Originally Posted by
tdracer
Not really. There were two primary contributors to the misdiagnosis of which engine had failed. One was that there was smoke on the flight deck, the pilot thought all the flight deck air came from the right hand engine so he figured that the problem was with the right hand engine. Problem was that was only true on the 737-1/200 - the change to mixed bleed air was not unique to the -400, it was that way on all -3/4/500 aircraft. The second issue was a change to the engine vibration gauges - with the smoke and vibration the pilots were unable to see the gauges clearly and not realizing the gauges had changed misinterpreted what the gauges were telling them. I can't recall now if the gauge change was an 'and-on' change or if it was a customer option, but it wasn't specific to the -400 variant.
Slight correction, if I may:If memory serves me well, then there wasn't much smoke in the cockpit, so the vib gauges were not obscured by smoke.Secondly, the vib pointer on the gauge for the left engine went "off scale" so the pointer wasn't at all visible to the F/O.