When the automation works, it works well and makes the aircraft easy to fly. When it doesn't, the skill of the pilots to 1) recognize that there is a problem, and 2) know how to mitigate the issue and manually fly the aircraft are paramount.
With the huge worldwide demand for pilots, it is inevitable that the quality and skillset of airline pilots are not as high as they once might have been.
In years past, airline pilots were retired military pilots, accustomed to high stress situations and quick decision making.
Today's cadre of airline pilots, especially in second-tier markets, are more likely to have started in light private aircraft, and worked their way up through commuter aircraft to larger passenger jets, with no prior military or other high-stress experience.
“with no prior military or other high-stress experience.”
That’s no even close to reality. That’s just your guess.
If you knew pilot training you wouldn’t have said such a silly thing.
Task saturation when failures start to cascade.
Lots of Airlines pay pilots trash too.
There’d be more skill in it if pilots made enough for enough skilled people to want to apply.
So Boeing thinks that when all the stuff fails and twenty lights and a horn are blaring, that people can manually fix what the computer cannot?
How many mechanics can even fix a car while it’s running at speed?
“We saw in these two accidents that the crews did not react in the ways Boeing and the FAA assumed they would,” said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “Those assumptions were used in the design of the airplane and we have found a gap between the assumptions used to certify the MAX and the real-world experiences of these crews, where pilots were faced with multiple alarms and alerts at the same time.”
...
They also assumed there would be competent pilots who could handle a sensor failure before the MCAS ever activated.
People should also understand that there is an intended adversarial relationship between the NTSB and the FAA. A lot of NTSB recommendations are never implemented.
A flight-control system designed to prevent the planes from stalling misfired on both crashed flights: a Lion Air 737 Max in Indonesia last October and an Ethiopian Airlines plane of the same type in March.
...
The system didn’t misfire.
The system activated as designed. The root cause was a bad attitude sensor that the pilots failed to diagnose and bypass.
This is why I think Boeing may have to completely redesign the MCAS system—or redesign the wing itself.
“We saw in these two accidents that the crews did not react in the ways Boeing and the FAA assumed they would,”
Complete CYA BS on Boeing’s part.
The way you get crews to react properly is to train them. But they didn’t get training, because Boeing didn’t want it to be a cost factor for airlines considering the updated planes.
Profit trumps safety for Boeing. Assholes.
We need robot pilots. They don’t get flustered, and they don’t drink.
“Mistakes were made”
Its a design flaw with the center of balance of the new plane using the old flight control computers.
EE Times put their finger on the problem right away.
EE Times is written by engineers, for engineers.
This bodes ill for all types of automatously controlled vehicles.
What are your thoughts on this?
It’s really hard to read this.
Reading the word “assumption” over and over. In safety processes there’s is no such thing. Everything is supposed to be tested, nothing left to chance - including the ability of a pilot to interact with the system in all use-cases. It seems they made assumptions about how pilots would react but never put it to test.
I don’t believe there weren’t those at Boeing that didn’t highlight this fact. Somebody made the conscious decision to skip being thorough because of MONEY and people died because of it.
I still believe somebody will end up in prison over it - and justly so. The only wiggle room is that the government is allowing them to self-certify, outside of independent certification. This is what happens.
[Today’s cadre of airline pilots, especially in second-tier markets, are more likely to have started in light private aircraft, and worked their way up through commuter aircraft to larger passenger jets, with no prior military or other high-stress experience. ]
Sales dept should be fired.
Extra safety feature here for an extra charge.
Also includes training. Don’t buy then you crash : )
Added incentive!
Boeing and the FAA made the faulty assumption that with two trained professionals in the cockpit at least one of them would figure out how to handle a runaway automatic vertical trim event with the two cutoff switches next to the trim wheels. The cutoff switches have been mounted next to the trim wheels for this purpose on all Boeing aircraft for approximately 50 years. Electrically assisted vertical trim in any aircraft always has the possibility of malfunctioning for a wide variety of reasons... faulty wiring, faulty switches, faulty sensors, faulty motors, mechanical damage, and these days faulty software.
Up until all the politically correct non-pilot armchair experts got involved in analyzing these two mishaps caused by third world pilots and airlines... pilots were expected to know how to turn off malfunctioning vertical trim and not auger their aircraft into the ground. And believe me if the pilots responsible were American white males you had better believe that they would have been blamed and their names would be on a permanent sh*t list for destroying their aircraft and killing their passengers. But these pilots were from a protected class and in our brave new world they cannot be blamed... so scapegoats must be found. Boeing and the FAA are now being blamed for not designing a completely crash proof airplane. Despite the almost incomprehensibly good safety record of modern airliners, airplanes will probably always be capable of crashing when handed over to incompetent people.
So this nonsense is being rehashed over and over and the same parade of bozos are parroting nonsense with no real experience or concept of what it a really like to be a pilot. I have been a pilot for many decades... I have witnessed what ambulance chasing lawyers have done to the general aviation manufacturers. They sucked them dry. Now they are going after the big fish and once again people who have never been pilots are falling for this pathetic BS. Excuse me but it makes me pretty damned sick.
Whitewash. No way a system with a single point of failure, like the model involved in both crashes could have ever been certified for flight unless someone engaged in fraud.
Period
I would expect in a large business, a profit would be their top priority. - Tom
at all costs.
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