On December 12, LowObservable gave a link to an article from “The Air Current”.
The article describes “week-long trials inside Boeing’s 737 Max engineering simulator focused on the human response to a variety of angle of attack indication failures and disagreements in real-world scenarios, in takeoff, landing and at cruise ...”
The article continues, “During the recent pilot trials, which tested how crews react to various scenarios involving the revised 737 Max flight control software and new checklists, all the pilots managed to get themselves out of trouble, but Boeing and regulators found that “more than half of pilots responded with the wrong procedures,” according to one of the three people briefed on the results ... “Troubleshooting the failure presented wasn’t intuitive based on the checklist,” said another person familiar with the trials...”
It looks to me like the trials were realistic, with the cacophany of sounds and lights that accompanies a real emergency. I am happy that none of the pilots crashed. But I am troubled that half of them fouled up the checklist.
These pilots had (presumably) been briefed on the new MCAS setup and went into the simulator knowing that MCAS problems were going to be served up. Yet half of them ended up with the wrong answer. What would happen to the average pilot on a bad day when his MCAS training is a year old?
I am going to speculate that the new MCAS checklists involve a pretty complicated decision tree, which takes some real mental gymnastics to work through. All of which is to decide whether or not to turn MCAS off. One could be forgiven for asking one more time, what exactly is it that MCAS does which would justify such a diversion of time and mental energy?
The onset of an emergency is the wrong time to play with an MCAS decision tree. The pilots, both of them, should focus first on airspeed, pitch, engine power, and nothing else, until they are ahead of the plane.
In my opinion, MCAS should be left on the ground. If it can’t be left on the ground because of some fundamental mis-aerodynamics of the airframe (other than yoke force monotonicity), then the airframe should be fixed first. Once that’s done, MCAS might not be needed at all.