[zelienople]

Finally, one lone voice cuts through the hysteria and garbage and speaks the unpopular truth.

The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people.

You don't like it, but it's the truth.

[salawat]

No... Not really.

I mean, I agree with you to a point. There is a delight taken by manufacturers being able to ostensibly cut training costs.

But in this case, the fact was the plane itself was unsoundly engineered. Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator. The pilot cannot be the primary carrier of blame when the equipment in the best hands available had only a 66% chance of having the pilot recover AFTER being made aware of what to expect.

Boeing is definitely the right one on whom to shoulder the blame here.

EDIT: Okay, On further consideration, I do see where you're coming from with the article's focus on "airmanship". My primary contention, however, remains. You can put a dangerous plane in the hands of a good airman, and you still have an airman flying a dangerous plane. That is the issue most seem to be bothered by. Even if the "modern pilot" doesn't have that visceral connection to their planes, that's no excuse for a manufacturer to produce one that requires extreme levels of airmanship to divine the existence of a system they couldn't admit the existence, severity, or implementation of to regulators for fear of not meeting deadlines.

Again, I agree with you to a point, and believe you did make a good point. Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think it should detract from Boeing's clear malfeasance here.

[zelienople]

You wrote "Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator".

This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false.

The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta.

You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.

In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, “[Expletive], we’re dead.” And in this, I am referring to the human species.

[salawat]

What you seem to mistakenly believe I'm referring to was the third pilot in the Lion Air penultimate flight. I was not, but it is a testament to good Crew Resource Management that he was able to pick out the right course of action when other pilots were not.

I'm referring to the test pilots test flying the original proposed software fix before they were forced to reclassify the FCC failure condition to catastrophic severity due to one of them not successfully saving the aircraft in a simulated single-event upset. Three pilots were tapped by the FAA to try to recover from a single event upset which would result in erroneous MCAS activation.

The two military pilots saved the plane. The civilian test pilot didn't, resulting in an elevation of failure in the FCC on which MCAS runs to catastrophic, requiring a fundamental redesign.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly...

I assume the Seattle Times is an acceptable source?

>You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.

Okay. Just stop. I've been knee deep in the investigation and follow-up of these disasters since about March, and had honed in on the most likely root cause given a combination of information on motives (Southwest rebate), culture issues (McDonnell Douglas management strategy from their merger), fundamental hardware/software design (single AoA sensor, no cross-checking), basic aerodynamics (consequences of the engines on end behavior), test piloting (Royal Aeronautical Society, D. P. Davies interviews), experience with control systems, and research into regulatory minutiae.

Take a spin back through my comment history if you'd like. I was working on reverse engineering with only publically available information, and got to the right conclusions within about a month. Got to sit back and check conclusions off until the Seattle Times formally published their inside story in June. Suffice it to say, I'm probably the absolute last person you'd want to accuse of "not knowing anything and being manipulable". The 737 MAX MCAS fiasco was an absolute travesty from the get go, and any competent computer scientist would have told them that a computer handling such a critical function must be very carefully designed, programmed, and clearly communicated to the end user.

I'm very opinionated in this case, mainly because I've taken the time to become informed enough to truly comprehend how badly Boeing screwed the pooch. And considering they've had whistleblower testimony that the single AoA sensor, no cross-check decision was made specifically to avoid having the FAA refuse to certify the plane on time, that eliminates the idea this was "good-faith", as good-faith would have been honoring your responsibility to the public to design a fundamentally safe and well documented aircraft in full compliance with all regulations.

Whistleblower testimony first mentioned here, in a 60 Minutes Expose on the MAX.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QytfYyHmxtc.

Thank you muchly, sir, and kindly take your misinformed speculation about my subject area knowledge elsewhere. It's my business to know why things fail, even if everyone involved is trying to do their best from keeping me from finding it. Physics don't lie. People, and especially businesses with everything on the line, on the other hand, do.

I have a great deal of respect for pilots, but I'm enough of an engineer to know when someone is putting an operator in serious danger. Boeing checked ALL the boxes.

I've said my piece. Good day, sir.

[cmurf]

FTA: "another of Boeing’s bewildering failures" he refers to the MCAS implementation as "throwing the airplane wildly out of trim" and "No one I spoke to from Boeing, Airbus or the N.T.S.B. could explain the reasoning here."

You are trying to hold pilots accountable in some vague sense, so what of holding Boeing and the FAA accountable in a non-vague sense? How is the actual delivered form of MCAS reasonable? How do you expect, given available factual flight data from both flights, MCAS induced mistrim to be avoided? Do you agree that it must be avoided at the low altitudes both of these flights were at, because it's not possible to recover from mistrim at low altitude?

If this were just about pilot training and certification, why are these airplanes grounded around the world? You really think the problem is just with a handful of "3rd world" pilots? Do you even realize that the Ethiopian Airlines pilot was one of their most experienced, and this experience as a fighter pilot is demonstrated in his recovery attempts shown in the flight data?

I mean, it's almost like some people don't know what they're talking about, yet call their nonsensical prattle "the truth" because they enjoy trying to aggravate thinking people, quite possibly the only actual skill they have.