Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
WideScreen
(as the MAX accidents continue to be the unwanted gifts that keep on giving)
Could you expand on a couple items in your post?
OK, let me elaborate.
Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
First, can you identify particular portions or parts of the NTSB comments which you claim show - or at least suggest - that Boeing lobbied the investigation by Eithiopian authorities to deflect or reduce culpability of Boeing?
No it doesn't. That's why I write "I smell". There is no proof of this, though on the contrary, there is neither a realistic reason to just ignore serious remarks from the (what I consider to be the best) accident investigation bureau, just dropping their whole comment.
Be aware, I did not indicate "who" were being lobbied on, only "Ethiopia". It could very well be, and probably is, not a "direct" connection. We should need to be aware, that the Ethiopian airline industry is -similar to the ME ones- pretty well intermingled around subjects/responsibilities which are considered to be mandatory/legally split over independent organizations (and even then....), in Western countries.
Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
Second, with regard to how the FO in the Turkish AMS accident mishandled the FCU ... just an SLF/attorney here but it has been reported that the FO set up for single-channel using CMD A rather than dual channel - are you asserting that the possibility of an FO making such an error is a design flaw on Boeing's part? Isn't that the main assertion of the NYT article which is the main source for implications about the Turkish AMS accident investigation?
I think, the Turkish at AMS had little to do with single/dual channel setup mistakes.
It was pretty well known in the cockpit, the Captain side RA didn't work. As such, they configured the FO side computers to do the approach, etc. expecting the FO side to work properly.
The mistake here is, that both Captain and FO computers do use the (faulty) Captains' RA sensor. An aspect that is completely outside normal logic thinking. Which caught them heavily for their specific approach situation (get on glide slope "aggressively", from above). My memory says, there was no training at Turkish for this RA aspect and the documentation itself around this subject was also minimal and could be easily overseen.
The subsequent manual take-over by the captain was neither performed perfectly. The automation was not turned off completely, with the consequence, the throttles moved back to idle, after the captain moved these to TO trust. It has to be seen, whether the TO trust, taking into account, the spool-up time, together with the in those days mandated "don't sink during stall recovery" would have been enough to avoid stall persistence and ground contact.
Many years later, it surfaced that the accident report draft did address this RA logic aspect as an important item, though got (largely) removed after Boeing "feedback" on the draft. This developed into a scandal around accident bureau, which gave a lot of lost-face and political consequences. I forgot about the exact outcome, though the then-head of the accident investigation bureau did have to do a lot of political (potato in the throat) assurance, that everything was still OK, but everybody knew how the situation around the investigation really was. Nothing different from the Boeing-MAX / FAA cooperation disaster, where Boeing effectively over classed the controlling organization(s).