The first officer had to do several things at the same time, and for a few seconds did not monitor the aircraft pitch attitude well enough.
In a jet the difference between a normal (about 600 to 700 ft/min) descend or this rapid descend is only something like 5 degrees. So it's easy to get this wrong if you look away from the instruments for just a few seconds. Especially if you're changing configuration (flaps) and power at the same time, because both have an effect on pitch.
Busting MDA on a missed approach is a fail on your Instrument Rating flight test.
That said, a 737 is pitch sensitive. No mention is made of the flight mode.
Not some huge plunge. Worth an investigation but the headline’s clickbaity.
> What happened in these 16 seconds is described in an internal memo circulating in Southwest Airlines stating, that during the go around due to weather conditions the first officer, pilot flying, inadvertently pushed the control column forward while monitoring the power settings causing the aircraft to descend to about 400 feet MSL before the aircraft started climbing again.
While at 600 feet, the “newer” first officer inadvertently pushed forward on the control column for about 3 seconds. In the span of 3 seconds the plane dropped from 600 to 400 feet. Then the situation was corrected and the airplane climbed. So if the first officer had kept the same rate of descent for 6 more seconds, it would have crashed. The article quotes the rate of descent as 4000 feet/minutes.
Some more details here: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/southwest-plane-plunged-within-4...
Edit: for the curious here is the flight data: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... and the track log: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024... you can see at around Thu 4/11 at 10:12:47 PM PDT the airplane made the rapid descent, then climbed back up quickly. However the ADS data shown by flightaware is too granular (one data point every 16-18 seconds) so we see the minimum altitude as 875 feet, but in reality the plane went lower. Apparently some other site (ADS-B Exchange) has more granular data, but I don't have access to it and am too lazy to create an account (is it free?)