Originally Posted by
MemberBerry
The Ethiopian crew (...) skipped the step about disabling the auto-throttles. If they did that, they probably would have payed more attention to their speed and adjusted it manually as needed. Instead, the engines remained at 94% until VMO,
I read in the aviation press a remark from a guy with 12,000 hours on the 737, a sim instructor, who said he'd often seen airspeed drop off a crew's scan in circs far less stressful -- and confusing -- than these.
As for Sully-upon-Hudson, he's big into number of flying hours as a measure of competence. Free country. But to sound off publicly (as he did in the case of the Addis crash) does him no credit. I'm no airline pilot, but people I know, who are, resent Sully's near-deification by the media. Yes he refused to return to La Guardia, realized he couldn't make Teterboro, and instead chose that extremely long and wide, dead-calm liquid runway just off to his left. (Switching on the APU was an admirable brainwave.) They insist that any competent crew could have done what he and Skiles did, given the excellent conditions. (Imagine wind, choppy waves, lousy visibility --- or worse, that + mountains.)
derjodel is bang on that "machines need to be designed in a way to anticipate delayed corrective response". The Max looks fundamentally flawed. That new bandaid had better be Absolutely Perfect.