Originally Posted by
Chuck D
It’s funny to continue to demonize the pilots. Boeing was/is trying to sell thousands of these things to airlines across the world, some with less than stellar records, and all collectively flying millions of flight hours. They have some fundamental obligation (even if just a fiduciary one) to get it right -
**and in the least, not make a new critical feature MORE dangerous than the previous design, and not even document it properly** that in itself is completely insane!!
- it doesn’t take an advanced course in statistics to now know that the original MCAS design and its failure mode would result in a far higher rate of crashes than a well vetted design.
It’s also funny to see the chest beating about how “our pilots” would react to multiple failures flawlessly when Boeing’s own *test pilots* expressed serious concern? Have you ever see a well qualified pilot botch a critical QRH procedure in the sim - an environment where you KNOW you’re gonna get abnormals? Happens often enough. How about the “old school” technique of taking a long moment and pausing/ looking at your watch before dealing with an emergency? Have heard that countless times and it’s usually good advice to slow down. But how does that work with a stall horn, clacker, irregular trim issues and airspeed issues all simultaneously occurring? How about at 5am or hour 7 into the flight? Yeah. Sure, all of these commenters would save the day 1000 times out of 1000 under every circumstance. Nobody has to give the Lion Air/ Ethiopian pilots the next Chuck Yeager award but if there’s blame to place surely most of it has to go to Boeing on this one.
Wholeheartedly disagree. This is the “political correctness” aspect of what I was talking about earlier.
Neither one of these should have led to accidents as pilots should have been able to deal with the problem and land the plane just like the crew the day before the Lion Air 610 crash did. Airmanship comes into play. Why did the Ethiopian crew desperately try to turn the autopilot on while being grossly out of trim? Trimming the wrong way? How about having the basic idea of “Pitch + Power = Performance” and bringing back the thrust levers from TOGA? You can’t tell me that while over speeding, you wouldn’t even instinctively reduce thrust... unless you had no instinct to begin with. How many of you get the airspeed fluctuating and approaching MMO in cruise instinctively reduce thrust as to not overspeed the plane?
These pilots were set up to fail. The hammer needs to also fall on their airlines, training, maintenance, quality control, regulatory agencies... but yet, its no longer about doing the right thing even if it may be harsh. It’s about blame and squarely blaming the manufacturer. Not buying it.