Originally Posted by
wonkazoo
Specifically to your point about being a forum for professional pilots. You are completely correct. Professional pilots who fly airplanes made and certificated by large companies and in the US the FAA. If this isn't the place to opine about a substandard or frankly lethal product being provided to you on which you will earn your living I don't know what is.
Look, I agree with pretty much everything you say, up to the point where it was the crews' fault for what happened. They had no control over their training. They had no control over Boeing's clear abuse of the certification process, and they had no input on a system which (as I have described previously) would try to kill you if you didn't get the diagnosis right. And that's an important distinction. In an earlier reply you spoke of numerous failures that you experienced which were nearly catastrophic. IIRC you mentioned engine failures as an example of a potentially fatal event. The problem is twofold: First, you need engines to fly. Like, I mean, you can't live without them right?? And second: Yes, an engine failure can be (and many times is) fatal. But it doesn't have to be, and if you goof a little bit the outcome isn't a 100 percent fatal conclusion. Even if you goof a lot the outcome is frequently far less than fatal.
If an engine failure happens there are a gazillion possible outcomes, all of which rely on you, the pilot, to select and control the final result.
But with MCAS there are only two possible outcomes, one is you keep flying if you line up the dots within roughly a minute (40 seconds if you believe media reports) the other is you are d-e-d dead.
I know of no other binary system/operational outcome that aligns with this and I once again submit this to the community: Anyone got an equivalent they can share??
Here is another attempt to try to illustrate how unique this circumstance is, and how profound Boeing's errors were in bringing this airplane forward for commercial use. (And how culpable they are as a consequence)
Imagine if your airplane had a third, previously unneeded engine that contributed nothing to the performance, stability, safety or functionality of the aircraft. I'm even going to give us the benefit of the doubt and say you know this third engine exists. If engines 1 or 2 fail you just do everything like you always have. Pull out the proper checklist, do your memory items and find someplace to land. But if engine #3 fails, well then you have 30 seconds to a minute to identify the correct engine, diagnose it and shut it down using an exact mechanism that has zero tolerance for deviation. If you fail to do this exactly right your third engine explodes and rips off the tail in the process and you and your airplane are toast on a stick.
That's what I mean when I say MCAS will try to kill you (it will...) and that's why I believe this is a unique circumstance and finally: That's why I place the responsibility for the entirety of the outcome for both flights at the feet of Boeing and the FAA.
As professional pilots I would think you would be equally interested (for the sake of your own preservation) in holding the manufacturer that created this Rube-Goldberg piece of utter BS to account, certainly as much, if not more than you want to hold a deceased and clearly under-trained crew to account. And I cannot imagine a more powerful lobby or forum- the pilots who fly the planes themselves for sharing your views and insights into what happened and how utterly unnecessary both hull losses were.
We can go round and round picking apart the numerous ways both crews could have and should have done better. What I would rather see is a discussion on how the community is going to hold the feet of Boeing and the FAA to the fire- for real (even incremental) change going forward. All so that the next "MCAS" never even gets to the drawing board because the concept was shot down in flames earlier in the process due to the manufacturer's desire to build safe airplanes no matter the cost.
Warm regards,
dce
Wonkazoo,
I understand your position, and I fully support what you say about the need to hold the manufacturers, regulators and airlines accountable. However, I guess we will have to just agree to disagree on how much control the crews had on the outcome.
To me, the great tragedy of these two accidents is not in the complexity of the malfunction, but rather in the simplicity of the appropriate response.
Since my very first days as a student pilot, one primary commandment has been repeated over and over and over again. This commandment applied to all operations, normal and otherwise. Following this commandment may not always save the day, but disregarding it will almost always lose it.
So I'll say it again and again, for as long as it takes:
FLY THE AIRCRAFT, first, last, and always.
For
all situations, for
all malfunctions, for
all weather conditions, for
all regimes of flight, some pilot must be actively monitoring, and if necessary, actively flying the aircraft. Whenever there is undesired or unexpected aircraft state, the pilot's first and most important priority is NOT to figure out what it is going wrong. The pilot's first priority is to FLY THE AIRCRAFT. Set appropriate attitude and power, monitor the performance, trim as necessary, adjust as appropriate.
In all of the discussion of these accidents,
there has not been a single shred of evidence that the primary flight controls or trim were not responding to pilot inputs. There has been no credible argument that if the pilot flying had simply set a reasonable pitch attitude, set a reasonable power setting, and trimmed out the control pressures, that the plane would not have been flyable. The fact remains that in the heat of the moment, these crews forgot or disregarded the first commandment of aviation - FLY THE AIRCRAFT, first, last, and always. WHY they forgot and what corrective measures can be taken to train future crews should certainly be part of a serious post mortem, but we cannot remain in a state of denial regarding what happened.
Sadly, no matter how many times this commandment is repeated, and tacitly acknowledged by just about every pilot, we still seem to have difficulty applying it in practice. Any professional pilot here likely has access to various incident/accident reports. We can read the narratives and easily determine in which cases there was someone actively monitoring or flying the aircraft, and in which cases they were not. Fortunately, most of the "not's" do not wind up as a smoking hole somewhere, but it is still somewhat distressing how often the first commandment is forgotten.
FLY THE AIRCRAFT, FLY THE AIRCRAFT, FLY THE DAMN AIRCRAFT