Today I had the opportunity to talk with a line pilot from a major US carrier that has both 737NGs and MAX 9’s in their fleet, and we chatted about both Lion and Ethiopian incidents. He routinely flys 737NGs and had only flown the MAX on one leg to date, but had nothing other than good things to say about it.
That’s not the point of this post - what is, was his absolute certainty that ANY pilot flying the MAX post-Lion crash should have known in a heartbeat the symptoms of a misbehaving AOA sensor and how to disable MCAS. He was unequivocal that this would be a non-event.
Additionally he noted that he routinely hand-flys the aircraft on departure to 10,000 or 18,000 feet (route dependent) and would only then switch on the AP. Equally, on approach he would switch off the automatics around 6,000 feet and hand-fly the aircraft. This is encouraged by his airline. This seems rather different than many these days.
His point was any time the airplane isn’t doing something he expected - turn off all the automatics including electric trim and figure out what was going on.
I asked whether he felt he would have turned off the trim BEFORE he knew about MCAS, and he was adamant that any repeated trim as experienced by Lion Air would have had the electric trim disabled no more than the second iteration. It’s simply not the same trim action as that which occurs with the STS, and would have turned off.
Of course this anecdotal and simply one pilot’s input, but take it for what it is. This pilot said he would fly a MAX tomorrow without concern.
- GY