PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - 737 Stuck Manual Trim Technique
View Single Post
Old 14th Apr 2019, 12:49
  #76 (permalink)  
meleagertoo
 
Join Date: Mar 2018
Location: Central UK
Posts: 1,634
Received 135 Likes on 64 Posts
I'd be surprised if sim modelling goes as far as that.
I think we're at risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees.
The angst and indignation that the trim system behaves in the way it does presupposes that Boeing could and should have anticipated that an aircraft could ever get into such a bizarre part of the flight envelope in the first place. The fact that , afaik, this is the first time in 60 years there's ever been an accident attributed to the previously well known jackstall shows that it is so vanishingly unlikely to occur that its hardly fair to have anticipated it. Indeed, Boeing considered it so unlikely they removed mention of the roller-coaster technique from the manual. That certainly looks like an error now, but no one raised theis as a critical failing before these accidents so no one elase had the awareness of it either.

Any aircraft is likely to become uncontrollable if mishandled as comprehensively as the Mad Russioan's interesting post - and 'm sure we could all come up with endless different gross-mishandling scenarios resulting in an accident. Thais doesn't, in my mind, equate to a design flaw of any great proportions as some are suggesting. Aircraft can and will bite if mishandled. You can't design that out of them, and of course it was a measure to mitigate against this that resulted in MCAS in the first place.

I see considerable parallels between the Air France stall crash and this one. In both cases an errant indication was not isolated or properly dealt with leading pilots to mishandle the aircraft to such an extent that they flew it from a perfectly recoverable situation into one that was extremely difficult to recover from, and didn't realise what they had done. There was none of the indignant howlings we hear today saying that Airbus should be sued into penury and it's directors jailed for manslaughter over the AF accident because they failed to anticipate anyone would point the nose at the moon and trim the aircraft into a deep stall with full power on - but what's the difference?
Neither of these accidents would be credible if postulated before the event, you'd be laughed out of town for suggesring such a thing might happen - so I'm rather sympathetic towards Boeing's stance on the trim matter. Some aspects of MCAS are another thing altogether of course, but again how could Boeing have anticipated anyone would fail to carry out necessary drills, fail to reduce power after levelling out, and fail to trim the aircraft sufficiently? They aren't psychic, no one could possibly have inagined this situation in advance so blaming them so harshly as some are doing seems to me a somewhat OTT application of 20/20 hindsight.
meleagertoo is online now