Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
Lots of things are foreseeable, but that doesn’t mean that’s what happens in fact, and lots things have very remote probabilities but still happen. For example, it is remotely probable that in each case the pilot was coincidentally distracted at the point in the trim check that the rudder happened to be at full left deflection. Strange that no one happened to be distracted at the point in the trim check that the rudder happened to be at full right deflection.
I’m confident I’ve spent more time than you, junior, up to my elbows in flying machinery, tracking down faults with ostensibly inexplicable symptoms that magically become explicable when you find the wiring defect that intermittently short circuits wires from separate systems when particular physical controls are in particular positions.
And I’ve said it before in this thread: As I recall, the Max 8 issue was initially attributed to pilot incompetence. Is my recollection inaccurate?
You’d think that if incorrectly positioned rudder trim on a serviceable aircraft of this type produced such a ‘foreseeable’ risk of disastrous consequences on take-off, there’d be an AD requiring a flashing rudder trim warning annunciator on the application of take-off power. The components would cost about $2.50, the systems engineering and FMECA about $250,000 and the regulatory process about $2,500,000, but given the number of fatalities I would have thought the cost/benefit analysis writes itself.
(PS: Junior, do you know if anyone from ATSB has actually physically looked at the rudder trim and rudder trim wiring in situ in the aircraft type, while the flight and engine controls are manipulated.)
Of course I haven't, you asked how it could have happened, I told you how it could have happened. Could something else have caused it? Sure, any number of things. He could have had a heart attack, who knows.
I don't know how to investigate crashes, so I have to trust the ATSB does know how. You might know better and that's great.
As for the annunciator? Sounds great, can they make one for the friction locks too? Those things are a pain in the ass.