Originally Posted by
SystemsNerd
With respect, I think there may be a breakdown in communication here that may be in large part responsible for the ongoing disagreement. When people say "human factors", they don't mean "the human element", they mean Human Factors*, i.e., the study of how the human mind and body interacts with designed systems.
The human mind does not, ironically, work in the ways most people think it does - it has well-documented limitations and sources of error plumbed into its design. A human factors expert can I believe pretty trivially design a scenario where most (if not all) humans will consistently fail to correctly solve even relatively trivial problems, regardless of their competence under normal conditions.
Thus, when asking "why didn't they just fly the plane?", one possible answer is undoubtedly some variant on "they were incompetent". But another possible answer is "they were put into a scenario in which any human being would consistently fail to solve the problem, regardless of competence". Probably the truth is somewhere between those two points.
*See Wikipedia article "Human factors and ergonomics"
That’s a fair point. My response and likely that of my “cohorts” is this: what was presented to the three crews upon lift-off was a classic Unreliable Airspeed (UAS) scenario which is a an emergency that any B737 type rated pilot ought to have seen in a simulator complete with all the bells, whistles and other distractions. The fidelity of simulators is really quite amazing.
So how is it that 1/3 crews did the drill and saved the aircraft (by controlling and flying the aircraft including a managing its speed thanks to doing the UAS drill) while the other 2 crews did not do the drill which ultimately lead to an uncontrollable aircraft as speed was so high that no human could manually trim the aircraft?
Once we have addressed that issue then the next one is how is it that the successful Lion Air crew needed a jumpseat pilot to point out that they had a runaway stab trim and the fatal Lion Air crew was thumbing through the checklist looking for a memory item when they lost control of the aircraft.
To me, this points to a serious training issue at both of these airlines.