Posted on 07/31/2019 7:43:15 PM PDT by xxqqzz
Training DID save the last place that went down a day before it crashed. An off duty pilot flying in the passenger cabin was able to diagnose the problem and deactivate the MCAS.
Stop buying into old propaganda.
I don’t know so many details about the first crash. But I have seen enough about the second crash. Those pilots switched off the stab switches as recommended. In doing so the electric trim switches on the yoke were disabled. Yet the trim was still froze in a position that the plane was most likely going to crash. The full manual controls were useless at this point for multiple reasons. They turned the switches back on in a desperate attempt to regain electric manual control and adjust the trim. But Mcas was wound like a rubber band at that point and it instantly crashed the plane after the stab switches were turned back on.
It is important to note that MCAS had no off switch. It never stopped trying to turn the nose down(as seen on the data recorder). The stab switches do not turn it off. They only cripple Mcas by cutting power to the electric trim motors so that they cannot be used by any command process.
The System hard numerous hardware and software design faults that even an intelligent 3rd grader could have foreseen.
Stop trying to blame the pilots. It was not their fault. And even Boeing now agrees that they are the ones at fault.
Pilots with excellent training and military experience were able to mitigate problems with MCAS. A system that relies on top-tier pilots to compensate for its flaws is a bad system.
You don’t want mediocre pilots flying Commercial Airlines with passengers.. It is just too dangerous to have pilots with little or no experience flying.. They can fly the mail Fed-EX or UPS routes..
I know at times it’s difficult to be objective, especially in modern society that has become so polarized that if A supports B then A will believe B is perfect no matter what B does or doesn’t do. B could stand for Boeing, a favorite politician who can do no wrong, or even a car (eg Mustang fans saying the new C8 ‘vette is crap when it’s shockingly amazing). No room for objective thinking - just straight myopia and tribal thinking.
But you made a salient point, and let me try and respond to it.
You make a good point - no crashes in the US, Western Europe or Wealthy Asia. Let us ignore for the moment those American Airlines pilot who complained about the Max (or the testing that showed a real issue with the system) and look at the point you made. You are correct, and why?
Well, a mathematician might say it’s luck of the draw! Even in the ‘poor’ countries there were MANY Boeing 737 Maxs’ in service, flying several times a day, every day. They were all flown by ‘inexperienced’ pilots, and flown for many months since their introduction. And ‘only’ two crashes! This, it could be a sad permutation.
My money - as well as yours I believe - would also go to training. American commercial pilots are VERY well trained, with many of them former military flyers who went through the most rigorous aerial regimen invented by man. Thus, I believe had it occurred to an AA or Delta pilot they would have fixed it (let’s ignore the testing again that had trained American pilots fail to recover when put in the same situation though).
The problem though is this: Imagine you had a fridge in your kitchen that would - occasionally - automatically disconnect a pipe and spew water all over your nice kitchen floor. It may go for a year without doing it, or it may do it in the next ten minutes.
However, your spouse and kids know how to ‘handle’ it. They need to tap it three times on its left side hard. The instruction manual even says that’s what you should do - Tap it three times hard on the left and it will not gush water.
So, your family is ‘trained’ on how to handle the fridge, they are 100% ‘competent’ in handling the fridge, and they even know the exact tapping sequence to make it stop leaking (say, Tap to the tune of Yankee Doodle).
That would still be a shitty fridge!
The Boeing 737 Max is a shitty plane, and I love Boeings (mostly fly them, including the previous iteration 737NG).
Just like your shitty fridge that occasionally thinks it’s an untrained puppy and wets the floor, the 737 Max is a shitty plane that occasionally wants to kiss the earth. And no amount of explanation or excuses - whether the pilots were NASA shuttle pilots or Mr Bean - can take away the fact it has a shitty system that occasionally tries to go Terminator on people.
So true. The real outrage is they ALL always claim they sacrifice to serve us. I’m so jaded I believe they should be the last to get a ship named after them, or a flag at half mast when they die.
Society may be in a period where we are screwed. The producers and shareholders want product to market in yesterday. Regulatory oversight fails because it is so politicized / corrupted just as it was when Sen Schumer told the SEC to lay off Madoff and muzzle the whistle-blower from Boston who had it figured out.
I’m a retired and now a dated engineer. Our methodology of developing extremely complex software with an AI component to remove the human brain on fly by wire systems and controls may be impossible in the development time frame allotted for rollout. Testing for all contingencies may be a current impossibility. Failures will end up causing huge investment losses as with the 737MAX. Call me old fashioned but I prefer using planes and software that are several generations old. Final testing is now always done by in service product and end users.
They turned the switches back on in a desperate attempt to regain electric manual control and adjust the trim. But Mcas was wound like a rubber band at that point and it instantly crashed the plane after the stab switches were turned back on.
You do not have your facts correct in how MCAS, even with erroneous AOA input data, operates.
Here is a link to a description of how the unmodified MCAS software worked:
Pilots can interrupt the MCAS in two ways: via the yoke-mounted electric trim switches, or using the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches on the center console. The trim switches interrupt the MCAS for 5 sec. and establish a new stabilizer trim reference point. Toggling both cutout switches de-powers the MCAS and the speed-trim system.
So yes, the Ethiopian Airways pilots turned the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switches back to enable electric trim control, and if they used the electric trim switch on the yoke THE MCAS SYSTEM WOULD HAVE BEEN INHIBITED FOR FIVE SECONDS, GIVING THEM PLENTY OF TIME TO RETURN THE STAB TRIM CUTOFF SWITCHES BACK TO CUTOFF AFTER RETRIMMING THE AIRCRAFT, BUT THEY DID NOT.
The Ethiopian Airways pilots failed to return the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switches back to the CUTOFF position after retrimming the aircraft electrically, as they were INSTRUCTED TO DO IN THE EMERGENCY AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVE. The pilots also continued to have manual trim control after they disabled electric trim.
Here is video from Mentour Pilot demonstrating an MCAS induced stabilizer trim runaway, and how to correctly respond to it. The video is cued up to the simulator portion of his presentation. As you can plainly see and hear, the trim wheels are spinning and making a lot of noise. There is no way the pilots don't realize that trim was being changed.
https://youtu.be/xixM_cwSLcQ?t=969
I am not blaming the pilots for designing a poorly executed MCAS system with no failure tolerance, that is on Boeing. But I am strongly suggesting that even after one aircraft loss, and an emergency airworthiness directive that they were required by their airline to read and sign, the pilots still did not react properly to the situation.
Boeing had the software revisions finished last April. They have been testing and testing, and airlines have been testing, and the FAA has been testing. The airlines were very pleased with the software revisions. It used both AOA sensors and would disable MCAS if they disagreed by more than 2.5°, and also put the "AOA DISAGREE" warning on the flight control displays for all versions of the aircraft. Boeing was on track to having the MAX back into full service by July 30.
However, in mid-June during the process of FAA testing, the FAA found another condition that can inadvertantly activate MCAS. Boeing is in the process of evaluating whether it can also be fixed in software, or if new flight control computer hardware needs to be designed.
According to the flight data recovered from the black box then your description of what MCAS will or will not do is wrong. I certainly would not trust Boeing for an accurate description. The software was written in India. The pilots were definitely not able to interrupt MCAS except via the stab cutout switches. And do you really think that they rode that plan into the ground without trying to use the electric trim switches to save their lives? Think about it.
I provided you with facts backed up by links to source material.
You in return offer no evidence, but instead choose to continue to parrot back sensationalized reporting by non-technical people more interested in gaining readers than disseminating the truth.
I cannot help you any further.
It has been awhile since all of this. My recollection contains some flaws. But you are over simplifying things as well. I went back and found the video report from the only person that I have ever found that truly explained things(And knows what he is talking about). Every other report I have seen is so simplified or biased as to be pretty much crap. There a several videos from this guy, but here is the one where he explains the data in a useful way(Following the timeline). He is currently a 777 pilot if I remember right. The MCAS supposedly does stop when the electric trim buttons are used. But only on a temporary basis. In one of this guys latest videos he explains that Electric trim response has been found to be too slow(by design). That may have also contributed to the crash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNbayma9dM&list=PL6SYmp3qb3uPp1DS7fDy7I6y11MIMgnbO&index=9
Re: The Boeing 737 Max is a shitty plane
And yet thousands of professional pilots flew it, major insurance companies wrote billion dollar policies on it, and dozens of senior aviation executives and engineers certified it.
What took you so long to speak up?
Re: I certainly would not trust Boeing for an accurate description. The software was written in India.
Both Boeing and the Indian subcontractor have publicly stated that the subcontractor wrote NONE of the software that is being investigated.
Yes, thousands of professional pilots flew it. Yes, major insurance companies wrote billion dollar policies on it. Yes, dozens of senior aviation executives and engineers certified it.
And yet - all major aviation authorities have grounded it. And yet - major countries have refused to let it fly through their airspace. And yet - Boeing executives had meetings with AA pilots who asked them to urgently fix MCAS. And yet - Boeing accepted responsibility. And yet - they even went as far as saying that programming flaws in the simulator software had made it difficult to even reproduce flight conditions that resulted in the crash. And yet - many buyers suspended orders until the issue was fixed, and apparently a NEW issue came up that had the potential to further delay re-certification.
You see how that works Zeestephen?
As for me speaking up - well, I am a businessman who travels a lot for investment-related purposes, and I am not part of the FAA or similar airline authorities. Also, and maybe more importantly, even if I was I probably wouldn’t not have known about the MCAS ...after all, the pilots association for Americans Airlines made a lot of noise to Boeing for not communication to pilots about the MCAS existence. Note: AA pilots, and the last time I checked that was not a third world airline.
And going back to my ‘shitty fridge’ analogy. You may make whatever excuses you want for the shitty fridge, and may say the family should have been better trained on how to handle malfunctioning pipes.
But it’s still a shitty fridge.
Same thing for the plane. It had a shitty software (and apparently, probably has another issue that they recently found out), and that’s a fact whether or not the pilots were Mensa material or extras from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That doesn’t mean Boeing doesn’t build great planes (I fly business class a lot, and I absolutely love the 777), or that the 737 is not one of the best designs out there (I love flying on the 737 NG).
Unlike you, I can walk and chew gum at the same time - and thus can say Boeing makes great machines while at the same time (correctly) state they messed up with certain aspects of the 737 Max in a bid to beat timelines, push sales and lower training costs (read up on their iPad based training requirement for pilots moving from the NG to the Max).
Shitty fridge, shitty plane. I can add ’otherwise great company’ if that makes you feel less perturbed that someone would say something bad about Boeing. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve noticed nowadays many people cannot hold conflicting thoughts and ideas in their heads. Everything has to be ‘all good’ or ‘all bad.’ Sorry for requiring readers to put some mental effort, but this is one of those times where something can be both good and bad. Or, to put it another way, Boeing is a threat company that messed up with the 737 Max, and it has cost them their worst financial hit ever..
All because of a shitty plane.
Or maybe that wasn’t an error considering what they have also been doing the with air ford refueling tanker plane ...
I assumed you were a pilot.
Had I known you were a frequent flyer businessman, I would have stopped reading after your absurd refrigerator metaphor.
As for the refrigerator metaphor (more of an allusion rather than a metaphor, but anyway) - I have found that the use of imagery works well when trying to communicate a complex idea to a child (or to use a simile) someone like a child. I this hoped you would find it helpful. Had I known you’d find it absurd I would have used something simpler.
My apologies.
Thank you for the link. I subscribe to blancolirio and have see the video.
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