One should not have anything in the footwell in any plane, stick or yoke, because it can jam the pedals.
The AAIB report tone is just the standard “ex RAF club” one. They recruit ATPL holders which will slant the place anyway. But every country’s “AAIB” is the same. They almost never admit their establishment is wrong, that ATC did anything wrong, that their charts are crap, etc.
I think the UK AAIB is sometimes unusually diligent but they are still subject to implicit political pressure.
What surprises me a bit in this sad saga is that the pilot apparently did a ‘free and correct’ check and didn’t notice anything amiss.
My feeling he probably did (as you would do when you put lot of things around) but the thing moved or tilted when aircraft rolled or rotated…
T-tail and full power would not have helped to recover from stall with limited forward stick? but I gather cutting power & trim in DA40 would have saved show as you don’t need lot of forward stick but I doubt it’s something that comes to the mind at 100ft after takeoff? the DA40 has one of the most begnin stalls power off, even with stick full back it won’t drop it’s wing, it lands with 49kts on -1200fpm
PS: while ago I got to do “elevator jammed & disconnect” at 500ft after takeoff in DA42 with an instructor which was about flying wide circuit with power and trim, the DA40/42 AFM is silent about this (C172 has some procedure)
Peter wrote:
They almost never admit their establishment is wrong, that ATC did anything wrong
The NTSB is pretty good at pointing out failures in the FAA or FAA-provided services.
The NTSB indeed, but not so much over here in Europe. It gets rather more national-political here 
I tend to agree that the focus on safety systems and the actual contents of the containers is something of a red herring.
The contents were irrelevant to what ended up happening – the containers might as well have been full of mashed bananas.
Safety systems should help stop this happening, but I tend to think the primary defence against it remains just not doing really dumb stuff.
They’d evidently decided that moving de-icing fluid around like this was how they did things. If they’d have been up-to-date on their safety systems, it’d probably have been either a safety system that declared this activity was permitted, or it’d have been a safety system that was flouted as a matter of course. You can write up all the rules you want, but what matters is what people are actually doing.
More important as a contributory factor is probably the working culture in aviation – with far more qualified pilots than jobs available – which means people don’t speak up. If they’d asked me to do that I’d have told them not to be so silly, that it’s clearly dangerous, but of course I would probably have lost my job for doing so. This goes to the heart of the UK ‘system’, and that’s where the AAIB – being part of that system – will remain relatively silent.
@Graham I can honestly say in the various outfits I have worked for, flouting the safety systems would get you sacked, and fellow pilot colleagues would ensure that the Pilot’s decision to refuse a flight was respected.
Not sure what hole of the Swiss Cheese would have been plugged first, in the case of this young man who was probably trying too hard to please, but I know the dangerous goods policy administered effectively and efficiently in the two outfits I work for now, would have stopped this mission before even contemplating it.
And yes the outfits I work for are peopled with a high proportion of ex Army RN and RAF colleagues, both on flight crew duties and safety management. Am glad they are there as it creates a good safety culture.
Regardless of procedures, it should be taught as a basic safety thing that you should never have objects in the cockpit which could fall down and jam the controls.
@RobertL18C perhaps you’ve worked for the more stable outfits?
There are some real fly-by-night companies out there. One sees enough of it just being around airfields. Per the report, this was how they did things.
Does one really need a safety management system to prevent carrying things such that they obstruct the controls?
Graham wrote:
Does one really need a safety management system to prevent carrying things such that they obstruct the controls?
How about trying something called ‘common sense’?
