Excargodog

So, you would be happier if it had been a stuck trim switch or relay? Then they would have actually been responsible for not reducing power to keep the speed down to where it wasn’t immobile manually?

You can claim a design or certification flaw for every abnormal event for which there is a checklist. At what point do you believe pilots have to step up and actually BE pilots?

ShyGuy

The 2 trolls are still going at it. An overwhelming majority of accidents are pilot error. This one seems to be a combination of pilot error and a flawed design and certification. Physically designing an airplane that is inherently unstable because of engine location that then requires software to push the nose down in certain regimes of flights should not have been approved. But money talks, and Boeing is one of the most powerful lobbying corporation in America. The MAX was their only answer against the NEO.

You can continue blaming 4 dead pilots, just like some blamed the 3 dead AF447 pilots. But the industry looks at the overall system and that system failed everyone here. The lack of disclosure of MCAS, when it activates, and how to deactivate it, limitations on it, etc, all should have been disclosed and trained from the get go.

I appreciate trolls telling others they shouldn't be flying airplanes but whether you like it or not, EET is now required by law here because of the likes of Colgan 3407, AF447, and Air Asia 8501. These two crashes with Lion Air and Ethiopian will now have training for MCAS activation.

EET was long overdue. Accident history shows once an airplane rolls beyond 67 deg, pilots don't have a good track record of recovery. You can continue to shake your fist at the sky in anger and tell pilots to fly their "damn planes" OR you can have training in envelopes and regimes that many pilots are screwing up / getting killed in.

aviatorhi

I guess you're gonna go to France and tell Airbus they can't make the A330NEO either? What about all the inherently unstable military aircraft (flying wings) that are looking to be working their way to the civilian sector in the coming decades?

The AF447 "pilots" at the controls were grossly incompetent just like both MAX "crews". MCAS itself is very obviously a runaway trim situation, though it appears to be prompted by sensor failures rather than electrical/relay failures. Treating it as a runaway trim would have been sufficient to keep anyone from dying is those two crews were not terrible at their jobs. The only thing I agree with on MCAS being at fault is that the amount of nose down trim it can provide should be limited.

The EET was a response to those crashes, true enough, but it was also a follow through on what people like us *trolls* tell people like millennial snowflakes about aviation. Too many of the newer pilots think Autopilot at 200/1000 is the way you fly airplanes, while many of us have been sounding the horn about pilot skill deterioration for decades.

Excargodog

You are a might free with the ‘troll’ comment, Henri.

There are, as others have noticed, MULTIPLE aircraft out there (particularly fighter aircraft) that are designed with reduced aerodynamic stability, that are absolutely dependent upon all the software and sensors working appropriately. I am personally familiar with a military system that in fact has three duplicated stability augmentation systems, constantly monitored by computer with the output dependent on the average if the two systems most in agreement. If one system departs from the other two by more than two standard deviations, that one is cut out of the system and the annunciations panel signal SAS failutpre and you land immediately, because if a second one fails the computer electronically ‘flips a coin’ giving you a 50-50 chance, because you have NO CHANCE of flying the aircraft without SAS. Clearly a similarly redundant system incorporating two (or more) AOA sensors would have been a h€|| of a lot better than what Boeing did.

But having said that, that does NOT excuse pilots who screw up the basics. I would not solo a student pilot in a Cessna 150 who I thought would get distracted and exceed the Vne of that Cessna 150, because whatever the problem was that distracted him to begin with, exceeding the Vne would certainly not help and would almost certainly guarantee a bad outcome.

I am disappointed in Boeing for not designing a better system. Criticism of them is appropriate.

But someone expecting pilots to , you know, actually pilot an aircraft, ought not to put them in the troll category - at least not to any rational person.

JohnBurke

There's that teen-speak again.

Talking about jet upset training?

It's been the norm for decades. You're just inexperienced, that's all.

Very, very inexperienced. Otherwise you'd know better than to keep posting incorrect information.

There is a recent change in the way of approaching it, but the reality is that it's a minor change, nothing actually new. That you don't understand this betrays your inexperience.

Upset recoveries, incidentally, still involve keeping the speed in check and a power reduction as required. In other words, it's all about flying the damn airplane, something the Ethiopian crew did NOT do.

Seems you're wrong, again. Keep this up, and we'll change your name to Corrigan.

ShyGuy

EET isn’t teen talk. You lose credibility saying that. Do you work at a 121 today? How was your sim in 2019 compared to before 2017?



“Jet upset training” is your unusual attitude recovery in sims. Extended envelope training takes it beyond that. No, in the US part 121 sims they were not certified to realistically model what could be expected once you rolled beyond certain angles. It was one of the factors they cited for AA 587, that the AAMP program was giving guys 90 degree rollovers for wake turbulence, freezing the sim in terms of no pilot input during that roll, and then making control commands effective at 90 bank. It was unrealistic and lots of negative training. It emphasized all the wrong elements for wake recovery. The accident docket is publicly available, read through the interview summaries of the people involved behind it.

Sims weren’t realistic for true deep stall training either. Until Colgan, most 121 airlines (at least ones doing PCs) were doing approach to stall recoveries, which was at stick shaker to power out of stalls and minimize altitude loss. In some cases that meant slight back pressure and rising the stick shaker.


I’m sure at Avantair you actually got to take a real Piaggio into stalls and spins and recovered them in real life scenarios with G force effects.


Now to comply with EET, simulators have been updated with software like StallBox, and that allows a much more realistic modeling of stalls and upset conditions in simulators. It’s a huge improvement.

ShyGuy

Now the military argument? Military missions are different. Part 121 airliners are for taking grandma from Point A to point B as safely as possibly. They are stable transport category aircraft. You refuse to admit it, but in this case to *certify* the aircraft it had to have MCAS because the test pilots felt it behaved differently at certain high alpha/go around situations. The whole thing s was being designed and built without having any additional sim training or ground training more than 2 hrs.


STS activates, are you going to identify that as a trim runaway? Not if it’s momentary and it stops. No doubt the Ethiopian made their issues worse by leaving the power levers where they were, and certainly a “pilot error” cause can be found, but MCAS l, single sensor failure, and constant stick shaker will be contributing factors. Take any one of those elements out, and the accident wouldn’t have happened.

Step back and look at the overall picture. 2 separate planes killing nearly 350 people, all because software on the plane was pushing the nose down over and over, and the pilots in the first case didn’t even know about MCAS. Planes shouldn’t be diving to the ground over and over again with an unlimited number of nose down cycles. That goes against the concept of stable aircraft designs.

If these are “just” simple pilot errors, the plane would be flying today. But it’s not. And they are taking the appropriate steps by having MCAS connect to both AOA sensors and compare, limit the amount of travel, and amount of activation per high alpha event. This should have been diagnosed like that from the get go, but no one envisioned failure modes of MCAS in their rush to get this thing on the market.

aviatorhi

All because weaklings like you are allowed to fly transports... chew on that snowflake.

JohnBurke

Yes, it is. Adults can actually say extended envelope training without the need to resort to emoticons and acronyms for everything. We also don't spend every free moment taking selfies and posting them online, and typing with our thumbs.

If trim is running and you aren't trimming, and the autopilot isn't driving it, then yes, it's obviously uncommanded trim. This seems beyond your ability to understand as you keep coming full circle to disbelief. How are you able to pass a type ride in anything?

Follow carefully: uncommanded trim is uncommanded trim.

The crew knew it. They said it out loud, in words, which were captured on the CVR, and detailed in the preliminary report. They identified the Angle of Attack indicator, specifically. They identified the procedure. They executed the procedure, albeit slowly and improperly. Then they undid the procedure. Then they accelerated to their deaths.

No, absolutely no doubt whatsoever. They didn't just make it worse. They made it uncontrollable and flew it far of the envelope, beyond the aircraft limitations and made it unrecoverable, continuing to accelerate until their death. No doubt at all, and clearly established at this point.

ShyGuy

Trolling aside, there is another system to be considered/looked at. Pilot upbringing in terms of training and career progression. In the US, we go through GA flying and then the first jet job is typically regional airlines flying many short hops in all sorts of weather and runway conditions. By the time a pilot gets to a Boeing or Airbus in this country, they have thousands of hours and several years of experience.

Compare that to many parts of the word (Indonesia and Ethiopia included, but they are hardly alone). There is no GA to speak of. No regional airlines either. Just one or two national carriers of that country. They take expats and get them when they can but in today’s industry, no one from the west is leaving for the east because conditions are good here with plentiful jobs. So in many of those countries, the career track is basically ab initio into an Airbus and Boeing.

In the Ethiopian case, both the CA and the FO were ab initio and the FO was brand new low time. In Lion Air, the CA had 853 total hours before flying a 737 and then all his time was on that. The FO was similar, 888 hrs total before flying a 737 and all his time was on that.

Here’s an example, an Indian CA for Jet Airways bragging about being the youngest at 25 yrs old, going by the social media handle “Boeing Boy”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzV06PeKVpg

When MCAS operates, what do you think Boeing Boy would do with his vast experience and background?



This is a legit problem for which I’m not sure there is an answer. Those airlines need pilots but there’s no GA or regional airlines to pull from, and expats are in short numbers.