OK, no shit confession for the benefit of all. It is an AW exclusive, although my airline made my story mandatory training in safety and human factors class for an entire cycle. Trust me, you don't want to sit in a class room and hear your story told by others and subsequently hear from your peers how stupid you were. It was scrubbed of IDs, but it makes you want to melt into you chair. Sitting at the long green table turned out to be a more pleasant experience.
Many years ago, when I was a high time MD 80 FO all airlines, but especially my company, had a spate of low speed events at altitude that led to some near disasters. It is probably some of the data Frank saw. Causes were many. It was getting a lot of attention. Some guys were climbing on autopilot in vertical speed and just plain getting slow. Some were cruising too high and after turning on anti-ice didn't have enough power to maintain altitude and speed. The autopilot would hold altitude and the aircraft slow over a very long time. We even had guys just climb too high without looking at a chart or stayed too long when it got bumpy. We had a few jets actually stall and lose thousands of feet in altitude nearly out of control. Fortunately, none ever got into unusual attitudes. My case was a bit different so it got some attention.
Just before my event they had instituted new training because most guys were trying to accelerate back to cruise from very low speeds just by pushing the power up. That just doesn't work. Especially on an MD 80. Even the stalled guys wouldn't reduce AOA,. Like it has been said, we were training to not recover from stalls the "bug smasher" way. The sims were all reprogramed and the training was don't fuck around. Declare an emergency firewall the power and descend. Only way you could get the energy back in low speed high altitude events is descend.
We were cruising well within our max ceiling. Smooth air and clear skies. Just some distant thin cirrus. We had a plane acquired from an airline the company had bought. The rnav was a bit different. We ran a GPS based system, these were all IRSs. The key strokes were just different enough to cause some confusion and hunting about some times. We got a direct routing. My leg, so the Capt (one of the very best men I have ever flown with, even known) entered the direct route and then tried to get us some abeam waypoints to track progress and fuel. He couldn't make it happen. That was one of the differences in this system. So he asked for help and the two of us go heads down to try a few things. During that period, for some reason, the speed started to roll back. Neither of us noticed. The tech guys who read out the data said the trim movement horn went off three times minimum. We didn't hear it. When we gave up and both sat back we noticed, simultaneously, the speed was scarily low. Again, tech ops guys did the math and we were 8 knots from stall. Both throttles were way back, one more than the other. I firewalled the power and clicked off the autopilot and nosed it over slowly. Captain turned on engine anti ice, declared an emergency and we both started looking around for the problem while I descended. To get the speed to start climbing, at max power, took about 1500 fpm! We were crusing at FL340. At FL300 I slowing raised the nose and got a buzz in the wing from an accelerated stall. Released that pressure and let the nose fall again. FA called after that and reported the whole cabin shook and people were concerned. I wasn't going to do that again so I had to make sure it was going to fly. Had no interest in looking at charts at the point. We still didn't know what happened and was concerned about instrument problems. I knew the plane would absolutely fly at 250Kts at any altitude and could have some fairly big errors in 250kts indicated and it would still fly. So when we reached 250Kts at FL260 I leveled gently. Full power, descending 1000-1500 fpm it took us nearly 10k feet to get to a comfortable speed we knew would work. Everything was fine. All instruments checked out. Autopilot back on. Auto throttles worked great. We had lots of gas so we stayed and FL260 and flew on to LAX with our tails between our legs not knowing what happened.
ASAP was filed. Worked great. Everyone at the company was wonderful. Union and company worked very well together. The FAA was VERY concerned about what happened to us in part because no one could figure it out. We were not obviously stupid. No problem with the auto pilot, throttles or instruments. We got the all expense paid trip back to DFW to a hearing (yes they paid us for our flight back for the hearing). Hearing was gentlemanly. Our fleet captain at the time plainly was defending us. The FAA was fair but firm. They spent most of their time asking us about the training we had been given, how effective it was and how well the sim modeled the event. Our comments were the sim was spot on and the training valid, likely saved us from an upset. They were curious about how and where I got the wing buzz and why I chose 250Kts and FL260. We were fairly chastised for not monitoring the instruments. Company called to task for poor differences training on the Nav system. And in the end they guessed we were one of the first to experience the new super cooled micro water droplets recently "discovered" that got into the fuel control units. Engine anti ice and high power setting cleared it. Aircraft was fine. We were fine. Just embarrassed.
Sad epilogue, the union ASAP gatekeepers said that the vast majority of crews that get to a hearing end up throwing each other under the bus, blaming the other guy for one thing or another. That is the MAJORITY of your fellow airline pilots. They don't even have the integrity to tell the truth when they are playing a get out of jail free card. Nothing to lose and they would rather blame the other guy. They said it was refreshing to hear two guys come in and put it all on the table benefiting safety over all else. While I never would have considered anything else, that revelation made me appreciate the Captain even more. It was my leg. I put him in that position and he never once pointed a figure at me. It was all "we" and "us". Great human. I want to grow up and be a Captain like him.
