Bluemoon20

What about incompetency at designing an aircraft that you have to compensate for with this MCAS system? If they are that concerns about these "Asian" airlines operation then why sell these airplanes to them ?

Clearly greed and profits won over the safety concern of the passengers .

JohnBurke

This wasn't incompetency; it was an alternate compliance design feature for Part 25 certification,which was approved by the FAA, and which didn't cause either aircraft to crash. The AoA failure is another matter, and while much has been said ignorantly of airlines which chose not to include features and alerts, in neither case did the AoA failure cause the crash, either. In both cases, the existing procedures were enough to have made the event at best a nuisance; a simple abnormal easily handled with a flyable aircraft. In both cases, bad airmanship lead to a fatal crash.

MCAS moves the trim slowly, and in very small increments, and can be stopped at any time. Given that it only operates when the autopilot is not engaged, trim action observed when the autopilot is not in use and when the pilot is not trimming (and trim can't be missed in the 737) is obviously trim running when it should not, and there is a procedure for this...which has been the same procedure for several decades. It's not complicated, it's not rocket science, and it's known; the Ethiopian crew even verbalized it....and obviously knew it, because they did it.

And undid it, accelerated beyond the design limits for the aircraft, and crashed...all due to pilot action.

Flightcap

So...why weren't Ethiopian and Lion Air airplanes falling out of the sky before MCAS?

Adlerdriver

Because, thanks to using a single AOA input (pretty dumb, IMO), MCAS made it far more likely that the occasional crew would encounter a runway stabilizer. It rarely, if ever, happened prior to MCAS.

All that tells me is we're damn lucky that Boeing (and Airbus) make extremely reliable aircraft. When I fly as a pax on an airline that is likely crewed by a high percentage of children of magenta who have spent most of their flight experience watching an autopilot fly - I just say a little prayer and hope it's a vanilla flight.

Flightcap

To me that says that at least some of the blame for this crash belongs with Boeing. Some here seem to be trying to take a hard line saying that the crash was 100% Boeing's fault or 100% the crew's fault. I think there's some blame to be given to both parties.

JohnBurke

They didn't fall out of the sky with MCAS.

Two flight crews drove their aircraft into the ground. Big difference.

Very, very big difference.

Adlerdriver

Any accident that involves some kind of system malfunction could be partially blamed on the system or aircraft manufacturer or maybe maintenance.
But, as John B has been saying all along (and I agree 100%), pilots are supposed to be able to handle these things. Would you blame GE or Pratt&Whitney for a crash if it was a classic V1 cut on a nice VFR day, no terrain, no other factors and the crew put in the wrong rudder or shut down the wrong engine or didn’t maintain proper airspeed and crashed as a result? Malfunctions happen and we follow our training, use our systems knowledge, experience and FLY THE AIRPLANE. If airlines are putting someone in the pilot seats of their jets that can’t do that, it’s not Boeing’s fault. They make pretty docile, forgiving aircraft but they still require pilots... real actual pilots that can do more than run checklists, operate the basic systems and turn the autopilot on ASAP after takeoff.

AirBear

There's no CRM at Asian Airlines, it's opposite their culture. I remember the B777 that hit the seawall at SFO. The new Captain receiving IOE stated he wanted to put his sunglasses on but was hesitant because the IOE Captain didn't have his on. How screwed up is that? (not implying sunglasses had anything to do with the accident).

JohnBurke

This has been going downhill since Boeing removed the dog from the cockpit. The one that was there to bite the pilot if he tried to touch anything.

dera

The level of arrogance and ignorance in your post is only exceeded by your stupidity when you talk about "Asian Airlines" in a thread called "Ethiopian 737 max crash".
Please, grow a brain.