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by blackflame7000 2309 days ago
No, the incident happened at 8:40 and by 8:43 they couldn't pull the nose up because of the horizontal trim being pushed down. That is a very short amount of time to diagnose something completely unexpected. No matter what they did after 8:43 it was too late. You are aware what trim is right? You can't just fix that by pulling on the elevators if the entire rear airfoil is directed downward.
1 comments
ceejayoz 2309 days ago
When’s the last time a car accident involved three minutes of advance warning of that nature?

The nature of the MCAS issue is it kept firing every 5 seconds, making things progressively harder to counteract. It takes a while to get to the “can’t counteract” point.

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blackflame7000 2309 days ago
It fires every 20 seconds and it takes 2 iterations before it's basically unrecoverable. However, you aren't taking into the account in the "I think I fixed it factor" after the first couple iterations. It's not like they had all 3 minutes to figure it out and fix it. A good amount of time was wasted to see if the fixes had an effect. This answer does a good job of explaining all the things that the pilot has to do in those 3 minutes.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-pilots-on-the-Lion-Air-and...

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ceejayoz 2309 days ago
That they were able to override the MCAS for several minutes is clear indication it was a recoverable issue with the right training. In fact, a different crew in the same plane the day before did just that.

To return back to the original point for a moment:

40 seconds is a shitload more time to react than the 1-2 seconds you've got when oncoming car traffic veers into your lane unexpectedly. Things in cars happen faster than in planes. A couple seconds of inattention in a plane won't kill you in the same way they will in a car.

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