Originally Posted by
737 Driver
The Ethiopian Captain (…) was given (…) a 350-hour First Officer.
Apparently there are 200-hour pilots out there flying nuclear-armed aircraft. So I've heard. Simulators have come a long way, thousands of hours of teaching people to fly single-engine airplanes really isn’t the greatest preparation for airline flying, and the CVR shows it was the Ethiopian FO’s suggestion to hit the cutout switches in the first place.
Originally Posted by
737 Driver
It is not procedural to fiddle with the cutout switches once they have been used.
It also isn’t procedural having the terrain fast rising up out the window to smite thee. Desperate times maybe explain desperate measures.
At all events, there's 0.6% of the worldwide Max fleet gone in the space of five months. No survivors. My two cents: Boeing finally broke the 737 but good by dint of finally overtweaking it. Having done that, they took the stall-happy result and -- on the cheap -- hastily stuck a bandaid on it. Now they and their furious customers are wedded to this Frankenplane, so Boeing is working on a New & Improved Extra-Special Bandaid.
Onion News defined MCAS as "software designed to place all the blame on airline pilots".