Originally Posted by
meleagertoo
To me the two incredible omissions in the entire fiasco were Indonesian's inexplicable absence of engineering reaction to the first event and then the apparent total unawareness of the Ethiopian crew of the nature of the problem (every other Boeing operator's crews, and probably 95% of the world's professional pilots too had dissected, researched, analysed and discussed the first accident exhaustively for months, yet Ethiopian Airlines allegedly hadn't promulgaed Boeing's essential publications on the subject to their pilots (how???), nor issued any guidance and the crew in question were apparently blissfully aware of what they were dealing with, quite apart from displayng some of the most astoundingly fundamental lapses of the most basic flying skills ever seen.
I'm more than a bit surprised that - on a pilots forum - this two issues didn't get more discussion. Especially the first one - how many pilots out there can readily deal with dispatching in a non-airworthy aircraft (which is exactly what was done on the first crash).
As designers, we know we have to design for pilots who are not all Sully's - heck the law of averages says half the pilots out there are below average - and we need to design for the 3-sigma 'bad' pilot, not just the good ones. But we also assume that the aircraft is built and maintained properly. When we do FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) and FHA (Failure Hazard Assessment), we assume that the aircraft is built per drawing, not dispatched in a non-airworthy condition, and faults (unless they are potentially latent) are properly dispatched via the MEL.
Yes, the design of MCAS was poorly executed - and Boeing has paid mightily for that. But the Indonesian and Ethiopian operators screwed the pooch equally badly.