NTSB Comments on Ethiopian 737 MAX investigation

I don't know why the NTSB would be surprised that the EAIB would treat NTSB comments as anything more than advisory. Of the two versions, I think the EAIB version is more accurate.
 
What I got out of everything I’ve read on the two accidents is both could have been prevented by using electric trim to correct for the MCAS pitch down until they could disable the pitch trim. IIRC the Lion Air crash was being flown by a FO that was put in the 737 not long after his first solo, while the captain was running the checklist. The 737 is a manly man aircraft that is very heavy on the controls without pitch trim even if you get it just a little out.
 
Albany Tom said:
I don't know why the NTSB would be surprised that the EAIB would treat NTSB comments as anything more than advisory. Of the two versions, I think the EAIB version is more accurate.
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How exactly is the EAIB report "more accurate" than the NTSB comments on the EAIB report? Specific examples, please.
 
I only fly the little planes, so don't know what a 737 flies like, but I believe you're correct with one addition. That when mcas goes nuts, in addition to trying to crash the plane with trim, it's also taking over the throttle, which I believe is a change that was never documented. They added the feature, again from memory, to avoid having to retrain the pilots on the new engines, with the theory that the system would make the aircraft fly the same. So it was a feature that was supposed to protect from pilot 'errors' associated with the new engines, it actually enhanced the ability of the system to kill everyone, by making it more difficult to recover in the event of a system failure.

Or in other words, they wanted to reduce training costs, and instead imposed a higher training standard, all without letting the pilots know.
 
Capngrog said:
How exactly is the EAIB report "more accurate" than the NTSB comments on the EAIB report? Specific examples, please.
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Sure, easy. EAIB said that the MCAS system was the cause of the accident. NTSB said that MCAS was a contributor, but that pilot error was also involved. I believe EAIB is more factually correct between those two divergent views. If there were a version that stated that the cause was MCAS, but that generally speaking, highly skilled pilots could keep MCAS from crashing the aircraft, I might agree that was better than either official version. Ten seconds or less, to troubleshoot a system fault in a system where the system does not operate as they were told is not a lot of time, in my view.
 
Albany Tom said:
it's also taking over the throttle,
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That is not correct. The crew failed to reduce takeoff thrust. MCAS has zero to do with engine control. There are volumes of factual info on this.
Albany Tom said:
highly skilled pilots could keep MCAS from crashing the aircraft
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This is your most accurate statement as better skilled pilots actually kept the Lion flight from crashing. When the lesser skilled or trained pilots were involved it did crash in both the Lion and EA flights.
 
Proper training would have prevented the accident. Also, according to the NTSB, “the airplane’s impact with a foreign object, which damaged the AOA sensor and caused the erroneous AOA values.”
I agree with the NTSB on this one.
 
Ok, I'll agree that if MCAS doesn't have a capability to control throttle, and I believe you if you've researched it, then it's more likely an average crew could compensate.

But I won't agree that MCAS isn't a hack, that its failure isn't primary cause of the accident.

My issue with Max is that to me it's accountants and marketing people hiding risk from people, and for damage control they blame the pilots.
 
Albany Tom said:
But I won't agree that MCAS isn't a hack, that its failure isn't primary cause of the accident.
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Well if you think it wasn't a training or skill issue then perhaps you can explain how 2 pilots were able keep a MAX flying with a runaway MCAS that 3 other pilots couldn't? As mentioned this topic has been beat to death but you're still entitled to your opinion.;)
 
Bell206 said:
Well if you think it wasn't a training or skill issue then perhaps you can explain how 2 pilots were able keep a MAX flying with a runaway MCAS that 3 other pilots couldn't? As mentioned this topic has been beat to death but you're still entitled to your opinion.;)
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It has been. I don't expect anyone's views to change, and that's ok. My view is that the aircraft put the pilots in a situation where a pilot of average training and skill may not survive it. That skill and training may make the situation survivable, but not necessarily. I think the statistics actually prove that. An analogy would be that you don't put salt on your sidewalk, and only 2 of 5 pedestrians fall and break their heads. Not having exceptional balance isn't causal.

How did the US pilots survive it? To me, that's simple. I believe it's partly training, and partially cultural. That a US trained pilot sees a brand new 737 as the weird meld of 1950's and 1990's technology that it is, and they expect it to occasionally try to kill them. They trust their skills over airplane's systems. They remember the bits about turning off the automation when it goes nuts. They have no illusion that they're flying a modern aircraft.
 
Albany Tom said:
I only fly the little planes, so don't know what a 737 flies like, but I believe you're correct with one addition. That when mcas goes nuts, in addition to trying to crash the plane with trim, it's also taking over the throttle, which I believe is a change that was never documented. They added the feature, again from memory, to avoid having to retrain the pilots on the new engines, with the theory that the system would make the aircraft fly the same. So it was a feature that was supposed to protect from pilot 'errors' associated with the new engines, it actually enhanced the ability of the system to kill everyone, by making it more difficult to recover in the event of a system failure.

Or in other words, they wanted to reduce training costs, and instead imposed a higher training standard, all without letting the pilots know.
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It’s not really correcting for “pilot errors”. It’s making the new plane fly more like the older planes so the FAA doesn’t require a new type rating which would create all sorts of problems for operators which operate both the older and newer aircraft and negate much of the benefit of the 737. A plane with rear mounted engines vs one with wing mounted engines will be a much larger difference as far as control and flying goes yet pilots can easily transition from one to the other with a new type rating.

A much more difficult problem to recover from is runaway pitch trim and every aircraft that has it can potentially have that problem, which is why we train for it in jets. In the case of MCAS error you still have pitch trim until you disable it. Regardless of what knowledge or training they did or didn’t get on MCAS, the errors experienced will be not as dramatic as runaway pitch trim and they were trained for that.
 
Albany Tom said:
That when mcas goes nuts, in addition to trying to crash the plane with trim, it's also taking over the throttle, which I believe is a change that was never documented.
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MCAS provides a nose-down trim input for just under 9 seconds. On the pre-modification aircraft, there would be a 5 second pause and then, if the triggering condition continued to exist, the process would repeat. That was all it did. Today, it will only activate once and will be disabled if there is a significant disagreement between the left and right AoA data.

On the accident Ethiopian flight, the crew did a LVLCH (level change) departure with the MCP (mode control panel) altitude preselect set to something in the low 20,000's. (I think it was FL230 but don't remember exactly). In this mode, when LVLCH was selected, the auto-throttles go into "N1" mode with Climb N1 selected. In that mode, the auto-throttles set and maintain climb power and the autopilot and flight director command pitch to hold the airspeed that is set in the MCP speed window.

The important thing about this mode is that the auto-throttles will maintain the Climb power setting regardless of how fast the airplane is going.

The Ethiopian pilots never disconnected the auto-throttles (which is on several of the non-normal checklists that would have applied to their situation) and never pulled the thrust levers back. Airspeed reached a peak of nearly 400 KIAS. For reference, Vmo is 340 KIAS. The excessive speed made it more difficult to control the mis-trimmed airplane.

What the NTSB is pointing out is that the simple application of the main electric trim inputs (thumb switches on each yoke) would have stopped MCAS and allowed the pilot to trim-out all of the nose-down trim input that MCAS had made.

On the Lion Air accident flight, the Captain had 21 MCAS activations. When each one occurred, he used his yoke thumb switches to trim back up which stopped the MCAS activation and removed MCAS' invalid trim inputs. After the programed waiting period, MCAS would activate again and each time he responding by trimming up. He could have continued to fly the airplane indefinitely in that condition.

His (relatively inexperienced) F/O couldn't find the checklist in the QRH (quick reference handbook) so the Captain transferred control of the airplane to the F/O so that the Captain could find the checklist. When he made that transfer, the Captain failed to tell the F/O that he was repeatedly having to trim the nose up and that the airplane was repeatedly trimming it back down again. The F/O had 5 additional MCAS activations while he was flying. He stopped the first 4 but didn't trim out the nose-down inputs that MCAS had made so the aircraft's trim moved progressively toward nose-down with each activation. The 5th activation reached the full nose-down position and aircraft control was lost shortly thereafter.

On the Ethiopian Air accident flight the Captain, who was also the flying pilot, seemed focused on engaging the autopilot. He started trying to engage it at 400' on takeoff and continued to retry repeatedly throughout the flight. The 737 A/P will not engage when the airplane is out of trim. That's something that every 737 pilot must know so that we know to trim the airplane before engaging the autopilot during flight. The various checklists that they may have followed all also included the instruction to disconnect the autopilot and auto-throttles as this is one of the first steps in any situation where you have bad data. You don't want the A/P or A/T to follow the bad data and the "A" side, which is the autopilot that the Captain kept trying to engage, was the side with the bad data.

The Ethiopian Air crew stopped MCAS twice. Once when they re-extended the flaps (MCAS is inhibited with flaps extended) and later when they flipped the stab trim cutout switches. In both cases they reversed those actions which allowed MCAS to reactivate. Eventually, they reached full nose-down stabilizer trim at an airspeed over 390 KIAS which made it impossible to maintain control.

What should they have done?

1. Disconnect the autopilot and auto-throttles. This prevents the automation from following the bad data.
2. Fly the airplane. Set a known pitch/power and keep the airplane in-trim with the thumb switches on the yoke. All of that was working.
3. Identify the problem. They had 1 (but not both) stick shakers, an "IAS DISAGREE" message (and different airspeed readings on each primary display), repeated uncommand stabilizer trim movement, and, eventually, an overspeed warning.

Since the airplane was now stable, with one pilot hand-flying, they could have picked any of those checklists to start but the RUNAWAY STABILIZER checklist would have been the best choice since it directly affects control of the flight. It would have quickly led them to disabling the electric trim, and MCAS with it, with the stab trim cutout switches. Even if they started elsewhere, they would have eventually gotten there. As long as the pilot-flying was actually flying the airplane, there wasn't any need to rush, and that flying-pilot should soon realize that the trim keeps running nose-down which would lead them back to the RUNAWAY STABILIZER checklist.

Since there is a standby instrument display, it isn't difficult to figure out which pilot has the good instrument data, and which one doesn't, so that control can be switched to the pilot with good data.

These were not the first accidents that could have been prevented if the pilots prioritized flying the airplane first. My airline has the following printed, in big bold lettering, at the top of our QRC (quick reference checklist) which is the first place we go for an emergency checklist. It is there to remind us what is most important in an emergency.

FLY THE AIRPLANE -- SILENCE THE WARNING -- CONFIRM THE EMERGENCY
 
Albany Tom said:
They remember the bits about turning off the automation when it goes nuts.
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I believe this should be SOP for any pilot. If something goes wonky ... get it out of the way and fly the plane ...
 
Daleandee said:
I believe this should be SOP for any pilot. If something goes wonky ... get it out of the way and fly the plane ...
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Should be, yes. The problem is when you are flying passengers for a living those people are expecting the smoothest ride possible and the culture creases professional pilots that turn the autopilot on anytime the limitations allow it and ride the autothrottles from run up power to touchdown. When there’s a problem instead of having the first instinct to fly the airplane, the first instinct is to fix the automation so the plane can go back to flying itself normally.
 
Albany Tom said:
I don't know why the NTSB would be surprised that the EAIB would treat NTSB comments as anything more than advisory. Of the two versions, I think the EAIB version is more accurate.
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so you agree with them that the flight became unrecoverable when the MCAS system acted badly? That there was no way a pilot could have done something to correct it?

what is your disagreement based on?
 
Albany Tom said:
Ten seconds or less, to troubleshoot a system fault in a system where the system does not operate as they were told is not a lot of time, in my view.
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This ignores all of the actions that could have been taken to prevent the aircraft to get into that situation where they had 10 seconds or less.

As to the cause, here is what the NTSB actually stated:

We agree that the uncommanded nose-down inputs from the airplane’s MCAS system should be part of the probable cause for this accident. However, the draft probable cause indicates that the MCAS alone caused the airplane to be “unrecoverable,” and we believe that the probable cause also needs to acknowledge that appropriate crew management of the event, per the procedures that existed at the time, would have allowed the crew to recover the airplane even when faced with the uncommanded nose-down inputs. We propose that the probable cause in the final report present the following causal factors to fully reflect the circumstances of this accident:
• uncommanded airplane-nose-down inputs from the MCAS due to erroneous AOA values and
• the flight crew’s inadequate use of manual electric trim and management of thrust to maintain airplane control.

In addition, we propose that the following contributing factors be included:
• the operator’s failure to ensure that its flight crews were prepared to properly respond to uncommanded stabilizer trim movement in the manner outlined in Boeing’s flight crew operating manual (FCOM) bulletin and the FAA’s emergency airworthiness directive (AD) (both issued 4 months before the accident) and
• the airplane’s impact with a foreign object, which damaged the AOA sensor and caused the erroneous AOA values.
​
From my assessment, I think this is dead on.
 
Albany Tom said:
Sure, easy. EAIB said that the MCAS system was the cause of the accident. NTSB said that MCAS was a contributor, but that pilot error was also involved. I believe EAIB is more factually correct between those two divergent views. If there were a version that stated that the cause was MCAS, but that generally speaking, highly skilled pilots could keep MCAS from crashing the aircraft, I might agree that was better than either official version. Ten seconds or less, to troubleshoot a system fault in a system where the system does not operate as they were told is not a lot of time, in my view.
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But what about all of the flat factual misrepresentations and omissions set forth in the EAIB final report that led to their final conclusion?
 
Albany Tom said:
My view is that the aircraft put the pilots in a situation where a pilot of below average training and skill may not survive it.
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If you were to say this, then I would agree. While I agree that the pilots should not have been put in this position by the Boeing design, I simply do not understand why any pilot qualified to be flying passengers would not have used the electric trim to trim nose up in response to the MCAS application of the nose down input, and had they done so, the plane was capable of controlled flight long enough to run the appropriate check list and sort the problem.
 
I don't remember whether this has been addressed: Did the preceding crew that successfully handled the uncommanded nose-down input squawk the event?
 
Palmpilot said:
I don't remember whether this has been addressed: Did the preceding crew that successfully handled the uncommanded nose-down input squawk the event?
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That was part of the Lion Air Flt 610 scenario (29 Oct 2018). I believe that the Indonesian Lion Air 610 crash of October, 2018 was due, in part, to an aircraft that was not airworthy and should not have even left the gate for departure. That B-737MAX had experienced severe flight control problems (MCAS) on the previous flight, and these problems had not been properly remedied prior to the fatal flight. It should also be noted that the crew of the previous flight had a B737 pilot riding the jump seat, and the three pilots had been able to successfully deal with the runaway trim caused by the MCAS. Of course, matters were not helped at all by that crew's failure to adequately communicate their flight control difficulties to the accident flight crew (or to other appropriate airline personnel). I could go on and on about this crash, but I won't.

The Ethiopian crew, however, had about 4 months of "heads up" on the potential for MCAS control difficulties. They either ignored or forgot all about the FAA-issued ADs on the problem.
 
Palmpilot said:
I don't remember whether this has been addressed: Did the preceding crew that successfully handled the uncommanded nose-down input squawk the event?
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They did, though what they wrote up was not a good description of the problem.

The Lion Air aircraft had a history of write-ups which led the airline to replace the left AoA vane/sensor. Unfortunately, they installed an unairworthy part that had not been properly overhauled. This was the part which sent the invalid AoA data to the left ADIRU which generated the unscheduled MCAS activations on the airplane's next two flights.

On that incident flight, the crew also did not perform well. The jumpseater identified the runaway stabilizer condition and led the crew to the correct procedure. The truly unbelievable part is that even with a continuous stick shaker (leaving no stall warming protection), continuous overspeed warning, disabled electric trim, no autopilot, and invalid air data on the Captain's instruments, THEY CONTINUED THE FLIGHT to their scheduled destination.
 
Albany Tom said:
Sure, easy. EAIB said that the MCAS system was the cause of the accident. NTSB said that MCAS was a contributor, but that pilot error was also involved. I believe EAIB is more factually correct between those two divergent views. If there were a version that stated that the cause was MCAS, but that generally speaking, highly skilled pilots could keep MCAS from crashing the aircraft, I might agree that was better than either official version. Ten seconds or less, to troubleshoot a system fault in a system where the system does not operate as they were told is not a lot of time, in my view.
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right few accidents are caused by one factor.
 
:) I knew this wasn't going to be a popular opinion. I'm OK with that. The pilots did not cause the accident, that's absurd. The plane had a malfunction. The argument is that some of the crews were capable of compensating for the aircraft failure before the crash. Ok, some did. But for whatever reason, some couldn't. It took 2 crashes for people to figure that out, and apparently some are still arguing about it. How many should we have put up with?

If the result were to be written as pilots not correcting the error as a secondary issue, I'd be fine with that. But MCAS, in and of itself, led to the crash. I don't think that's arguable. It was a lousy design.

As to the accuracy of the reports, I didn't say the EAIB report was completely accurate. I said that I felt it was more accurate than the NTSB report. I believe that's true.

I do agree that most accidents are caused by more than one factor. Second causal factor of these? Lack of oversight of Boeing on changes to the 737.
 
Albany Tom said:
:) I knew this wasn't going to be a popular opinion. I'm OK with that. The pilots did not cause the accident, that's absurd. The plane had a malfunction. The argument is that some of the crews were capable of compensating for the aircraft failure before the crash. Ok, some did. But for whatever reason, some couldn't. It took 2 crashes for people to figure that out, and apparently some are still arguing about it. How many should we have put up with?

If the result were to be written as pilots not correcting the error as a secondary issue, I'd be fine with that. But MCAS, in and of itself, led to the crash. I don't think that's arguable. It was a lousy design.

As to the accuracy of the reports, I didn't say the EAIB report was completely accurate. I said that I felt it was more accurate than the NTSB report. I believe that's true.

I do agree that most accidents are caused by more than one factor. Second causal factor of these? Lack of oversight of Boeing on changes to the 737.
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What expertise do you possess that the NTSB does not that makes your opinion more valid than theirs?
 
Albany Tom said:
:) I knew this wasn't going to be a popular opinion. I'm OK with that. The pilots did not cause the accident, that's absurd. The plane had a malfunction. The argument is that some of the crews were capable of compensating for the aircraft failure before the crash. Ok, some did. But for whatever reason, some couldn't. It took 2 crashes for people to figure that out, and apparently some are still arguing about it. How many should we have put up with?

If the result were to be written as pilots not correcting the error as a secondary issue, I'd be fine with that. But MCAS, in and of itself, led to the crash. I don't think that's arguable. It was a lousy design.

As to the accuracy of the reports, I didn't say the EAIB report was completely accurate. I said that I felt it was more accurate than the NTSB report. I believe that's true.

I do agree that most accidents are caused by more than one factor. Second causal factor of these? Lack of oversight of Boeing on changes to the 737.
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How much stock do you own in Airbus? How much 121 time do you have? You had the problem and how it could have been correctly clearly spelled out to you by a 737 pilot, but continue to fight this. Clearly you have an axe to grind.
 
dmspilot said:
What expertise do you possess that the NTSB does not that makes your opinion more valid than theirs?
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I'll flip it around. Why would anyone on this board base their opinion on this problem solely on an NTSB statement? That two airplanes were lost, and that the crews couldn't recover them isn't opinion. That's a fact. The opinion piece is where NTSB said that with proper training the pilots would be able to recover, based on the fact that the US trained crews did. I believe that's opinion, but more importantly, I'm arguing that what matters is the actual state of pilots. Again, two crashes, one after the memo. How many crashes should they allow before they pulled it? Three? Four? So re-writing it as a mutual plane-pilot problem is to me just a distortion of the truth. My opinion.
 
Albany Tom said:
I'll flip it around. Why would anyone on this board base their opinion on this problem solely on an NTSB statement? That two airplanes were lost, and that the crews couldn't recover them isn't opinion. That's a fact. The opinion piece is where NTSB said that with proper training the pilots would be able to recover, based on the fact that the US trained crews did. I believe that's opinion, but more importantly, I'm arguing that what matters is the actual state of pilots. Again, two crashes, one after the memo. How many crashes should they allow before they pulled it? Three? Four? So re-writing it as a mutual plane-pilot problem is to me just a distortion of the truth. My opinion.
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You completely butchered the facts in your Post #6, so it seems like you have already drawn a conclusion based on your own ignorance and decline to consider information that contradicts your conclusion. It's called confirmation bias.
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
How much stock do you own in Airbus? How much 121 time do you have? You had the problem and how it could have been correctly clearly spelled out to you by a 737 pilot, but continue to fight this. Clearly you have an axe to grind.
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What does Airbus have to do with anything? I'm stating that Boeing screwed up the Max, and that led to the crash of two airplanes. I think that's fact. I think Boeing did try really hard to deny that fact. I think the justice department agreed.

No axe to grind. A better question to ask would be "did you lose any family members on one of those flights?" I didn't. That might have given me an axe to grind.

I don't understand defending bad behavior of corporations. They're not that important. We treat them almost as if they were people. I believe the justice department criminal settlement was something like 2 billion dollars? Do people really believe that the justice department treated them unfairly?

Boeing is fine. We still let them build commercial aircraft, and we even still let them build 737's. They don't need any cheerleaders.
 
I think the statement that the aircraft were unrecoverable is only fact if you caveat that by saying that the aircraft only became unrecoverable due to a lack of the PF actually flying the aircraft and applying an existing procedure that would have remedied the situation. 400+ knots with the stab cutout switches thrown, trying to trim with the manual wheel, is nowhere to live. That would never have been their situation had they 1) disconnected A/T and flown the airplane like most pilots would, or 2) followed the runaway stab trim ORC/QRH, which would have directed them to do so immediately. I'm not saying the pilots were the entire cause of the accident. There was a malfunction that was casual. But their handling of the malfunction was also casual.
 
Wonder if there’s a misunderstanding of what causal means in NTSB/AIB reports.

The two MCAS crashes were entirely different affairs from beginning to end.
 
TCABM said:
Wonder if there’s a misunderstanding of what causal means in NTSB/AIB reports.

The two MCAS crashes were entirely different affairs from beginning to end.
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Also good points.

To the OP, I don't think many (if even any) pilots are saying "these guys crashed a perfectly good airplane because they weren't skilled enough". It wasn't a perfectly good airplane. That is cause #1. And that is what Boeing has paid big money over. There was a lack of training to and socialization of (by design) a new flight control subsystem (MCAS). But what that argument fails to consider, is the fact that had existing procedures for runaway stab trim been executed properly (or at all in once instance), both aircraft would have been recovered. In the cold writing of a mishap report, I think there is some grey area there, but I would tend to call this part non-casual, but still a finding of importance which would warrant a recommendation (i.e. do the training).
 
I did think that MCAS had input to auto throttle as well as trim, and that does change my opinion a bit about recovery. But in terms of what caused the accident, it seems clear that two different crews were not able to recover from the failure, even with notices going out after the previous crash. To me that's strong evidence that those pilots just couldn't do it...either they didn't know how, or they couldn't react quickly enough.

I read NTSB as including pilot error as part of the cause if it is POSSIBLE for a crew to recover. But I think it's clear that not every crew is going to be capable of doing that in this case. To me the question is, could the average crew recover the aircraft when presented with the failure during an actual flight? For non US trained pilots, I think the answer here is "no", based on the two crashes.
 
Albany Tom said:
To me the question is, could the average crew recover the aircraft when presented with the failure during an actual flight? For non US trained pilots, I think the answer here is "no", based on the two crashes.
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Seems that was an early discovery i.e. that the foreign trained pilots were not as well trained as the US pilots. The facts seem to bear that out ...
 
Declaring a single cause would seem to go against the accident-chain theory, i.e., that there is a chain of events that leads to an accident, and that breaking any link in the chain may prevent the accident.
 
Palmpilot said:
Declaring a single cause would seem to go against the accident-chain theory, i.e., that there is a chain of events that leads to an accident, and that breaking any link in the chain may prevent the accident.
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Good reminder.

I understand the boundaries of incident investigations - they may be bounded by what corrective actions some entity or persons can employ to prevent future incidents (because when you find a cause, you can develop a preventative corrective action). If we step beyond the engineering, piloting, and training “stuff” that bounds some of these investigations and dig deeper, there are causal factors that are closer to the “root” causes - things like accounting, legal, management culture, etc.

I’m stating the obvious, but I got sucked into the MCAS/design vs pilot error/training while reading this thread and then remembered some of the deeper causes beyond the techy stuff.
 
Albany Tom said:
I did think that MCAS had input to auto throttle as well as trim, and that does change my opinion a bit about recovery. But in terms of what caused the accident, it seems clear that two different crews were not able to recover from the failure, even with notices going out after the previous crash. To me that's strong evidence that those pilots just couldn't do it...either they didn't know how, or they couldn't react quickly enough.

I read NTSB as including pilot error as part of the cause if it is POSSIBLE for a crew to recover. But I think it's clear that not every crew is going to be capable of doing that in this case. To me the question is, could the average crew recover the aircraft when presented with the failure during an actual flight? For non US trained pilots, I think the answer here is "no", based on the two crashes.
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I'd liken it to the crew missing a really critical window of opportunity to do the right things in order to recover. Recognition and application of the appropriate procedure were the missing link. Which goes back to training of course. You can blame that on MCAS, but another type of stab runaway would present similarly, and would also be corrected using the same procedure in either case. Like I mentioned before, if you are trying to manually trim out of this at 400 knots, it is like trying to pull a stop sign out of concrete. In the sim (which fortunately is the only place I have encountered this), you have to be in the mid 200's (or ideally lower) to be able to manually trim effectively, barring superhuman strength. It is quite controllable in that regime, but very much not if you get fast (compounded in these cases by also being pretty nose low). I imagine these guys got fast in a hurry.

But like 455BU said, this isn't the whole story. Those crews shouldn't have been put in this position in the first place.
 
Albany Tom said:
:) I knew this wasn't going to be a popular opinion. I'm OK with that. The pilots did not cause the accident, that's absurd. The plane had a malfunction. The argument is that some of the crews were capable of compensating for the aircraft failure before the crash. Ok, some did. But for whatever reason, some couldn't. It took 2 crashes for people to figure that out, and apparently some are still arguing about it. How many should we have put up with?

If the result were to be written as pilots not correcting the error as a secondary issue, I'd be fine with that. But MCAS, in and of itself, led to the crash. I don't think that's arguable. It was a lousy design.

As to the accuracy of the reports, I didn't say the EAIB report was completely accurate. I said that I felt it was more accurate than the NTSB report. I believe that's true.

I do agree that most accidents are caused by more than one factor. Second causal factor of these? Lack of oversight of Boeing on changes to the 737.
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pretty spot on. The points that they may not be trained like US pilots isn’t wron in and of itself- but no pilot should be handed a plane that wants to crash itself!

we would howl up a storm against an IA tgat returned our spam can out of annual in such a condition!
 
Albany Tom said:
I'm stating that Boeing screwed up the Max,
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Albany Tom said:
I did think that MCAS had input to auto throttle as well as trim,
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Based on your comments it appears you don’t fully understand the purpose of the MCAS. The MAX flies perfectly fine without it. It was only installed to meet one Part 25 certification requirement at the extremes of the flight envelope where no airliner flies operationally. It wasn’t Boeings requirement but the FAAs. Also, technically the MCAS didn’t fail but merely acted as it was designed based on the data it received which was primarily from one AoA indicator. The fact this was an equipment failure (of the AoA) makes this this no different than any other equipment failure which usually has some sort of correction procedure that a pilot must react to in a timely fashion. However, not all pilots react to those failures at the same level no matter where they are to include the US.
Albany Tom said:
The opinion piece is where NTSB said that with proper training the pilots would be able to recover,
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FYI: the NTSB doesn’t write opinion papers as they are not permitted or accepted. This is why you will see some probable causes listed as “unknown at this time” which is the last reason any NTSB IIC wants to put. As to training you'll find the statistics are against you in that its been proven time and time again that proper training will affect the outcome of situations like this. If you want to point fingers you need to place some of that on the operator as it was shown in several reports that EA's internal culture didn't meet certain minimums as well. In my opinion, they set up their own crews to fail.
 
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