[del82]

But the difference is not only do the pilots of a commercial airliner have vastly more training and experience than your average driver, but they literally have a list of things to try (and extensive training on following the list) in the case of a malfunction like an uncommanded nose-down.

Imagine that the failure that caused the nose-down wasn't a failed AOA sensor giving bad readings to MCAS, but some other reason that _also_ wouldn't have been solved by pulling back on the yoke, but would have been by completing some later step on the checklist. Suppose the pilots didn't follow the checklist. Would that be enough information to say that Boeing is responsible?

To be sure, in this case the pilots may have followed the checklist! It may well be the case that Boeing is completely responsible! The checklist items might not have worked, or there may have been a good reason that the pilots didn't follow it, or the checklist might have been crazy, or they might not have had time to do what needed to be done, etc. There's still a whole lot that's not known (or hasn't been released) about what happened.

I'm just not sure that the current evidence, _viz_ that Boeing made an internal software change, that they didn't explicitly call it out to pilots, and that there's no difference in the actions prescribed in the event of an uncommanded nose-down pre- and post-change, is enough to say that the fault is entirely Boeing's for this accident.

[llukas]

More training and experience is a problem as previous plane model behaved differently. Pilot trained this situation and plane did X and now does Y - you don't really see the problem? - now pilot has extra burden to quickly determine if something else is wrong as plane behaves differently than pilot was trained to.

And you are writing this after many, many accidents that root cause was pilot not exactly knowing what or why something happens with a plane or plane autopilot (ie. AF 447)

Being apologetic of cost cutting on safety issues is dumb as it erodes culture of safety and encourages others to skimp on safety.

[twtw]

> Pilot trained this situation and plane did X and now does Y - you don't really see the problem? - now pilot has extra burden to quickly determine if something else is wrong as plane behaves differently than pilot was trained to.

The pilots did not train for a specific root cause of a fault. They trained for a symptom (uncommanded nose down), and the procedure for that situation was unchanged.

> extra burden to quickly determine if something else is wrong

This isn't an extra burden. Pilots aren't doing root cause analysis for failures while they are responding to them. They are trained to try actions in a specific order until something works. It's not like the checklist used to have one action on it and now it has two - the solution in this case was a standard action on the standard checklist.

Pilots do not look around, say "ah, electrical short in elevator actuator" or "ah, bad angle of attack sensor" and then take a single action.

[llukas]

They did train recovery scenario on simulator and know how plane should behave (based on old model knowledge) - now it behaves differently. All you wrote is they should ignore it as not important detail and stick to the checklist.

Unexpected situations are always extra cognitive burden.

[ansible]

> Unexpected situations are always extra cognitive burden.

From my perspective, it is a human factors issue that Boeing failed to consider.

Yes, the emergency procedure remained the same, but even well-trained pilots are still people. And changing the behavior of the system in such situations was not well-advised.