[CondoleezzaProtege]

“I’m disappointed with those who sit in their lofty chairs of judgment and say this wouldn’t have happened to U.S. pilots,” said a veteran captain with a major U.S. airline, who asked not to be named to avoid involving his employer.

The flight crew on the March 10 Ethiopian flight faced a barrage of alerts in the flight that lasted just 6 minutes. Those alerts included a “stick shaker” that noisily vibrated the pilot’s yoke throughout the flight, warning the plane was in danger of a stall, which it wasn’t; repeated loud “DON’T SINK” warnings that the jet was too close to the ground; a “clacker” making a very loud clicking sound to signal the jet was going too fast; and multiple warning lights telling the crew the speed, altitude and other readings on their instruments were unreliable.

The Lion Air crash in October would have been at the forefront of the Ethiopian pilots’ minds, and they seem to have focused solely on following the Boeing procedure to eliminate the MAX’s new flight-control system — called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that was pushing the nose down. They did so by flipping two cut-off switches. But then the heavy forces on the jet’s tail prevented them from moving the manual wheel in the cockpit that would have corrected the nose-down attitude.

“What would the best pilot do on their worst day with all of this sensory overload?” the veteran U.S. airline captain said. “Who knows what any of us would have done?” “The manufacturer isn’t supposed to give us airplanes that depend on superhuman pilots,” he added. “We should have airplanes that don’t fail the way these airplanes failed.”

[Zhang Fei]

Shedlock is a bit of a crank of a financial advisor whose clients have missed out on the decade-long stock market boom since 2008. Everyone has a particular bias in terms of the information he chooses to process. Shedlock chose only the bits that were irrelevant to making money in the financial markets.

[RayChuang88]

The problem with sensors is not just a recent Boeing problem. Airbus had a lot of issues with freezing pitot tubes causing wrong information to be fed to the fly by wire computers, which may have been responsible for several A320 crashes and one A330 crash.

[nuke_road_warrior]

And he criticized Boeing for designing an airplane in which a system triggered by a single sensor failure...

Murphy is alive and well and is a vicious son-of-a-b****h. One is none, two is one, etc.

[JohnBrowdie]

riiiiiiiight. that’s why they only happened in third world countries with sh*tty maintenance and training programs.

[Born to Conserve]

And yet, many pilots would have landed the plane safely. So what is it when some pilots can handle the situation, and some pilots cannot? Pilot error? Pilot ignorance?

Boeing’s mistake is not having an idiot proof airplane.

All those highly skilled pilots are going to suffer from this attack on Boeing, because the attack is going to hasten the introduction of automation and idiot proofing. Low skill piloted airplanes and no pilot airplanes will be coming.

[FtrPilot]

Following is the first sentence in the Article:

The lie of the day: Skilled pilots could have prevented the two 737 Max crashes.

Truth: Properly trained, proficient pilots would have prevented the two 737 MAX crashes.

Training should have included:

A technical description of MCAS, which should have been included in the flight manual...it was not.

A level D simulator sortie which included MCAS normal operation...what happens if the pilot flies the aircraft into a stall. The simulator sortie should also include MCAS failures and emergency procedures.

737 MAX differences training consisted of 2 hours of Computer Based Training (CBT). It is my understanding that the 2 hours of CBT had no reference to MCAS.

Boeing apparently performed no Failure Modes & Impacts Criticality Analysis (FMICA). If they had, they would have altered the MCAS design and changed the differences training to include level D simulators.

[_Jim]

Failure to even manually ‘uncrank’ all the down stabilizer MCAS put it?

C’mon ... those guys COULD have even grabbed the STAB TRIM wheel even and stopped its action ...

[immadashell]

Are there instances when a pilot has been subject to the false indications and inputs AND managed to land the aircraft?

[aimhigh]

Decades ago, a jet took off and one of the engines flipped forward from the bottom of the wing to the top. Now aimed in the wrong direction, the plane crashed. The cause was a pin that wasn’t put back in correctly by a mechanic. Who was officially blamed? The pilot.

[IamConservative]

I've read that the 737 Max was quickly designed in response to a new Airbus plane that included a new engine that was 25% more efficient. Boeing wanted a plane that used the same engine so they could remain competitive with Airbus. The problem for Boeing was the size of this new engine. The 737 sat too low to the ground for the engine to have proper ground clearance. Rather than redesign other aspects of the plane, Boeing mounted the engine higher putting the top portion of the cowling above the leading edge of the wing as seen in the pic below. This created a flight control issue. Rather than correct it with mechanical design, Boeing creates the MCAS software to compensate fo it. Splash 2.

[CodeToad]

Having a bad design that pilots did not overcome is not pilot error. I’m a pilot and an aerospace engineer.