeed indications had returned to normal, but the pilots had already set in motion a sequence of events which could not be undone.
That was before the prolonged stall warnings. But maybe this phrasing is just an embellishment?
But further down, the article is pretty clear that the training was inadequate for this type of unreliable airspeed indication:
> Although procedures for other phases of flight could be found in the manual, the training conditioned pilots to expect unreliable airspeed events during climb, to which they would respond with a steady nose-up pitch and high power setting that would ensure a shallow ascent. Such a response would be completely inappropriate in cruise.
Once the aircraft was stalled there was a narrow window to recover from it, which obviously did not occur. But the stall was entirely caused by pilot input of full nose up! The procedure for unreliable airspeed (which was in both the QRH and the FCOM) was simply to fly a known safe power / pitch from the tables provided in the QRH.
At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.