Originally Posted by
737 Driver
Wonkazoo,
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....
FLY THE AIRCRAFT, FLY THE AIRCRAFT, FLY THE DAMN AIRCRAFT
There is evidence from the voice recorder (of the second accident) that the co-pilot was unable to move the stabilizer. Now if you are convinced that the accident was the pilot's fault then you may disregard it as insufficient knowledge of how to move the backup manual wheel connected to a cable connected to the stabilizer (what year was this plane built, anyway?) but there it is. Now perhaps the definition of "primary flight control" does not include the stabilizer, but as a creature of the water rather than a dragon rider, I'd consider anything that has the ability to put the bow of the flying ship into the ground to be a "primary flight control".
Perhaps to bridge the gap between us engineer types and the dragon riders, I have a question. I have seen some very well thought out responses to the accident scenario. This is good, it helps safety to imagine what should have been done (even if it turns out not to be relevant young dragon riders can learn something more about their craft from reading it.) Now can somebody working out this scenario give me an estimate of how many feet of altitude they think that they would have lost in the accident scenario? And then, for us poor fish men down on the water, how much altitude can you afford to lose in the worst case scenario at the worst case airport? And then, how much altitude would they have lost when they were a young dragon rider and had just been qualified?
Murphy's law is actually a serious engineering proposition, not a cynical joke. Humans have a hard time understanding scale and probability. Our brains just can't comprehend tens of millions of flight hours a year, so when we judge the probability of "x AND y" happening we tend to vastly understimate the probablity of "x AND y" EVER happening. Science shows us that the new plane has a fatal flaw, it nearly killed one set of pilots and did actually kill two other sets of pilots. Was it a coincidence that it happened on a new instance of a new model of plane? Statistics can be used to model this, but intuition says that in this social media age, we would know if it was a fairly common occurence for airplanes to suddenly pitch down at takeoff. Heck, we get front page CNN coverage when there is an emergency landing because of a little bit of smoke in an aircraft cabin, and even the best dragon riders probably would have to admit that in the MCAS scenario the pasengers might have felt a bit of discomfort.
A large number of ship accidents are caused by not knowing where you are. A friend tells me that one of his captains had a habit of walking up to the most junior officer and asking "where are we, mister?" Damn good advice, and we could say that every time somebody hits (charted) rocks it was their fault and what they really needed was a guy behind them saying "WHERE ARE WE, MISTER?" Or, after a few ships have hit the rocks and caused massive oil spills, we could put a lighted bouy on the rocks to warn them.