Larry

My hot take is that this is survivorship bias. We have no way of knowing the reactions of all the pilots who have died under similar conditions (possibly while totally freaking out?) because they didn't do so on the radio. It may be that she did quite well comparatively. I was reading some inexperience in her responses, yes, but my first reaction was to be surprised at how she could access English at all at such a stressful moment. If you listen to the audio of Sully landing his plane in the Hudson, yes he is calm, but you notice once he knows he's gonna be landing in the water, he stops communicating. Trying to put what you're seeing into words is a totally different part of the brain from flying the airplane in an emergency condition. When you have emergency experience and a known recovery procedure, it is easier to remain calm. My guess from the audio is they hit freezing rain after they already had ice on the tail, and the stabilizer froze up enough to stall the tail. At that point, you start diving. Pulling back on the yoke does absolutely nothing. You speed up beyond the limits of the airframe, and the tail flies off. Even if it remains attached, there is no recovery procedure when you're descending at 22000 fpm with no stabilizer. That's a guaranteed near-vertical UFIT as we saw in the dash cam. Keep in mind at their pitch angle they would have had a good portion of their weight on the yoke, and would need to somehow support their own weight before they could even attempt to pull back. She's the copilot; at one point you can hear the pilot in the background saying the Lord's Prayer. He also knew it was not recoverable. I'm glad she communicated as much as she did; without it we would have a much harder time figuring this one out. There may be pilot error in this crash, but if so it will turn out to be how they handled the first sign of freezing, not how they reacted once the emergency occurred. Again, that's a guess based on preliminary data.