Originally Posted by
sky9
Can I just highlight that the F/O had 200hrs experience. I didn't get a commercial pilots licence until I had flown 230 hours and didn't fly jets until I had 1800hrs. The company that I flew 737's for in the UK in the early 1970's required 2000 hours before offering a job in the right hand seat.
This incident was to all intents and purposes a single pilot operation.
This airline isn't alone in setting up that situation.
It does not help that the captain was only recently transitioned to the new aircraft, and the already-mentioned-a-few-hundred-times issues with "just what was in the differences training?" was hardly a robust aircraft systems course. That their best efforts were not good enough points, in my view, a finger at the system writ large: training, currency, company policies on training (and others) and of course the aircraft system itself. What is to me the most worrying is that with the comparatively recent Lion Air crash, this crew was, it seems, neither prepared nor trained on how to deal with that problem.
That right there, it seems to me, is where the entire system let these two pilots down. The "system" doesn't learn, and / or does a poor job of passing on "lessons learned."
Deni, a few pages back, points to the AoA signal getting to the flight computer as being a detail worthy of very thorough resolution. With the Lion Air ending up in the sea, some evidence of how that signal went sour may have been lost. In this crash, granted, there was a fire, perhaps some evidence of that signal's path, and it's possible sources of corruption, may be more clear.
I sincerely hope that Beoing's team is, along with their various test flights, putting a high magnification glass on the entire path of the AoA signal from vane to computer, and focues on how and where those signals can get dirty/contaminated. I experienced a variety of strange things happening in aircraft over the years due to electrical signals going astray or strange. Were stray trons a root cause?
We'll see.