Originally Posted by
Fly Aiprt
Thanks for that, LowObservable.
So much for the armchair or sim 'experts' who still believe 'they just had to...'.
I'm going to get slammed by the ATP's for this, but what the heck.
Sullenberger's letter, like his congressional testimony, reads like an audition for a job as an expert witness in the many lawsuits against Boeing (assuming he hasn't already been hired). And to steal a phrase from his letter, "I know a thing or two" about expert witnesses.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that MCAS wasn't defective or that it didn't place the pilots in a challenging situation.
But Sullenberger is clearly advocating, not analyzing, when he effectively takes the position that recovery was not "possible." He says "
The National Transportation Safety Board has found that Boeing made faulty assumptions both about the capability of the aircraft design to withstand damage or failure, and the level of human performance possible once the failures began to cascade." I'm not aware that the NTSB has made any such findings. The JATR has questioned assumptions about crews consistently recognizing and responding within 4 seconds, but that's a far cry from saying the NTSB has made a general finding that Boeing made faulty assumptions about what was "possible."
And Sullenberger rehashes the argument about MCAS not presenting as classic runaway trim; however, the facts are that both crews recognized that they had a malfunctioning stabilizer trim system and both crews countered with MET. Sullenberger has never explained why the JT610 crew didn't turn off electric trim. In effect, he is arguing that the crew knew they had a malfunctioning stab trim system but shouldn't be expected to have known to turn it off. Nor does he explain why the ET302 crew (fully briefed on the previous accident and familiar with the Emergency AD) turned stab trim with the airplane out of trim, then turned it back on without using MET to relieve control column forces.
Neither Indonesia nor Ethiopia have released CVR transcripts. Until they do, nobody will know what was going through the crews' minds and why they did what they did. But even without that data, Sullenberger is prepared to say the crews did nothing wrong, and couldn't have done better. That smells like fear that any focus on the pilots' performance will let Boeing off the hook.