Yeah. . .and turning off the MCAS resulted in the third-world “pilots” discovering they can’t fly. . .we’ve flown jets without auto-pilots and AOA indicators since the Wright brothers to today.
System breaks, turn it off and fly the darned jet. Too much for third-world aircrew apparently.
Reported one “pilot” had 200hrs. . .and that’s not enough time to be an commercial instrument rated pilot in the US, let alone the standards to fly for a reputable airline (ATP).
For safety sake, I don’t believe a country should be sold a vehicle they can’t design and make for themselves.
If it’s beyond their ability to design and manufacture, it’s beyond their ability to maintain and operate.
Mr. Jeeves on his post #8 advised that the MCAS would only shut off for nine seconds and then re-enable.
This sounds like the same kind of thing the first Airbus aircraft software was accused of when they first rolled them out. Their software would override the natural instincts of a professional pilot.
Why not let the nose rise and cause a stall warning if it needs to. Just put a blurb in the iPad training that the higher mount of the engines may cause the nose to rise more at full thrust.
Reminds me of the old joke about the extremely high cost of designing an astronauts pen that would write in zero gravity. The cosmonauts just used a pencil.
“Yeah. . .and turning off the MCAS resulted in the third-world “pilots” discovering they can’t fly. . .we’ve flown jets without auto-pilots and AOA indicators since the Wright brothers to today.”
My neighbor is a SW Captain. He flies the Max 800. HIs take on the problem is exactly what you have written. Ditto for the unqualified turds who crashed the Asiana Airlines plane in San Francisco a few year ago. These “pilots,” ( reported to be “Ho Le Fuk, We Too Low, Bang Ding Ow, and Sum Ting Wong) with
“thousands of hours” ( sitting there being flown by the plane’s autopilot for ten hours at a time) were unable to manually fly an approach on a clear day when the ILS was inop. NEVER FLY A FOREIGN FLAG CARRIER from either Asia or the ME!
I watched a very good video of an airline pilot analyzing the premliminary report. That 200 hour pilot did exactly the right thing. The problem was, he did it too late. By the time they implemented the correct procedure, the plane was at full throttle and moving around 500 mph, and the force on the horizontal stabilizer was so great that the manual trim controls could not be moved.
I'm confident a pilot facing the terror of his imminent death would have exerted every ounce of his strength to move those stabilizer trim wheel, but at the speed the plane was moving, and with the degree of up angle on the stabilizer, it was virtually impossible to move those trim wheels without dropping the nose, and they were simply too low to the ground to allow that.
They should have cut off the automatic stabilizer trim as soon as it started giving them troubles. They waited too long.
They turned the MCAS system back on against the protocol and never flew the plane by hand. They tried, but the auto-throttle had the throttles firewalled and when they re-engaged the MCAS the plane flew into the ground near the speed of sound, far above the “never exceed speed”. The plane was doomed by bad piloting. Boeing is not blameless here but bad pilots flew the plane into the ground by violating directives.