none of the protections an Airbus has will ever fly the airplane into the ground.
I agree this 737 system is a badly designed cockup which would confuse even the pilots who know how to disable it, but an Airbus doesn’t have GPWS based protection; it will fly happily into the ground – as Germanwings has shown – in any mode including the alternate law or whatever it is called.
“They are trying replicate the NG handling”
I am not sure what are the MCAS specs to 1/ pass certification tests or 2/ to fly same as the NG?
I understand you can have 1/ without having 2/, the latter is more relevant to common type differences
But, unlike trim/autopilot it was never stated that you can hand fly B737Max without MCAS (ignoring aspects in 2/), so my assumption you can’t but probably I am wrong on this: most of what we have now tend to blame sensor/system malfunction on top of pilot inputs…
Ibra wrote:
most of what we have now tend to blame sensor/system malfunction on top of pilot inputs…
Obviously something is very wrong somewhere when pilots do not know how the plane works, and don’t know how to fly it, or even can’t fly it. That is a very complicated problem on several levels. A bug in the software, a little error in the design, combined with inexperienced pilots, is a much simpler problem and therefore the more probable one. (at least until we now for sure what the problem is 
)
This is the memory checklist for trim runaway
So it is possible to overpower the trim wheel – if you are aware it is running away.
However, the trim can move very fast
Also, in one of the crashes, reportedly the LHS had 8k hrs and the RHS had 200hrs, so the plane was being flown single-pilot, practically speaking.
Peter wrote:
So it is possible to overpower the trim wheel – if you are aware it is running away.
From what I’ve read, the problem is that the symptoms of the MCAS going haywire are different from a runaway trim. In a runaway trim, the wheel moves continuously thus giving a pretty clear indication of what’s going on. However, if MCAS intervenes, it only moves the wheel a bit and then stops, IOW you have an intermittent trim wheel movement. Without knowledge of the system, I’d say it’s not overly likely you will identify this as runaway trim and act accordingly.
Peter wrote:
the RHS had 200hrs
Has been corrected to 380 hours. Not much more but for the record.
Peter wrote:
but an Airbus doesn’t have GPWS based protection; it will fly happily into the ground – as Germanwings has shown – in any mode including the alternate law or whatever it is called.
Hardly comparable…. any plane will let itself be flown into the ground on pilots command. But when the planes insist on doing that on their own then it gets worrying.
For the germanwings chash, we need to take into account that copi was crazy. I mean that gpws wouldn’t have changed anything unless take control despite pilot action, which is not its effect. The guy perfeectly knew what to do and doing the same with any 737 would have done the same, unless i missed something.
I hope any plane would have done the same. You need to be able to act and disengage the electronics.
You can plan for the crew who accidentally gets in a dangerous situation, but not really for the guy who’ll pull circuit breakers to disable safeguards for criminal purposes (not sure he did)
Some more bad news for Boeing.
It looks like it is more complicated. The pilots did apparently follow the manufacturer’s procedures.
This is frightening… Actually the mcas pitched the plane down against trim stopped and both pilot action… There was no way to escape once Vfe was reached…
