Originally Posted by
rog747
As the starter of this evocative thread of the first early morning report of a 737 accident in Africa, I have of course followed it all closely - The shock that morning that it was a 2nd new 737 MAX that actually had crashed in astonishingly similar circumstances to Lion Air has rocked the aviation world, and the public.
I do think most of you now need to go have have a nice cup pf tea and try to stop pontificating on weird and wonderful graphs, text and charts, (I do not of course mean the revealed readouts we know of so far) and to really now stop putting blame on the crews that simply were trying to save their aircraft due to unknown phenomena seemingly trying to kill them, which has seen 2 brand new jets of a design from the early 1960's dive into the ground at high speed minutes from take off.
This is unprecedented in our industry in many years - Last seen when the DC-10 was in service 40 years ago - Also long before social and digital media, and the likes of Pprune and YouTube and the freedoms of getting information quickly.
Many of the posts on here have shown much sense and empathy even at such an early stage in the investigations, and of course many pilots and crews are worried, however, we have descended somewhat that some here will brush it off as if the crews should have done this, and done that, or ''I could have saved the plane''...
No one knows as yet as to why these 2 new jets dived into the ground and lost over 300 lives.
The 3 Comet 1 structural failure crashes claimed 99 lives - those investigations were undertaken at a time when FDR or CVR data was not available -
How we have evolved from 65 years ago.
Can we calm down a wee bit over the MAX theories - except we do know that MCAS was implicated and functioned each time -
As I see it 2 have been lost (another 1 was an almost lost) and in all 3 the flight crews were faced with, and then all were startled with rapidly unfolding, and unknown dilemmas as to why their aircraft was trying to kill them just after lift off trying in vain to save it.
At this stage none of us know for sure why.
edited 11.43
Generally sensible post, however, it is absolutely reasonable to ask whether pilot skill / training was a factor.
The LionAir pre accident crew defused the situation with the help of a jump seat pilot. Once they had the aircraft under control, they re-enabled electric trim only to discover it attempting to nose the plane down again, before disabling it again and flying manually to destination.
That crew defeated AoA-failure-induced MCAS
twice, not once.
One lesson which the industry has to learn from this is that all flight crews must know how to restore orderly flight and disable all automation in the case of misbehaving flight control systems. If that's not possible, the cockpit is no longer a place for human beings.