I have read all the comments made on this forum concerning the Lion Air, and now the Ethiopian 737 Max crashes. It seems to me that the majority of comments focus on what could, or should, have been done by the crews involved. The Ethiopian pilots especially, whilst doubtless fully knowledgeable of the previous incident, were faced with the extraordinary and bizarre coincidence of a 2nd failure on the Max of the AOA vane, supplying erroneous data to the MCAS. This happened at the worst possible time where they were at their busiest, and with no height or time to play with. Whilst we all now have the benefit of knowledge, hindsight and time to analyse the situation . . . they didn’t. Of course they did their best, attempting to follow the memory items and new procedures as this crisis developed, but who, hand on heart, can lay any blame on them for not getting it exactly right? They may have been an average crew, with maybe less than average experience, but they were a trained and qualified crew and presumably signed off to fly the Max.
Even Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg has publically stated: “As pilots have told us, erroneous activation of the MCAS function can add to what is already a high workload environment”. The Max, and in fact all commercial aircraft, simply have to be designed, built and certified to be within the flying ability of all pilots deemed qualified by their authorities to fly the Max. Two crews have shown sadly that the Max was outside their ability, particularly the 302 crew even with prior knowledge of the potential failure, and the industry therefore has to assume that this is the norm, not the exception.