....oh, wait! I WAS a heavy air transport navigator, so I guess I am qualified to suggest that whoever wrote this inane article overlooked the fact that out over the middle of the Atlantic, the USAF transport aircraft would not have had his landing light on at all, unless instructed to do so by Air Traffic Control, but if that was the case, the same controller would have been talking to the Air Canada jet on the same frequency or on Guard, which all planes monitor.
Also, when a pilot has been off the controls (sleeping) for a while, and he comes back on, it is customary for that pilot to request and get a briefing from the other pilot who HAS been flying, and to not touch the controls until that briefing has been given. There is a hand-off routine for change of flight control in the cockpit, with request, followed by agreement, followed by change of controlling pilot, followed by acknowledgement of change of pilot. That system is almost never broken, because breaking it can lead to FUBARS like this one.
What the First Officer did was use full elevator deflection downward, which caused the aircraft to fly a negative-G path, which causes unrestrained passengers and gear to hit the overhead in the cabin, then fall back down (when nearly full deflection upward was applied to reverse the abrupt descent).
There is a CAAS (Collision Avoidance Alerting System), now in it's 3rd generation, IIRC, that would have given the pilot warning that an actual collision was imminent, and probably flown the airplane out of danger. The First Officer did not need to react this way.
That First Officer needs immediate re-training.
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