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Old 29th May 2019, 15:11
  #160 (permalink)  
boofhead
 
Join Date: Feb 2000
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I confess I don't understand your objections to what I am saying. If a stall strip comes off an airplane in flight and then the pilot subsequently finds on approach that the wing is dropping, should he give up? Just let the airplane fly into the ground? I would posit that there are pilots out there just waiting for that opportunity. He does not have to know why the wing is dropping all he has to do is react and recover.

If a pilot gets ice on the tailplane and experiences tailplane stalling should he think "I have not been trained to handle this so I just give up?" If a pilot finds that after lift off his airspeed indicator is not working because of ice/tape/bugs/malfunction is he allowed to just give up and throw the airplane into the ground? He has a sudden engine failure, follows the drill but forgets to feather the prop should he just sit there and allow the airplane to roll itself up into a ball? Even distractions in flight have caused the pilot and his passengers to die. All these things have happened and hundreds of people have died as a result, often with professional pilots flying the aircraft.

It is not important why the stab system failed. It could have been a myriad of things. All a pilot has to do is fly the airplane. It happens many times without a problem and we don't even hear about it. Engines fail and pilots do the right thing, they handle icing, mechanicals, recognize subtle incapacitation, low oil pressure, engine failures, prop runaways, incipient stalls, seat belts hanging out of the door, out of balance loading, bird strikes and more and don't decide to kill themselves and their passengers. That is what we expect and deserve from a professional pilot.

Sure we fix the problem of the MCAS. We increase maintenance to ensure the stall strip does not come off. We give the pilots training to handle what we think might happen in his flight, but we can't anticipate everything and therefore we must have professional flight crews who can handle the unexpected and that means they have to be able to fly their airplane all the way to the ground without giving up.

If they fail, we have to be able to see that as not only a warning to build our airplanes better (add stall warning, anti ice equipment, better passenger restraint, fire bottles etc) but also recognize when pilot training has failed. And do better. But if we deny the pilot element and do nothing we better get ready for the body bag companies to increase their stock prices.
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