Were the pilots fully trained? The Captain, Yared Getachew, went into Ethiopian Airlines' Flight School straight out of High School.
Boeing is one screwed up company. They are run by democrps.
The control system was way too complex, yet not complex enough to adequately cover at least one of its fault modes.
I’m waiting to see what the people on Mayday Air Catastrophe have to say.
The Ethiopian Captain thought they were entering a stall and wanted to gain altitude. Conditions in Egypt at the time made gaining altitude more important than at other airports.
The crew desperately tried to gain altitude and fought the computer (MCAS) that kept nosing the plane down because the angle of attack (AOA) sensor was broken on takeoff.
Boeing did not use redundant sensors for input into the MCAS system like Airbus does for its many automated systems.
Typically, you use at least three sensors so you can have two that agree. Airbus does that....but they have experience in computer-controlled flight.
Boeing does not and messed this up big time.
This article tries to shift blame to the pilots. Maybe there is some truth there but the perception of the public is the plane has a flawed design and development. It will be interesting if this plane ever flies again.
A Canadian man who was a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines before resigning last year said he tried before the crash to warn the carrier that crews weren’t adequately prepared.
Computer 2 wins, Pilots 0 wins
Bad Pilots without the needed info....
“The bulletin listed nine possible symptoms in such a failure. If any of them occurred while the plane tried to nose down on its own, the directive said: “do the Runaway Stabilizer NNC ensuring that the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are set to CUTOUT and stay in the CUTOUT position for the remainder of the flight.” “
Shutting off those switches also kills the electric trim control on the yoke since they those switches disconnect the motors entirely. If not for that then the planes would not have crashed. And if anyone a number of design issues were not present then the plane would not have crashed.
Doesn't mean much; son "Ace" never even finished high school. Went directly to college and flight school at 16.
'Course not every sixteen year old can pull that off!
You can google any airframe for the accidents and incidents. The majority of them are not by US carriers. Why?
Something should be done to address this big picture.
Maybe the rest of them thought that he was just a bad pilot.
My early background was in aircraft instrumentation and later on, after earning a degree in Computer Science, I worked in aerospace for a good number of years, so I feel pretty qualified to comment on this.
The crash of both planes seems to have been caused by faulty Angle of Attack (AOA) information being fed into a computer system which then drove the flight controls to force the nose down in order to avoid a perceived stall.
In my experience, sometimes the pilots would complain that their altimeters were erratic and after investigation we found that the problem was often caused by a dirty AOA probe. How’d we know? We had test equipment that we could hook up and fake out the aircraft by changing the static pressure in the tubing. We would power up the test equipment and simulate an altitude of, say, 10,000 ft., and then engage the computer which made changes to the altimeters. Then we would slowly turn the AOA probe and watch the altimeter. If it’s OK, it will change the altimeter in a controlled steady change. If the AOA probe was dirty, this would suddenly drive the altimeters thousands of feet in one direction and then thousands of feet in the other direction unpredictably. Of course, that’s not good. The point is that a dirty and/or corroded AOA probe can produce WILDLY inaccurate AOA information.
On the 737-Max aircraft they apparently also sent the AOA information to a computer system, which is tied into the autopilot system, which drives the control surfaces and when they got wild AOA information they also got wild control surface changes. The pilots at first turned off the system but then, for some reason, turned it back on and couldn’t recover the 2nd time. I’m not a pilot, but after watching many, many episodes of “Air Disaster” I’ve concluded that a lot pilots today just aren’t very good at flying the plane manually anymore.
Many people have suggested that they should have a backup AOA probe. But with two probes how do you know which one is right and which one is wrong? I suppose you could have a third probe and then “vote” to see which data to use. I think this might lead to more problems than it fixes.
Knowing that the AOA data can be wild at times, I think I would use my computer systems to sample it at, say, 5 times per second. Within 1/5 of a second I think the readings should be pretty close together, within some reasonable limit. If consecutive readings were wildly different I’d try to figure out the real AOA reading, discard the other(s), and raise some sort of fault code in the maintenance records. If it gets too bad, at some point the computer system may have to warn the pilots and shut itself down. My offhand thinking is in terms of perhaps 3-5 seconds.
I’d probably look back farther than just two readings. A mathematician would be good here. There are mathematical techniques that can take a set of input data points and generate a smoothed output. This might be a good place for one of those. Use the smoothed out data in the autopilot system in order to avoid the wild behavior. Perhaps they already did this; I don’t know.
Another thing would be to change out the AOA probes fairly quickly and refurbish them, hopefully before problems occurs. I don’t think we did this in the Air Force but then our pilots had ejection seats.