Posted on 09/21/2019 11:38:36 PM PDT by zeestephen
What we had in the two downed airplanes was a textbook failure of airmanship. In broad daylight, these pilots couldn’t decipher a variant of a simple runaway trim, and they ended up flying too fast at low altitude, neglecting to throttle back and leading their passengers over an aerodynamic edge into oblivion. [Extreme length]
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Early on, skilled American pilots who trained on the 737 Max recognized that its sensors and computer system could sometimes behave in a way that misled pilots and put the aircraft at risk. Good airmanship and quick reactions were then required to avoid disaster. Boeing never remedied the risk or explained it to pilots and customer airlines.
Starting about fifteen or twenty years ago, shop talk at a party among airline pilots I knew turned against Boeing as getting sloppy and outdated, with sometimes cheap and inferior build quality when compared to Airbus models. The pilots correctly anticipated that Boeing was going to have loads of trouble in building the 787.
Boeing has lost its way, looking to profit through marketing and financial strength instead of engineering quality. The 737 MAX is a fiasco. Blaming the pilots who died flying it will do little to remedy Boeing's problems.
Both Boeing and the Indian software company have made public statements that NONE of the software written in India was involved in ANY part of the two crash investigations.
No mention of Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani who worked on 737’s and arrested for tampering with these planes. That has ties to ISIS. I guess it’s “racists” to point that out.
Now it emerges that the latest iteration of the A320 has a similar issue. The New A320 also has the LEAP engine. But Boeing is the only manufacturer being demonized by the media.
Simply holding on to the trim wheel will stop any automatic movement whether it’s from MCAS or anything else.
Near the end of this essay, the author made a vague religious reference to the cockpit audio of one of the Indonesian pilots....
“He gave a few feeble inputs of nose-up trim with his thumb switch and began calling on God for a miracle.”
My first thought....
Allahu Akbar?
But the author dropped it right there and did not explain further.
As I recall, the Muslim pilot who flew a trans-Atlantic jumbo from Brazil into the ocean about 10 years ago was chanting Allahu Akbar during the descent.
One of the two planes that crashed, had the same problem the day before. An extra experienced pilot riding up front saw what was happening and instructed to turn the system off.
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And there is the critical difference between today’s aircraft and aircraft of 30 or 50 years ago; fly-by-wire systems today. No amount of “airmanship” can overcome a fatally flawed software system which intercedes in control of the aircraft to disastrous consequence. The only ‘fix’ in these circumstances is to disable those computer systems.
Aviation ping
Good to know, but was the trick and its life-saving potential made clear and taught in 737 MAX training? I doubt it. And why not make the aircraft safe from odd, deadly maneuvers that could not be controlled through intuitive reactions by pilots of ordinary skill? Supposedly, Boeing planned a software upgrade to do just that. Too bad they were not quick enough to avert two air crashes.
Oh for gawd’s sake. Was this sentence really necessary in the article? Can’t the Slimes write an informative article about a topic without including some “#woke” language to insult the reader?
Alani tampered / disabled the air speed sensor, which I read is related to the Boeing MAX 737 malfunctions. I would love confirmation. Boeing will too, no doubt.
Good to know, but was the trick and its life-saving potential made clear and taught in 737 MAX training?
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It’s not a trick. It’s in the manual and isn’t specific to the 737 MAX or MCAS. Every pilot who has to know what to do in case of trim problems should know it.
“...at the very least warned all subsequent pilots of that plane about the problem and the solution.”
SOLUTION? The correct “solution” would have been to not fly that plane until the problem was found and corrected.
Meaning that plane would be sitting on the ground (in ONE piece) today. And all of its passengers would have still made it to their destinations ALIVE!
If your plane tries to crash “itself”, here’s what you do.....
Problem solved!
Well, I guess there would be no reason for them to lie about that.
If you put enough engines on a bathtub, it will fly.
Ping
(1) Smaller manual trim wheels on the 737 NG and 737 MAX made it more difficult to trim a runaway stabilizer back into a regular position;
(2) The larger stabilizer surface in both models made it more difficult to counter a runaway stabilizer by using the elevator, which was kept at the same size; and,
(3) 737 NG and MAX pilots were not taught a tricky rollercoaster maneuver that is the only way in those models to recover from severe mistrim and free a locked elevator -- but the maneuver requires 3,000 feet of altitude to spare.
As it was, the Boeing MCAS computer flight system flew the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max into the ground as the pilots cut power to the stabilizer's electric motor and frantically tried using the trim wheel to recover control.
The selections and training was very demanding but the output was someone who could fly and manage an aircraft under almost impossible conditions.
Civil flying is straight-and-level and for gods sake don't upset the passengers. That and the push to save costs today's airplanes are designed for the computer to fly and the pilot to manage the computer (if allowed to do that). Basic air work, situational awareness and experience gained from intensive training, lessons learned and ‘the school of hard knocks’ are being lost.
Lose the computer and you might get lucky and catch up with the airplane before you spatter. Look at Air France putting a perfectly good A330 (Google AF447) into the Atlantic because they could not manage a simple lose of instrumentation. These two 737 Max are crews that did not have a clue and it killed them and a bunch of people that thought those up front knew what they were doing.
OK, rant off.
As it was, the Boeing MCAS computer flight system flew the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max into the ground as the pilots cut power to the stabilizer’s electric motor and frantically tried using the trim wheel to recover control.
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Actually, they reactivated the automatic trim before the final pitch down.
At that point they were in an overspeed condition. If they had been competent pilots they would have pulled back on the throttles and MCAS would have been deactivated automatically. They didn’t need to know that MCAS existed.
If your plane tries to crash “itself”, here’s what you do.....
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