Originally Posted by
PerPurumTonantes
I'm an engineer and a pilot. The responsibility is with Boeing/FAA, no question. Yes the ET302 crew could have done a few things different. But they had 6 minutes. In a little box in the sky, where the wrong answer meant death, with alarms going off, and not just useful alarms but alarms telling them to do the opposite of what they needed.
You train pilots to trust in safety systems, trust in automation, follow the checklists, follow the SOPs. They do this every day successfully for years. Then you expect them to instantly drop this and distrust all the safety systems and automation, work out which one is faulty and what to do about it, while simultaneously hand flying an aircraft that's behaving like they have never experienced before in any of the hand flying they've done.
Boeing had plenty of time, in nice safe offices that weren't about to crash into the ground, to get this right.
Being an engineer too but not an airline pilot, I thoroughly concurr...
'Good' engineers really shouldn't abrogate their responsibilities nor discharge them to other professionals working in a much less benign environment
However, one does feel a strong sense of 'modern management' involvement, possibly even interference.
All the good wartime and post war management methodologies seem to have been thrown out the window since the 90s and this fundamentally US trend of ignoring rhe importance of 'Domain Knowledge' has long since corrupted the UK and I assume, elsewhere. I understand Japanese industry were taught good disciplines postwar and hopefully have resisted the worst trends of Managementitis coming I imagine, from US academia and unwisely encouraged by shareholder pressure.
Apologies for waxing philosophic.. .but I cannot divorce an innate sense of betrayal over the years from what I see through this MCAS lens, though MCAS is only a sympton.