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by asynchronous13 2360 days ago
To be fair, "sudden loss of steering" is different than "sudden loss of power-assisted steering".
1 comments

And it's actually comparable to the _intended_ failure mode of a 737 Max. If the system fails you can't let the computer control the trim, so there are manual trim wheels provided and you switch off electronic trim. Like the steering wheel of a large modern car, these wheels are mechanically connected to the thing you want to change but if you're feeble like me you'll struggle to even move them which is why the computer was in the loop.

As I understand it large trucks existed prior to power-assist, they just hired big strong chaps who could wrestle the steering.

We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check" where you need to exert so-and-so much turning force for so-and-so many seconds or you can't fly their plane. So probably trim wheels need a re-think, whether that happens as part of the 737 Max work, its immediate aftermath or not for years because this incident scares manufacturers away from changing anything about trim.

Seismic shifts in safety considerations do happen, we haven't seen the last of them. And they aren't always ultimately for the better. Titanic had a few effects, many of them really good, but one notable one is that it pushed the narrative that you need to provide and test a LOT of lifeboats on an ocean liner. Titanic, as you can probably all recite, did not have enough lifeboats. But in practice lifeboats are very much a last resort for an ocean liner captain. You've got a whole lot of civilians who are incompetent at sea at the best of times, probably panicking and now you're trying to successfully get them into smaller boats under supervision of a relatively smaller number of crew. Some of them are likely to be injured or even die. A ship's master would prefer _anything_ over putting passengers into lifeboats, except them all drowning. Almost always the sensible course of action, taken by the ship's master, will be to take the still working ship to any port and unload the passengers. Yes even if the ship is somewhat on fire, or has grave engine problems, almost anything except actually sinking right now.

Meanwhile just owning the lifeboats means your crew have to keep testing them and servicing them, each time also has a chance of injury or death as crew fall into the water, boats fall on the crew, and so on. So owning a suite of lifeboats for your ocean liner (which you weren't planning to crash into an iceberg at any time) is probably a net negative in terms of injuries and deaths.

>We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check"

Actually, I think they absolutely should. And then it should be made illegal to have a plane that has any such requirements, so these planes should be deemed unairworthy, and Boeing should be forced to scrap them. Either that, or female pilots should be able to claim discrimination, and every female or otherwise not-strong-enough pilot should get a free lifelong chief pilot salary as part of the settlement.

Basically, this plane should never have been built. It's a 1960s design, and because of crappy regulations that allowed this, Boeing kept making this 1960s tech because it was "grandfathered". Newly-built planes should not be allowed just because they were OK 50 years ago, when they aren't good enough according to modern standards.

How about bogger trim wheels, or servo motors for those?
I'm guessing you meant "bigger"? Otherwise I don't know what a bogger trim is. The wheels already have servo motors, but understandably the cut-out cuts those out also.