I am a regional airline captain of an E-145 regional jet and have been paying close attention to the details of this accident. This is my own professional speculation, but if this accident is determined to be caused by icing it sounds like there are a lot of the tell tale signs of something called a tailplane stall. I've herd your analysts speak of stalls due to icing, but not stalls of this nature exactly. What is interesting is that there is not much training or information on the subject and its recovery procedures are very much the opposite of what a normal stall recovery would be. Further more the chances of a successful recovery is very much tied to early detection. As your analyst alluded to, the autopilot is known to mask this condition and this is probably one of the main reasons the FAA does in fact recommend hand flying the airplane in icing conditions. Also in direct contradiction to a normal stall situation adding flaps only exacerbates the condition. At the point on the approach that this plane went down it is highly likely that the crew had just added their final flap setting.

When the horizontal stabilizer of an aircraft stalls it can create a violent nose down pitch. Nose down pitch and the addition of power are some of the desirable pilot actions when recovering from a normal stall, however in this case the implementation of these actions will only bring you to the ground faster. The action required would be to pull back on the yoke to break the stall, however if the situation actually makes it this far the crew may not be able to pull back enough to have any effect upon the outcome. The best-known defense at this point is almost pilot intuition that this situation is occurring so that some alternate landing methods may be implemented by the crew, such as not lowering the flaps all the way.

This is a horrible tragedy and as an airline pilot one of my worst nightmares. My heart truly goes out to the families of the crew and the passengers. I can only hope this helps to sheds some light in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.