EuroFlyer wrote:
Why then didn’t they just pull back the throttle ?
The whole MCAS system is there because of the way the engines are mounted, which causes a significant pitch change with application of power. They were in a situation where all they wanted was to keep the nose out of the dirt. Pulling back the power would have added to the nose down movement. If they even had capacity to consider this then I would suggest that is why they did not do it. If it would have helped at all, it would have been at the onset of the problem, not while they already were fighting for control.
The very disturbing thing about this whole thing is that there are several significant factors which will bring the nose of this airplane downwards while at low height and no space to dick around with load relief e.t.c. This really puts you into a situation where everything you do has an adverse effect on what you want to achieve. You are out of trim and overspeed. Taking power off will bring the nose down further, you can’t use the trim as the hand trim can’t overcome the aerodynamic loads, and the electric trim is trying to kill you because it has determined the airplane stalls at some 200 kts over stall speed.
Not a good position and reason enough to ground this thing until a solution is found which gives a much better chance than the current one.
Dimme, thank you for the link.
Everything I have read about these crashes tells me that they got the FHA and SSA wrong. Also as far as I can see, FAR 25.1309 does not forbid a single point cause for a Catastrophic scenario while CS-25.1309 does.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Not a good position and reason enough to ground this thing until a solution is found which gives a much better chance than the current one.
Actually there are no other cheap solutions (on those big engines/small air-frame to gain aerodynamic stability you will have to change air density or gravity while keeping aircraft the same), so it has to be another software fix probably toward simplification and reduced operating range (e.g. capped engine power in slow speeds = require another FMS software hack) and few more pilot training hours and documentation pages or simply the aircraft stays grounded forever?
PS: reducing power is probably a sensible thing to do (engine power/place/weight are not the same but air-frame is still a 737, that should fly with low engine power in a stable fashion with MCAS enabled) but we are not expecting airliners pilots to be as smart as “test pilots/engineers”? especially when fighting the yoke near the ground with 200 POB…
Good article from a guy who obviously knows and appreciates his stuff.You begin to wonder will it ever recover? Recover to the extent that airlines, crews and passengers will actually fly in the thing. Personally I would not. That is perhaps a rather narrow and negative view, but once broke…….
The final stages of his article were interesting in that this may well be a stretch too far and that the airframe is no longer fit for purpose. Where that leaves Boeing, the FAA, and the airlines goodness knows but the question remains that 400 deaths, some would argue needlessly, maybe enough to end the programme.
While there is no doubt Boeing need to get the software fixed and put in some warning systems the real problem rests with pilot training.
Recovery from the excessive nose forward trim situation has not been part of the training for years despite the lessons of forward trim recovery being well known as far back as the days of the B707.
The heart of these accidents is not in the failed system fitted to the 737max but the system that failed to train the pilots to recover the aircraft from the situation that the system failure put them in.
I’m sorry to say it’s the beancounters unwittingly aided and abetted by the enthusiastic young followers of the magenta line that have put us in this position as the stick & rudder luddites like me look on agahst and powerless to stop those who dismiss us as dinosaurs.
I agree A and C, except for the aided part – most would prefer more confidence through stick and rudder vs. the magenta line but the managers in power bow and obey instead of showing resistance!
Just think of the horror (costs) forced onto the traveling public by increasing training/sim sessions. It would be a rounding error in ticket prices and is therefore absolutely unacceptable!
More money for training is needed.
One of the things highlighted in the AOPA article that Peter linked was the American’s relaxed attitude to flying the aircraft visually and without the use of autoflight, this is in direct conflict with the dire warnings from some airline managements I know when it comes to performing a visual approaches especially in the USA.
I believe that the crux of the flying skill crisis facing the airlines is the lack and affordability of GA flying in Europe, 95% of today’s airline pilot recruits have come via a training system that protected them from making any truly independent decisions as thay are so closely monitored throughout training.
The lack of affordability of GA in Europe is partly down to the airline beancounters who insist that GA pays the full price for its regulation and yet are happy to employ pilots who have paid for their own training in full ( and in effect subsidise the airline ).
My solution to the airline flying skill deficit is two fold first the whole industry needs to do all it can to facilitate GA flying and airline managements need to to a policy U turn and encourage their pilots to hand fly the aircraft whenever the workload situation allows.
Can I see this happening in Europe ?………………… No !
I am not sure that stick and rudder training, however good, would have saved the 400 or so lives. As I understand the information which has been published so far, even if all automation was switched off, the crew of these aircraft could not have overcome the forces which took the aircraft into a nose dive and into the ground once the dive had begun. How would training have helped unless it was specific training to deal successfully with a known design or software fault? And did such training exist? Should an aircraft with such a known fault be released into service by the powers that be?
Secondly I spend quite a lot of time as a passenger on airlines, and I rarely have a concern about the crew’s training, whether they are American, European or Asian.
Knowing many airline pilots of different nationalities, as I do, mainly through GA, where I see them exercising stick and rudder skills that I can only aspire to. I don’t think there is much different from those in USA to those in Europe.But things can always be improved which is why most of accident investigation operates a no blame approach.
gallois wrote:
Should an aircraft with such a known fault be released into service by the powers that be?
No.
Since the Wright brothers first flew things have crashed and fallen out of the sky. If we take the fifties, sixties, seventies large numbers of passengers have all perished through a variety of reasons and causes. The vast majority involve some form of human failure. So what does the aviation industry do as we progress? They attempt to manage the human element out. This is well documented and discussed previously. Problem with that is
a) Do not tell the crews that software has been altered. It has the potential to kill you?
b) Take old (proven) airframes, but massively weight them up until they require software to make them fly. Look to a)
c) Manage the human flyers out of the programme. Look to b)
Now lets add 1 experienced guy to the flight crew, overload him with complicated automation, some of which he does not know about, and one dead header who is actually training. Simples really, what could possibly go wrong?
