Originally Posted by
LowObservable
But let's get this straight. It never happened to you.
True, none of us were there when the pins all lined up. Guilty as charged.
Might I also point out that none of us were there when the aircraft designers were designing, the project managers were managing, the regulators were regulating, and the airlines were training. Yet, there seems to be a pretty broad consensus in
these parts that their were critical lapses in
those parts despite the fact that no one here (at least that I've seen) has claimed to be current in qualified in those specialties. Odd, don't you think?
No, I was not there, and no I have never seen an MCAS failure in the sim or in life. However, over the course of 35+ years in aviation and perhaps a dozen different aircraft, I've dealt with more emergencies in the sim than I can count and more in the air than I ever wished to have had. I've encountered pilots of all different skill levels, and I've observed the traits that separate the good from the bad. Having reviewed perhaps hundreds, if not thousands, of incident reports over the years, I think I have a fairly good sense for what types of malfunctions should have been survivable without resort to extraordinary means, which ones required some combination of luck and superior skill, and which ones were pretty much hopeless from the start. In the case of Lion Air, I'd put that one somewhere between the first and second categories mainly due to the novelty. For Ethiopian, that one falls squarely in the first batch. Sorry you disagree, but I strongly suspect the final accident reports will fall closer to my position than yours.