The ungrounding process has ENTIRELY become political now.

 

There is one glaring similarity... Boeing's reaction to the rudder servo issue. But it was easier back then to get away with obfuscating and blame shifting (no social media, etc).

 

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.

 

Things change, to answer your question, there was a time, that a junior pilot did not speak up at UA. The culture was that you never challenge a Captain's authority unless you thought you were going to die and that was not always obvious. The MDW, SLC and PDX accidents crew members guessed wrong and paid for it tragically. But, those were high visibility cases. I had one standards captain tell me the Stanine test (predecessor to Hogan) was working very well, crew members were not speaking back to the Captains. All of this changed after PDX, later generations are the beneficiaries of CLR and CRM, but it was not always the case

It took training and a corporate culture change. ALPA and safety advocates like Dave Fitzgerald (senior) were instrumental to make this mindset change with the rank and file. This will happen again with pilots all over the world. I don't buy the Asian face-saving excuse, maybe, when we were doing the same thing, but not now. If a problem exists with foreign pilots it is a lack of adequate training, confidence in their airmanship and their corporations not living up to their responsibilities for profits. US companies went through this, but it was not easy and we had to change the rules to ensure our pilots are trained, rested and use the best practices.

I was incensed after the Lyon Air accident, at the time, I thought this Boeing betrayal was to sell their airplane as if it was the same as the classic for marketing and profit motives. Obviously it was more complicated than that, but so far no one has gone to jail and Boeing will survive because it is too big to fail.

After the Ethiopian accident, I was apoplectic. It became clear no pilot should ever trust Boeing, Airbus or the regulators again. Line pilots must be part of the design process, even if it might cost the next promotion, we owe it to the people that trust our profession. The opinion of the pilot now in seat 36B.

 

Lyon Air accident? Was that some French crash?

 

And as of yet you feel you feel Boeing hasn’t been blamed for this? Lion air was and is a disgrace and nothing has really been pushed about that. Let’s just follow the narrative blindly.

 

No, I would avoid flying Lion Air like I would some others and I very strongly dislike the idea of 300hr pilots at the 121 level. I just feel there's a different venue to address airlines who lack adequate training standards. Boeing is getting slammed - was just replying to those who exclusively trash the pilots in these two crashes.

 

Tu vois, la stanine et Hogan marchent, tu as attrapé que

 

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-ceo-dennis-muilenburg-to-step-down-immediately/

Muilenburg out. Wonder if this will speed up the plane coming back or if it will still take forever. It probably doesn’t help that the space capsule had issues over the weekend.