Originally Posted by LowObservable;
10475835]
I have to say I'm getting a little tired of this kind of superficial blather from people who, according to their claims of experience, ought to know better. It's a bit ridiculously obvious that the third pilot didn't have to busy himself with the other things going on in the cockpit, and could place the trimwheels in the center of his vision and focus on them for long enough to see what they were doing. The other two pilots could not do so, just like the accident crews.
It really isn't possible to say whether or not the first Lion Air crew would have eventually found their way to the trim cutoff switches without the jumpseater's help. What we can say is that until that point, the crew was maintaining aircraft control by opposing the MCAS input. It should be noted that the Captain was initially flying this aircraft, but at some point handed it over to the First Officer.
Both pilots demonstrated the ability to maintain aircraft control in spite of MCAS.
In the case of the second Lion Air flight & subsequent accident, initially the crew also maintained aircraft control by opposing the MCAS inputs. There is no official CVR transcript of the Lion Air accident flight, but there have been "leaks" that suggest that the Captain was initially flying and then turned over primary flying duties to the FO and then went "heads down" in the QRH to find an appropriate procedure. There is also a definite inflection point on the FDR data that shows a transition from the flying pilot successfully opposing MCAS to a situation where the opposing inputs are not large enough thus resulting in a greater and greater out of trim state. It is reasonable to speculate that this inflection point occurred when the Captain handed off control to the First Officer, and then didn't notice the FO losing the battle with the trim until it was too late.
In Ethiopian accident is that the Captain never really caught up with the trim even though he could have. Why that was the case is a bit of a mystery.
In summary, three out of five pilots who acted as the flying pilot demonstrated the capacity to maintain aircraft control with an erroneous MCAS input - the Captain and FO on the first Lion Air flight, and the Captain on the second Lion Air flight. Two pilots - the second Lion Air First Officer and the Ethiopian Captain did not.
The evidence strongly suggests that a
majority of these non-Western trained pilots actually did have the required aviation skills to successfully oppose MCAS for a number of minutes of active flight and keep the plane aloft. Since they were able to do this for several minutes, there doesn’t seem to be a practical limit to how long they could have continued to do so. As a direct consequence, there is no compelling evidence that there was any “reaction time” required to solve the MCAS problem. Given significantly more time to work the problem, I think it is worth asking whether even a minimally proficient crew would have eventually worked out a solution to the errant MCAS inputs. Given enough time, it seems they would even have enough time to be phone patched right to Boeing.
Time was never a problem.