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.
I pretty much agree with everything you say except for the "any human" reference in the second to last sentence. I think that there is broad, though not unanimous, agreement that the accident crews made some serious errors that led to the final loss of aircraft control. Where I and some other participants here differ is that I strongly believe that much of the human factors element you refer to is amenable to training. One only has to look at the performance of the crew on the Lion Air 610 flight
the day prior to the original accident. Despite being presented with a novel malfunction, one of the pilots kept flying the aircraft. IMHO, that crew took a bit too long to get to the trim cutout switches, but the takeaway is that every time MCAS made an input, the flying pilot took it right out again. At no time was there evidence that they were losing that fight.
It has been suggested that this crew would have ultimately crashed if not for the jumpseater suggesting that they try the cutout switches, but frankly that is an unwarranted assumption. Having been both in the flying seat and the jumpseat on many occasions, it is absolutely true that the jumpseater may catch something quicker, but that does not mean the flying crew will not catch it at all. There definitely appears to been a limited understanding of the stab trim system by both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crews (very much amenable to training), but it did not prevent the crew above from maintaining aircraft control.
I will agree that
any human pilot at some stage in their training will be easily overwhelmed by even the most basic aircraft emergency scenarios. That is why we train so extensively for them. I had previously posted that in the Ethiopian accident, the Captain did fly the aircraft after a certain fashion, and that he had defaulted to his training. The problem was that he defaulted to the
wrong training. Just about all of the ET302 Captain's initial actions can be understood in the context of a
normal takeoff profile. Unfortunately, a normal takeoff profile left him in a highly unstable position from which dealing with the ultimate stab trim problem became a bridge too far.
When I and other posters keep saying that the pilots should have kept FLYING THE AIRCRAFT, we do not say this from a perspective that operating a malfunctioning aircraft is some inborn capability that every person has. Heck, walking isn't even an inborn capability. However, it is a skill that is amenable to training. That is, as long as you get the
right kind of training. As has been already discussed extensively, training in modern commercial airliners has largely devolved into a process of following scripts. Pilots are presented with known problems with known solutions. Even at my airline, there is much less of the relatively unscripted training that really drove home the need to set aside any distractions and focus on the basics of flying the aircraft without the benefit of any automation until the situation was stabilized.
There are multiple links in the chain of causation leading to these accidents. I don't think anyone is questioning that MCAS needs to be fixed, or the FAA needs to step up its oversight, or that airlines need to review their internal training and operations policies. The professional pilot corps, however, needs to look at what we can do to correct the airmanship deficiencies that were exposed by these accidents.