Delta Airlines' 757 loses its NOSE TIRES on the runway in Atlanta and is forced to abort flight while taxiing - in latest terrifying incident involving a Boeing jet

No I have no firsthand knowledge and I am not a pilot.

What particular part of my post(s) do you take exception?

MCAS is part of the Flight Control Computers, not an actual separate system. My understanding is there are two FCC’s and they each have their own AOA sensor. Only one FCC is in command at a time. The MCAS function also uses the same trim motor as what is used by the auto pilot function and the manual electric trim switches.

In other words, you cannot deactivate the MCAS without deactivating electric trim. Maybe I am incorrect, but I don’t think there was a way to turn off the MCAS flight laws.

I’ve read that the MCAS would resume trimming the nose down after a five second pause if the AOA sensor was still showing an unacceptable upangle. I’ve read that this will now only occur once. I’ve also read that the MCAS laws have now been limited to how many degrees it can move the horizontal stabilizer.

So those are two changes Boeing has made. Limit stabilizer movement and limit it to one correction. The most significant change I’ve read about is that the MCAS will now not initiate if there is a disagreement of ten degrees or more between the left and right AOA sensors.

I could be wrong, but I believe only the higher cost display option offered (where the actual AOA readings were shown in the displays and had a disagreement alarm) disabled the MCAS - but I am not sure if that was the case. Maybe the higher cost option did not disable MCAS after a disagreement. But the two aircraft involved in the crashes did not have AOA displays or disagreement alarms, and the MCAS feature relied on only one AOA sensor.

Now MCAS is disabled on all 737 MAX jets if the left and right AOA sensors disagree by ten degrees or more whether or not the AOA display and disagreement alarm feature is ordered.

Your 737 friends… how are they describing the failure? Are they blaming poorly trained pilots? Do they dispute anything I’ve said about the MCAS? I agree that better trained and more experienced pilots would have been able to save the planes. In fact, the crew who flew the second doomed plane immediately prior to the accident flight did experience runaway trim from the MCAS and recovered the plane. The crew who took over for the next flight were obviously not able to recover. Regardless, I place the blame on Boeing’s design. A single sensor failure would make the plane drive itself into the ground.

There is little that can take the place of experience, we lost a tanker due to power rudder issues as I understand, talking to our pilots the save would have been to hit a toggle switch on back side of center column which turned off power rudder.

Probably over simplifying, but experience is something one has to survive to get.

Long story will try to make short. Airman had an issue with an engine control,!we were in Guam. Was with senior engine guy, we went out hooked up all test equipment , I read the steps. After all done it didn’t diagnose the problem. Starlet reached up and said it’s this cannon plug

Ie jiggle the cable, experience😂

Sorry not to get back to you sooner. I will try to revisit this with my brother and some neighbors who are also 737 pilots. It will be interesting to get their perspective and see how they have changed now that years have passed.

The conversations that I had with them about this were long enough ago that the details are not completely familiar to me at this point. The gist of most conversations that I had with that 737 pilots at that time was that despite the problems with the version of MCAS and other Boeing screw ups that there was plenty of blame to go around. Though some were very critical of Boeing all felt that if they had faced the same situation that the plane that they were flying would definitely not have crashed.

My brother and others have been involved with training pilots from 3rd world countries. The consensus has been that many of the 3rd world pilots that they worked with got their jobs through connections and not because they were the most qualified people available. Those with connections are then fast tracked into flying airplanes which they are not experienced or skilled enough to adequately handle emergency situations.

The scary thing these days is that Covid and the mandatory vaccines have caused an unprecedented number of very experienced pilots to leave US airlines in a short period of time for medical reasons. They are being replaced mostly with young people with little experience who have been chosen using criteria other than their motivation, skill set and aptitude. Most the long-time airline pilots that I know feel that the quality of new people joining their ranks is not what it used to be. In that way our airlines are beginning to resemble what 3rd world airlines were known for in the past.

I am not aware of any empirical evidence that airline safety has been compromised severely yet... these recent news articles are stupid and miss the real issue altogether. Fortunately, in general airliners have become easier to fly over the years and have systems that despite the 737 MCAS debacle usually make planes safer.

There is a book called Stick and Rudder An Explanation of the Art of Flying that was written by Wolfgang Langewiesche in 1944. It is still one of the most important books on the actual process of flying that was ever written. I worry that the basic principles of flight discussed in the book are being overlooked in most flight training programs and replaced with a video game style skillset. I learned what I feel are some of the most important lessons of flight in hang gliders and a home-made ultralight with a snow mobile engine and no flight instruments at all.

My wife and I were socializing with a married couple who both worked as test pilots. We invited them to go flying with us in our general aviation airplane which is very easy to fly. They said that they had taken their initial flight training long enough ago and had not flown a basic airplane without electronic assistance that they were not sure that they would remember how. To me that felt sad, like some part of the joy of flying was now missing from their experience.

My brother has recently started flying General Aviation aircraft again because he is trying to get his kids interested in flying for a career. He said that he forgot how enjoying flying an airplane really could be.

Sorry to ramble on so long.

I am just now seeing your post. (Speaking of not getting back sooner...)

I don’t disagree with anything you have said. In fact, what you have said is precisely why a perfectly good B777 was flown into the ground on a perfect day at SFO airport ten years ago. (Remember Captain Wee Too Lo and First Officer Som Ting Wong?) The ILS glide slope was out for maintenance and the crew were unable to land the plane manually.

With that said, and I’m sure experienced western European and American pilots would have prevented a 737 MAX from flying itself into the Earth, I still feel the primary blame is on Boeing for that design where a single point of failure will make the plane aim into the dirt.

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