Originally Posted by
Fly Aiprt
5000 ft isn't high with an airliner doing antics.
Just observing that he kept it above 5000 thorough all the antics.
Have you seen Mentour Pilot's video on trim forces ?
I'm surprised you are saying the Captain could have continued for hundreds of seconds.
Mentour's video was about the wheel, not the electric trim that was being used to counter MCAS.
And yes, I think he likely could have continued use of the electric trim switches for another 10 minutes.
No way to prove it, or disprove it. Simulators won't really tell especially now with so much known.
Just the feeling I get from the data available.
Agree hewas slowly loosing pitch, but can we extrapolate that forward?
He was maintaining altitude. I think he would have given a really long trim command at some point and got back to better pitch if he had stayed on the controls. He'd already worked out that he could stop MCAS (not knowing what it was). I think the increasing forces would have connected and he'd have made a bigger stab correction. I think he soon would have (or had the F/O) checked the actual stab position and put it back in the 6.5-7 region.
I don't know the units on the column forces in the plots but it is in the plots I've seen. Just gives a range of -50 to 100.
https://leehamnews.com/wp-content/up...-annotated.png
Instead, it appears after the F/O couldn't find anything useful in the QRH if went to look himself and the F/O failed to maintain the corrections the captain had been doing (5 short blips instead of 5-10 second activations)
The captain didn't do it because of fatigue, it was to look for answers, thinking he's find something the F/O missed. But he wrongly assumed the F/O would continue to counter MCAS like he had been doing. 20-25 seconds later he's pulling harder than the F/O ever did.
(There are still some oddities in the last 40-50 seconds if the trace. Why the split when the F/O took over? Why did the F/O's force drop so much when the captain rejoined him?)
Then there's the issue of elevator blowdown at the speed and altitude of these crashes. The elevator should have been able to counter full AND trim. Except the speed at the lower altitude reduced the elevator authority. Is that something the regulators should look at along with the trim wheel?
FDR, concur with you in #2514. Hoping the CVR transcripts will shed more light on how much he did realize and what was said in the handoff.
I didn't call for such exceptionalism.
I was observing the apparent exceptionalism of the JT610 captain and even specifically said I didn't fault the F/O for not being exceptional.