Originally Posted by
meleagertoo
WP, that argument is completely irrational.
If pilots were improperly trained its absolutely nothing to do with Boeing. How can it be? They merely make aeroplanes and specify the training required to operate them safely. If a customer fails to train their pilots properly you can't blame Boeing, they had nothing to do with it.
Unless they were trained at Renton of course...
"No more training is needed for pilots who were properly trained in the first place" - does that satisfy you?
Otherwise you'd be blaming Ford for training failures in a crash when someone on the other side of the world with a photoshopped licence has gone joyriding- which is equivalent to your original statement.
No, as somebody who wants to reach my destination alive that does not satisfy me at all. There is no evidence presented that these pilots were not trained to industry standards. If you say that we need to ground all aircraft until we can test that pilots are trained to new standards, have at it -- I'm sure the FAA would be open to your suggestion. If you want to say "put all MAX pilots in the sim and ensure that they are trained to handle trim runaway properly" then that would be a good step forward, but Boeing (and presumably Southwest) does not want to do that.
So you are left, as a passenger, with a rather difficult safety determination to make. I have no way of determining the skill of the pilot (if you think that ethnicity or "culture" matters, may I remind you of Colgan Air flight 3407).
Sorry if I have touched a nerve here, I am not trying to troll you. But when I board an aircraft my goal is to make it to my destination alive, and the system that I am using consists of both the plane and the pilot.
There has been no evidence presented that the pilots were in any way more deficient in training or skills than any other pilot. There has been no evidence that the seven different pilots who were fooled by this system were flying with counterfeit licenses, or that they paid off somebody to get their license, or that they were not trained. (Seven pilots because even the jump seat pilot who averted the first crash apparently had no idea why they had just saved the plane, given that they turned the power trim back on briefly after disabling it.)
On the other hand, there is evidence that the plane can sneakily point its nose towards the ground in certain very predictable failure modes (flappy things hanging on the outside of an aircraft in -40c weather do go wrong sometimes) and that the pilots are expected to notice this behavior quickly and channel their inner Wilbur Wright by turning off the newfangled electric motors and hand pulling wheels that pull cables, all the while pointing the nose of the plane at the ground and reducing airspeed. Given a choice, I would rather fly on a plane that doesn't put its pilots in that situation, or if it is proven to have done so is one where the company steps up, admits the problem, and fixes it.
Boeing's reluctance to admit that there even was a problem is a big problem in itself -- having worked for organizations that have from time to time made major boo-boos (without killing anybody that I know of) I can tell you that when the internal environment is "there really was no problem, it was all customer error and we are just going through the motions for the public's sake" then the problem will not get fixed. The guy who says "uh oh" is quickly squelched by exactly the same sort of arguments that I see here. Now I realize that a hell of a lot of money is relying on a fix, which is why I don't trust it. "Failure is not an option" never applies to engineering.