As it was an opinion piece about Boeing your shock is not based on fact. I pointed out the only factoid in the article was factually wrong. If you can’t find anything technically incorrect it’s because there weren’t technical details in it. It was someone’s opinion. It may be an accurate assessment but without facts to back it up it’s an opinion.
Yes, I’m blaming the pilots. This is not an absolution of Boeing. Here’s a video of a runway trim. It’s pretty obvious what is going on even if you’re not a pilot. You can visually see the wheel spinning because of the hash marks on it and you can hear it moving. Between that and the instruments the crew should have quickly realized the plane was climbing unrestrained and dealt with it. It wasn’t a difficult problem to diagnose or fix. Runaway trim is very dangerous and going full trim greatly increases the danger.
The runaway trim issue here is an MCAS redundancy design flaw that is Boeing’s fault. The whole MCAS system was an attempt to keep the newer version 737 within the same training platform and save airlines money. that was it’s selling point.
Failure to correct the loss of control was the crew’s fault. They should have been able to maintain control of the plane by shutting the auto trim off and manually retrimming. The situation is not specific to MCAS and can occur in any airliner.
After the first crash there should have been a coordinated effort to ensure pilot training was adequate and that goes back to Boeing and the airlines. This is similar to the Airbus crash out of JFK but in that case the pilots were blamed for excessive rudder input. Airbus eventually changed their rudder restrictions but the initial fix was pilot training. THAT’S what should have happened here.
In Magiver’s world, when a foreign jet is crashed by an American pilot ripping the rudder off with aggressive over controlling due to poor training, it is the aircraft manufacturer’s fault (the rudder was too weak). But if an American jet with a serious design flaw is crashed by foreign pilots it is the pilot’s fault. No amount of discussion will change his views.
I said the crew was blamed for that crash. Not sure what was difficult to understand about this. Airbus changed their limiters at higher speeds to prevent what happened going forward. In Richard Pearse’s world should they not have done this?
It would be nice if you knew what you were talking about so you could understand your own cite. The trim in a 737 is much like many aircraft. it adjusts the entire tail plane with a jack screw. The problems they were having was at almost full deflection and this was mentioned in the video you posted. If you read what I posted that was what the crew should have prevented in the first place. There’s a giant wheel in front of them with hash marks on it spinning and making noise. Their instruments would have shown a marked change in airspeed and attitude. It wasn’t a subtle mechanical issue that could easily be ignored. It’s the car driver equivalent of driving off an exit ramp and doing nothing as you approach a stop sign.
Long before they reached full trim they have both the option to use the trim switch on the yoke to counter the problem or simply shut off the trim. As I stated upthread it becomes significantly bigger problem if it goes to full trim and your link shows that. MY link showed the simple procedure to counter the event.
I explicitly told him that up in post #176, and I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s been mentioned. To wit:
Magiver just ignored that fact, and continues to imagine that the flight crew were completely unaware that the trim system was operating, a fact that would have been obvious to even the most inexperienced novice.
One more thing:
So you’re claiming that the FAA and the aviation regulatory bodies of at least 23 other countries were all idiots for grounding the MAX worldwide instead of blaming the pilots the way you did. Sorry, but there’s pretty much zero credibility in any claim based on nothing but your own armchair analysis which is contradicted by all the evidence from many different qualified sources. Eventually Boeing’s own CEO acknowledged how badly they (not the pilots) had screwed up.
Honestly, I posted a link to what I regarded as an interesting and completely uncontroversial article that, in addition to summarizing what happened, examined the devolution of Boeing’s management and engineering culture. I never imagined that anyone would start arguing about it, but apparently it offended something in Magiver’s political sensibilities.
Except that’s what happened. Just as the Asiana crew drove an airplane into the ground on a clear day with a check pilot on board. Watching a trim wheel spin the tail plain to full deflection made it extremely difficult to recover from.
Once again, is it your contention that Boeing, the FAA, and the aviation regulatory bodies of at least 23 other countries were all idiots for grounding the MAX worldwide instead of blaming the pilots the way you did?
I never said that. I said the crew failed to maintain control of the plane. The MCAS system was a bad system and I stated that. it was the cause of the bad input to the trim system. That was a correctable problem.
This reminds me of the joke about a “typical” NTSB report…
*Cause of accident: Failure of the pilot to maintain sufficient altitude.
Contributing factor: Both wings and the propeller fell off. *
It’s easy to blame pilots. The rules are written in such a way that you can almost always blame the pilot. I’m a former airline pilot, currently flying bizjets. Call me loyal to my tribe, but I am always bothered by certain critiques of pilots in situations like this. I don’t think there’s anything simple about a flight control malfunction when you’re flying a high-tech vehicle at several hundred miles per hour. Yes, we’ve all been trained on runaway trim scenarios, but I can certainly see how this situation was not straightforward. But here we are doing the old “study for six months what they had six seconds to respond to” thing and passing harsh judgement.
Ever read the Tom Wolfe book, “The Right Stuff”? A skilled pilot gets killed in a high-performance (possibly experimental) airplane. Well, obviously they didn’t REALLY have the right stuff then, eh? It’s specious, after-the-fact reasoning. The best pilots still make mistakes - I see it all the time, and that’s why there are usually two of us.
That Asiana crash at SFO - highly experienced pilots who made mistakes that day. Doesn’t mean they were bad pilots in general, and now we get to learn from what happened. That’s the strength how we do things in aviation, and it’s why we have ASAP reports. We’ve realized it’s more important to gather data than to be punitive in many cases. I’d suggest we do that in our thinking here on this issue, rather than decide the guys in the Max were just bad pilots.
It was corrected (or at least ameliorated) by the optional dual-sensor version. But those airlines cheaped out and bought only the basic version (which also works, but requires you to provide more training for your pilots (which they also didn’t do)).
Rather like buying a cheaper car, without the power brakes option – and then complaining that it takes longer to stop, so that caused an accident.
It was not like that at all. Boeing made the AOA sensor disagreement indicator an optional extra, BUT since they were not telling anybody about the MCAS system and were keeping it a big secret, there didn’t seem to be any particular need for the extra indicator.
It’s more like a car manufacturer secretly installing a system to override the accelerator according to the input of some sensor, and then only mentioning casually that you can have an optional extra warning light for the sensor, without saying why it might be needed.
OK, strictly speaking, if the Lion Air plane was already malfunctioning yet was succesfully if roughly brought home the day before it went down, that’s at least strongly suggestive that IF a crew can quickly figure out what’s wrong and how to control it (even if they may not know the real reason *why *it’s happening that way) in the right time frame and sequence, they have a chance.
But as has been mentioned, even seasoned crews sometimes can be quicker or slower to detect and diagnose problems. If you are given inadequate or no training or even not told at all about some new failure point, one can be uncomfortable with “failure to react the right way” as the primary cause when things go tits up fast.
(I’ve read comments in the months before, that even Boeing’s own initial advice post-Lion Air/pre-Ethiopian as to how to handle a similar situation may have been less than fully helpful, or maybe just the necessary propagation of the knowledge was too slow.)
Boeing did decide (a) to expand the capabilities of MCAS beyond what was originally intended and (b) that crews and even regulators did not need to know about that, and this set things up for failure. The decision to make the modifications to MCAS “invisible” was made to offer as a selling point that recert/requal/retrain would not be needed. And that in turn was done because Boeing was caught with nothing better to put in the production lines and in the air at the same time as the Airbus NEOs. This may be faulted to the management style issues brought up in the New Republic article, or may have some other origin, but it was still on management.
(Meanwhile carriers have been known to seek to cut cost related to crews’ remuneration and training. I duno ‘bout you but I want the people up there in the front of the machine to be sharp as knives, happy in their job and well rested.)
I can get that it is purely speculative to ask if the Old-School Boeing as alluded in New Republic would have plunked down in the 00’s the investment to do a true 21st-century 737 replacement together with or immediately before/after the 787, or even surrendered a couple years’ advantage to the NEOs, under a philosophy of “best, not first”. We may never really know that.
I understand your position here. a lot of A/A pilots didn’t take kindly to the investigation results of the JFK flight. But planes with the massive trim wheel set up found in the 737 make it hard to ignore when it’s engaged. It even makes a clanking noise that stands out. If the plane is pitching too high or low while a trim wheel is obviously spinning unrestrained then the connection should be instant. If it was a different plane with a trim system that was less obvious then it would be less straightforward,
haven’t read it but I have listened to many talks from Bob Hoover. Yes, pilots make mistakes. Engineers make mistakes. Mechanics make mistakes. But they’re still mistakes. I’m not expecting Bob Hoover miracles in the cockpit.
I disagree here. If you can’t land a plane on a clear day in perfect conditions then I wouldn’t use the term “highly experienced” to describe them.
It’s a given but that we learn from mistakes. That doesn’t exclude holding people accountable. Boeing is going to regret the day they tacked on the MCAS system like it was an extra coffee maker. I don’t think they took the first crash seriously enough.
This is a video simulating the problem in a 737 simulator, skip to 10:30, notice that as the problem gets worse it becomes nearly impossible to trim back the horizontal stabilizer; and that was with two pilots that knew what was coming and what was causing it.