Originally Posted by
edmundronald
So above-average pilots would have saved the plane and below average pilots lose it. Let's see, there are 50% of below average pilots in the world, you better be careful when an SLF to get in the right plane - although of course only above average pilots participate in PPrune.
Gimme a break - the issue is why were the pilots subjected to this horrible situation, where being average but not good meant bye bye for the SLF?
Edmund
Average professional pilots even below average professional pilots should note and correct out of trim flight. This is C-172 stuff and is not complicated. The first Lion Air flight showed that the Max with MCAS erroneously operating is flyable by repeated trimming, the second flight showed that had the captain continued trimming back to in trim the flight may not have crashed; it was only when the trimming was reduced to the occasional blip that control was lost. If trimming had continued and a return to airport was chosen as soon as the flaps were lowered MCAS would have stopped and the aircraft could have recovered.
Boeing had an expectation that qualified 737 pilots would continually keep the aircraft in trim and that would stop MCAS, They also had the expectation that repeated uncommanded nose down stab trim by the aircraft systems would result in the stab trim being switched off by a qualified 737 pilot.
Boeing was wrong. 737 pilots qualified and allocated their seats by their airline did
not do as Boeing expected. It seems that automation surprise plus all the alerts aural and haptic (the stick shaker) amplify the automation surprise to a level where some pilots can no longer 'fly the plane'. It may be that the simulation training may not provide the visceral reality of an emergency in the real aircraft resulting in cognitive tunneling or even an attempt to carry on as if the system failure hadn't happened. I and no doubt others here, have witnessed examples where competency shown in the simulator falls apart in the 'real world',
So while Boeing is building aircraft that would be easily flyable by 737 pilots from the 1970's who usually flew manually and often preferred to switch off the automation; the training systems and the airline training constraints are producing pilots who avoid
and are instructed to avoid, manual flying and who are better at system management. This has become apparent in this thread where there is a rough distinction between the 'switch it off' - pitch and power - fly the aircraft group (smaller); and, the systems managers who need to know all the aspects of the system with an FMEA and NNCs geared to each of those failure modes. The first group are aghast the aircraft were not recovered, the second are aghast that a new part of the system was not flagged up by Boeing and was not briefed with precise NNCs.
Aviation seems to have met the cross over point where avionics manufacturers and airframers can no longer assume that any bag of bolts on failure will be picked up by someone 'aviating', 'navigating' and 'communicating' - setting pitch, power, trimming and flying the aircraft; they now have to remove all potential single-points-of-failure, fail soft, gracefully degrade, and, if possible automation should carry on and cope with all potential failure modes. However, that is a slippery slope as it is a self fulfilling prophecy the more capable the automation the less capable the pilots. The only ones happy about that are the beancounters who will further reduce simulation time accelerating the problem.