Originally Posted by
MPN11
IMHO that makes a lot of sense, on several levels. Certainly the ‘persistence’ of MCAS demanding nose down would require a LOT of persistent winding of manual trim if MCAS was not disabled. That incessant input (5 seconds?) is hardly helpful if it takes more than 5 secs to wind it off ... while struggling with everything else ... and then have to do it all again!
Well until you flip the stab trim cutout switches and all become right with the world. So simple, so quick IF you know what you are doing!
Boeing felt this procedure was enough, especially after all MAX pilots worldwide were given specific information on how to deal with inadvertent MCAS activation to allow the plane to continue to fly until their comprehensive fix was implemented by April of 2019 but having it happen again (assuming this was an MCAS issue) clearly demonstrates that some pilots qualified in the MAX can’t handle the task loading and intrepret the situation well enough to apply the simple fix so hence the plane remains grounded until the plane itself can be smarter so as to not require pilots to interpret their own jet. I’m conflicted about many things in this accident: the engineers who couldn’t see the danger in allowing a system to apply overwhelming trim in response to a single sensor input, Boeing management deciding before Lion Air we didn’t need to know about MCAS, and yes the pilots who absolutely should be able to diagnose a trim issue and how to stop it in 7-12 minutes of time before crashing their jet even if they didn’t know WHY the trim was misbehaving. Lots of blame to go around but let’s get a good airplane fixed and flying again.