Originally Posted by
Greytraveler
gotta say that the tone of the report in part is far from professional - lots of use of rhetorical questions and even exclamations marks - such as:
What really happened is completely opposite to that!
someone enjoyed writing this
And the airline's response too. Looks like both parties have been at odds for a while. Regarding the engineering sim sessions:
The Ethiopian party had notified the IIC that they will attend but did not show up.
The Ethiopia response comes close to amusing, if there weren't so many dead bodies involved. The repetition of "loss of integrity of the pitch flight control system" flying in the face of all evidence brings to mind the Iraqi information Minister...
If you manage to read past all that there's a couple of gems near the bottom:
The operator should consider developing his safety
oversight program in order to detect such potential flight
crew performance.
Gets the response:
Ethiopian Airlines has SMS program in place. The FOQA uses the
monitoring and trend analysis by IATA/CAE-Flight scape. This
program does not include trends related to in flight break-ups.
And finally, right at the end they drop this in:
The autopilot system on B737 aircraft needs to be modified to
engage regardless of forces applied to the controls and to provide
an alert if the autopilot does not engage.
So, the crew didn't have a clue what they were doing after all then ? [but it's still the a/c at fault...]
The airline attitude seems to be:
- Airline and crew did nothing wrong, ever
- The crew flew into a fatal storm cell because ATC told them to
- Control inputs being all over the place is because the flight control system was broken first
- Their crew would have recovered (even given the broken control system...) from a 400kt+ spiral dive when already pulling over 4G, but unfortunately someone blew them up / shot them down at 1300ft, and why isn't anyone investigating that because it's obviously the real problem...
