No deicing boots?

That is just crazy! That pilot was fighting for control until the very last nanosecond. May their Gods go with all souls that were lost.

The flight crew was evidently poorly trained. The aircraft got into a spin/stall.

Tragic for sure, prayers for the victims and their families

Praying for the families of the victims.

Stall recoveries are not trained regularly in commercial aviation. When the aircraft is descending...the urge to pull back on the stick is hard to overcome. For a stalled aircraft...decreasing the angle of attack is essential...that means pushing the stick forward.

Kinda sucks to die that way!

As a longtime aerobatic pilot, I’ve performed countless intentional inverted and upright accelerated flat spins. Entering an unintentional power-on spin, however, usually doesn’t end well for pilots and passengers if they aren’t trained in recovery.

The recent crash occurred while the aircraft was cruising at 17,000 feet, a tad over 200 knots in severe icing conditions. Radar indicated a sudden drop in speed followed by a vertical descent. All signs point to the aircraft entering a power-on stall due to the icing conditions.

Planes tend to spin flat with power on, if too much weight is aft of the center of gravity (CG), or both. A plane with a forward CG and power off will spin nose down if you let go of the stick. However, as PilotHawk mentioned, the natural instinct for those without spin training is to pull back on the stick.

During spins, the weight and balance of the aircraft are critical factors that determine whether recovery is possible. Think of a seesaw in a playground: for a spin recovery to be successful, the nose end of the aircraft needs to be the "fat kid" holding the "skinny kid" up in the air. In other words, the nose must weigh more than the tail, or recovery isn’t possible. Simple as that.

If the plane had a forward center of gravity, it could have entered a nose-down spin or dive. In theory, with enough altitude in a dive, the plane might have gained enough speed to create lift over the wings, giving a chance for recovery—but only with the power off and only if the pilot pushed the nose downhill. Most untrained pilots would keep pulling back on the elevator in an upright spin, keeping the plane in a stall. Even with proper spin recovery techniques, icing on the wings and props down to 10,000 feet might have made recovery impossible. Ice buildup disrupts the airflow over the wings, preventing the lift that makes flight possible.

A significant problem complicating spins is that as a plane begins to autorotate in a spin, centrifugal force causes anything loose—cargo or passengers—to shift towards the tail. If you've ever been on an amusement park ride that spins, it's the same effect. This exacerbates any aft CG problem, often making recovery impossible.

Art Scholl, an aerobatic pilot I admired as a kid, tragically died in a spin during the filming of the original Top Gun movie. The heavy film camera mounted on a rail system in his aerobatic plane unfortunately came loose and slid back to the tail, creating an unrecoverable aft CG problem. He didn’t realize the camera had come loose in time to recover or bail out.

With training, it’s surprisingly easy to control either an inverted or upright flat spin in an aerobatic plane designed for it, once you understand how it behaves with power on and power off. But as they say, you want to be "three mistakes high"…

Often, when you enter a spin with power on, the plane will snap half-inverted, which usually causes disorientation until you recognize it. From inside, it’s actually hard to tell visually if you’re in an inverted or upright spin because you’re spinning horizontally—meaning the horizon appears to spin around instead of the ground. Pilots who only train in power-off spins are used to pushing what seems like the opposite rudder of the spin rotation. In an unintentional inverted flat spin, pushing the wrong rudder can accelerate the spin.

The best practice for recovery is power off and applying the heavy rudder to stop the rotation, as one rudder will always have more resistance. However, we’re creatures of habit, so if you’ve only trained spinning upright in one direction—say, spinning left and using right rudder for recovery—you might not recover if you don’t realize you’re spinning inverted.

It’s also easy to transition from an inverted to an upright spin if you attempt recovery with rudder while the power is on. Just a slight amount of power on in a spin will raise the nose to the horizon, flattening the spin.

They were likely cruising with autopilot engaged, which could have further complicated recovery. While I’m not checked out in the aircraft they were flying, these observations come from a period in my life when I lived out a boyhood dream of being a modern-day barnstormer.

Godspeed to the victims and their families.

And if you watch it closely, you can see it nose dive and start to recover and nose dive and start to recover, each time it get some air over the wing, it would kick off to the left again like the vert stabilizer was locked full on port side. That last full spin you tell the cyclic spin was slowing, he just ran out of air to fly. While I agree they don't teach stuff like that, one of the first lessons you learn in school is "no matter what is happening, your first job is to fly the plane." If 68 peoples lives are at stake by my hand, you better believe I will be fighting for control until my last dying thought.

UPRT is huge at Delta.

It’s not as easy as just saying that.