[eternalny1]

Boeing should face some major fines for this, and additional regulation is going to be needed to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.

This all seems to come down to the fact they wanted to avoid having to retrain pilots ($$$), so these automation changes were kept in the dark.

The crew before them dealt with this same problem but they successfully cut out the trim system. They got lucky and they should have been more vocal in expressing the fault outside of just a post-flight note about it.

The fact that the 737 can auto-trim itself beyond manual elevator authority, due to a SINGLE faulty AOA sensor, is mind-boggling and scary.

[extrapickles]

From what I can tell, the previous crew did not get lucky, they just followed the checklist which would have solved the issue in this case.

Auto-trim beyond the elevator authority is not a problem as the pilots can take manual control of the trim by grabbing the trim wheel (its in a very obvious spot on the 737).

The actual fix is hard as adding another alarm can get tricky from a UX perspective during an emergency. Probably the only “fix” is to reinforce the value of following the checklist.

[kelnos]

There already is another alarm: an optional "angle-of-attack disagree" indicator that Lion Air was apparently too cheap to install.

Now, that wouldn't have directly pointed to what was wrong, but it would have been pretty suggestive.

(I would suggest, though, that having an optional configuration that lacks robustness for a system that can automatically point the plane toward the ground... a really poor choice of options.)

[twtw]

> and additional regulation is going to be needed to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.

Given that the FAA made the decision that it was fine to not retrain the pilots, sounds like there's going to have to be someone to regulate the regulator.