There was a time in the 60's when airlines were hiring off the street with 0 flight time. I've known a few guys (now retired) that were hired, trained by the airline right into aircraft. One guy started flying dc-9s for NorthEast.

While your at it... how about time on type, Night, IFR, number of landings, emergencies. Better yet, maybe a PRIA if a U.S. carrier.....

Anyway back to reality.... it’s a normal progression for pilots with many airlines overseas.

135 operators hire pilots with minimal time too... essentially CFI time.

Could be totally unrelated to Lion Air, but the elevator not being able to overpower the stab has always been a problem for Boeing on the 737. Having to trim, per manual, to recover from a stall as the elevator doesn't have enough authority is crazy.

Then on the MAX, first, the MCAS drives nose down stabilizer trim automatically based on the AOA, second, the stabilizer trim commands are NOT interrupted even when the control column is displaced in the opposite direction. A faulty AOA sensor then is all it takes. That leaves fiddling with switches to fix the problem.

Out of curiosity, do you know if MCAS would drive the nose down even if there's a positive rate of climb?

It’s based on AOA and nothing else, as long as the flaps are up.

Boeing tried to fix a problem that wasn’t there, and now they have blood on their hands. The FAA should ground all MAXs until MCAS is either fixed or disabled if there is no way to eliminate errant AOA input.

Not a Boeing guy. Serious question...what does MCAS stand for. I can gather what it does from the conversation thread.

Maneuvering Characteristic Augmentation System. Because of the shape of the Max motors and the fact they extend further forward ahead of the CG than other 737s, at high angles of attack the engine nacelle itself starts to produce lift which causes an additional pitch up moment. So they had to design a system to drive the nose down...


MCAS is supposed to be disabled with the flaps extended...will be curious to know the configuration of ET302 when they started to encounter issues.

Ethiopia is not Europe, I know..
However in Europa-Land it’s very common to go right seat transport category Jet right out of flightschool with a CPL-ME/IR and a “frozen ATPL” aka 14 written exams passed.
Wasn’t but a couple of years ago that the regionals hired with 250hrs and 25ME.

Don’t know where Air Ethiopia does their training but I’d expect they send their cadets to an Airline academy.

From Pprune:

777 crew behind ET302 at holding point report observing normal takeoff followed shortly by declaration of emergency. They heard ET302 on tower frequency transmitting “Wrong airspeed indications and difficulty controlling aircraft.”

Where do you guys get this stuff? When you want to push the nose down you don’t use trim, you use the yoke. MCAS trims off the increased pressures, the pilot still has to push the nose over. In the Lion Air case the AOA malfunction cause the trim to continue to run increasing nose down pressure. That was a malfunction, not the design of the system.

It was the FAA that said pilots should not be told about the system, not Boeing. Boeing didn’t want MCAS, the FAA did. The FAA said not to tell pilots because they would think it is an anti stall system that pushes the nose over and pilots would not properly recover from a stall. They were right, as evidenced in all the articles talking about the “stick pusher” and the new anti stall system, neither of which exist. Where they were wrong was not being able to see into the future where a damaged/malfunctioning AOA vane could cause that condition.