Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by twtw 2695 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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.

> 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.