PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Ethiopian airliner down in Africa
View Single Post
Old 28th Apr 2019, 20:43
  #4523 (permalink)  
MurphyWasRight
 
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Boston
Age: 73
Posts: 443
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Originally Posted by GordonR_Cape
Just to clarify something which was discussed previously: Enabling the autopilot would certainly inhibit MCAS. However this is only true if there were no other factors in play. In the accident scenarios the problems cascaded, and AOA disagree triggered unreliable airspeed, which limited the possibility that the autopilot could be used to inhibit MCAS.

Analysing all of this in a short period of time, would have required exceptional knowledge, and in the absence of an AOA value or AOA disagree display, an understanding of the links between the sensors and the flight systems may have been beyond the scope of the crew.
My earlier point was that the autopilot was engaged for about 35 seconds, this could have tricked the pilot into thinking things were (more or less) ok spurious warnings only, this led to flap retraction.This is supported by the almost normal seeming events in cockpit at this time, selecting altitude etc

Flap retraction led to 2 things in short order:
1: Autopilot dropped off.
2:Mcas added it's first ND input.

So the pilot was dealing with 2 things at once.
MurphyWasRight is offline