Some quotes"from the great aviation writer, William Langewiesche"...
Like thousands of new pilots now meeting the demands for crews — especially those in developing countries with rapid airline growth — his experience with flying was scripted, bounded by checklists and cockpit mandates and dependent on autopilots. He had some rote knowledge of cockpit procedures as handed down from the big manufacturers, but he was weak in an essential quality known as airmanship. Sadly, his captain turned out to be weak in it, too.
Airplanes are living things. The best pilots do not sit in cockpits so much as strap them on.
... airline pilots who never fly solo and whose entire experience consists of catering to passengers who flinch in mild turbulence, refer to “air pockets” in cocktail conversation and think they are near death if bank angles exceed 30 degrees.... The worst of them are intimidated by their airplanes and remain so until they retire or die. It is unfortunate that those who die in cockpits tend to take their passengers with them
twenty-five seconds later (a long interlude in flight), Harvino requested a clearance to “some holding point” where the airplane could linger in the sky. The request was surprising. The controller did not provide a holding point but asked about the nature of the problem. Harvino answered, “Flight-control problem.” He did not mention which kind, but before they die, pilots are rarely so descriptive.
After both accidents, the flight-data recordings indicated that the immediate culprit was a sensor failure tied to a new and obscure control function that was unique to the 737 Max: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The system automatically applies double-speed impulses of nose-down trim, but only under circumstances so narrow that no regular airline pilot will ever experience its activation — unless a sensor fails. Boeing believed the system to be so innocuous, even if it malfunctioned, that the company did not inform pilots of its existence or include a description of it in the airplane’s flight manuals.
=The system in question is complicated, and we will return to it later, but for now it is enough to know that after the loss of Lion Air 610, the company suggested that the 737 Max was as safe as its predecessors. Its tone was uncharacteristically meek, but not for lack of conviction. The company seemed hesitant to point the finger at a prickly customer — Lion Air — that had several billion dollars’ worth of orders on the table and could withdraw them at any time. The dilemma is familiar to manufacturers after major accidents in which it is usually some pilot and not an airplane that has gone wrong. Nonetheless, Boeing’s reticence allowed a narrative to emerge: that the company had developed the system to elude regulators; that it was all about shortcuts and greed; that it had cynically gambled with the lives of the flying public; that the Lion Air pilots were overwhelmed by the failures of a hidden system they could not reasonably have been expected to resist; and that the design of the MCAS was unquestionably the cause of the accident. But none of this was quite true. The rush to lay blame was based in part on a poor understanding not just of the technicalities but also of Boeing’s commercial aviation culture. The Max’s creation took place in suburban Seattle among engineers and pilots of unquestionable if bland integrity, including supervising officials from the Federal Aviation Administration.
After President Trump weighed in on the basis of no perceptible knowledge, and the F.A.A. was forced to retreat from its initial defense of the airplane, Boeing had to accept a public onslaught. The onslaught has included congressional hearings, federal investigations, calls for the criminal prosecution of Boeing executives, revelations by whistle-blowers, attacks in the news media, the exploitation of personal tragedy and the construction of a whole new economic sector built around perceptions of the company’s liability. Boeing has grown largely silent, perhaps as much at the request of its sales force as of its lawyers. To point fingers at important clients would risk alienating not only those airlines but others who have been conditioned to buy its airplanes, no matter how incompetent their pilots may be.
"William Langewiesche is a newly named writer at large for the magazine. He is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic and international correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he covered a wide variety of subjects throughout the world. He grew up in aviation and got his start as a pilot before turning to journalism. This is his first article for the magazine."
Shocking. I hope this might be his last article.