Thank you for having a stab at answering.
Originally Posted by
737 Driver
retract the flaps) when it was not appropriate (particularly retracting the flaps given what was known about MCAS).
How did he know he was going to have an MCAS event? He was dealing with a stall warner that shouldn't have been warning.
I would advocate asking "why" to every conclusion. And writing "because..."
There are two lines of thinking here: it was a poor aircraft and they were poor pilots. Let me explore both, using the "why" system:
1. The aircraft had hidden killer behaviour because it was a financial requirement to have a common TR because the regulator allowed this because the regulator is weak.
2. The crew performed poorly because they were inadequately trained because it was a common TR which was allowed because the regulator is weak.
If we boil this down, it doesn't really matter whether you subscribe to pilot error or Boeing error or both. Ultimately this has arisen through inadequate regulation. The regulator should have stepped in with the whole instability issue, the MCAS fix, the lack of documentation and the lack of training.
This month it's the FAA, but it so easily could have been any other national authority. The industry is in a mess due to inadequate regulation - and it's Boeing, the airlines, the pilots and the passengers are suffering.
I would avoid making assumptions about the skills of the crews. In Europe it's easy to do too - we hear incompetent sounding fat cigar chewing fools who don't know that you can have a flight level of 90, but we try to remember that judging ability by nationality or assumed education is very, very wrong.