If the failure of a single sensor can send the aircraft into a dive toward the ground, it is not "pilot error" if the unfortunate pilot is unable to deduce the cause and determine the solution in time. The problem is that the aircraft dove toward the ground.
It would have been great if these pilots had been better trained, or had better documentation. But the fact is the aircraft crashed itself, because it was getting erroneous sensor information, and the system was not designed well enough to prevent a fatal response by the flight control computer.
I like to use the analogy of a professional baseball player. Sometimes the make an “error” when a non-professonal would have almost certainly made the same error. But it is an “error” because most prose would not have made the error.
i.e. I’m not saying it was full blown pilot error. I’m simply saying it was sort of a form of it, if only because a previous crew followed procedure according to the “quick tips” book and didn’t crash.
There were some WWII planes that had some interesting quirks. The F4U Corsair was called “widowmaker” because if you stalled it upside down, you ran the risk of it floating to the ground like a leaf, preventing you from exiting. You died when it hit.
But the plane wasn’t considered defective. Rather, the pilots knew about this quirk and avoided what caused it.
If a previous crew knew of this “quirk”, and didn’t bother passing on the info, a fair amount of responsibility for this goes to the airline procedures. Let’s be honest here. What pilot on the planet today would allow this to happen if they were flying one of these planes now? Knowledge is power.
And yes, Boeing bears responsibility for this, but so does the airline if the “previous crew” story is true.
“If the failure of a single sensor can send the aircraft into a dive toward the ground, it is not “pilot error”
First, the software did not send the plane into a dive. It lowered the nose a few degrees which was easily compensated for by the captain over 20 times. He could have simply turned on autopilot or turn off the stab and it would have been fine.
Next, the crash was not caused by the failure of single sensor. Items malfunction in planes all the time - from sensors to engines and everything in between.
Pilots are there to deal with these in the right way. A runaway stab is something every airline pilot in the world should recognize and deal with in seconds. Is it Boeing’s fault if some low hour pilot reacts to an engine problem by turning off fuel to the good engine?
I put the blame for this 100% on the awful mistakes made by lion air mechanics and lion air pilots and also lion air culture. Remember, the pilots on the previous flight kept flying to their destination after they turned off the auto stab system. Any American airline would require such a plane to turn around and return to airport.