Excellent summary however
there is plenty of blame to go around
there were many contributing factors some
of which may never be fully known for certain.
I’ve developed software for over 30 years and
automation has it’s own set of challenges but
I completely agree that there is no substitute
for highly skilled / trained pilots at the helm
of any large airliner.
7
One of the points Juan has made in his excellent video series was that airline pilots are often almost completely insulated from the basics of flight these days. We know a married couple who are both test pilots for Boeing. They both got their training in the military, neither of them has ever flown or even ridden in a small general aviation aircraft. All of their experience is in aircraft that have incredible power and capabilities and have software systems that take care of much of the finer points of flying for them. They said that they could not fly out little planes without remedial training, I thought that they were joking when they said it. One of my brother-in-laws is a Colonel and squadron commander in the Air Force... I don't think he has ever been in a small plane either.
My brother is a captain for Southwest; he came through the civil aviation system where he started out as a flight instructor, then flew small commercial aircraft, then commuter turboprops, and then jet airliners.
So there are two basic categories of commercial pilots these days... military and non-military. One group has basically only flown airplanes with a lot of software assist. Some of the people in this thread have said that military pilots would be more capable of handling this type of software failure because they have been in more stressful situations than non-military trained pilots. This was either written by military people or non-pilots. One of Juan's primary points in his last MAX video was that a lot of current airline pilots don't have much experience with basic airmanship, and that this leaves them less prepared to actually handle this type of situation.