Plane View: Thanks for the information about the report. I also heard that it had been postponed until the end of June. I would assume that a 600-page draft must include the 500 or so pages that the coroner submitted, plus many pages for the FDR readout, so I don’t understand his complaint about lack of staff. I would think that his report, without these addenda, would only run to 20 pages or so. Someone, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, I don’t think that the case against Boeing is all that “rock-solid.” With 5000 planes in production over 30 years, this seems to be the first one that didn’t do what it was supposed to do. I have sifted through American and European incident reports going all the way back to 1978, where pressurization problems caused the pilots to lower altitude or land, but these incidents didn’t cause the plane to crash. In fact, most of the incidents referred to failure of a particular part, such as outflow valve, cabin pressure controller, or open door or faulty seal. The other failures during climb or cruise were due to pilots’ failure to reconfigure after a bleeds-off takeoff.
I have also carefully looked through the checklists, past and present, and the instructions seem pretty clear and straightforward and always have. In fact, even though the recently revised checklist specifically states that the pressurization mode selector should be set to “Auto,” if pilots elect to do a bleeds-off takeoff, they will still have to reconfigure the bleeds, and that is what has been overlooked, even though it has been on the non-normal checklist from the beginning, with a revision in 2002 as per the following incident report of the Canadian Transport Safety Board
http://www.tsb.gc.ca/en/reports/air/...1/a00p0101.asp
I still think that an unrelated, recurring electrical problem is at fault here, and that the pressurization failure was secondary, albeit fatal. As Poljot suggested earlier, was there also a problem with the pilots’ oxygen supply? If the bottles weren’t erroneously filled with nitrogen, then perhaps they were empty. I hope that at least one of the 600 pages of the investigation report will cover this.