Originally Posted by
GarageYears
Firstly, as it stands the cause of the second crash is unknown. Fingers pointing at MCAS are speculation, at least until the interim report is published. It may well be a better narrative than other options.
Notwithstanding that, the Ethiopian environment is way different than those that occurred with Lion Air. Check out the MSL altitude of both departure airfields...
Finally, the same AOA sensor is flying in several thousand 737NGs today. It doesn’t seem the sensor is likely to be to blame.
Truth is the Lion Air aircraft shouldn’t have been in service, given the maintenance log and lack of accurate documentation of issues with the aircraft on previous flights. As for Ethiopian we just don’t know any facts, other than the actual crash.
- GY
Well, actually this Ethiopian investigation is almost as leaky as the Indonesian one... The main suspects are very much the same: AOA reading and MCAS.
Since MCAS, in its past iteration, after being fed by erroneous data by a single AOA vane, have a knack to drive the trim mechanism to the end of the jackscrew, essentially doing its job as programmed spectacularly "well", that will leave the AOA vane as the fall guy.
Except..., it is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE for the vanes which had been in used since forever and thought to have been very reliable would be implicated as the cause for the two crashes within the span of 5 months. This will leave us with something else more plausible as the caused but has been largely ignored: the Max-8 flight control system or something therein...