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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

How hard is it to flip through a binder while fighting against the trim system by putting significant force onto the stick and overriding the trim system every 10 seconds? Seems excessively challenging.

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This is why there are two pilots, and techniques like Crew Resource Management dictate that one pilot be solely responsible for flying the plane while the other pilot attempts to resolve the problem.

There were a number of incidents in the 1970s where pilots got so distracted solving a problem that they let the plane crash (by running out of fuel, or by gradually descending into the ground, or several other things), so training tries to explicitly account for this problem by ensuring the pilots are very clear about who is responsible for flying and who is solving the problem, and that they clearly communicate the steps they are taking to each other.

Two examples of crashes due to the lack of CRM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173

One example of CRM success:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

The pilot flying (PF) controls the aircraft while the pilot monitoring (PM) calls out the checklist items. It's very manageable with an experienced crew. But apparently the first officer in the Ethiopian crash only had 200 hours of experience, so it will be interesting to see if his inexperience was a contributing factor.

But the captain had 8000 hours of experience. But I agree, maybe the less-experienced pilot was a contributing factor. The black box recording should provide insight if there were any cockpit squabbles...

But he had only been a 737 Captain since Nov 2017 [1]. And graduated from flight school in 2010. It's unknown what the distribution of the 8000 hours are. For all we know, he had 6000 hours on the Q400.

[1]:https://outline.com/dMNAS5

The plane has only been in operation since 2017. No one has more than a two years of experience with this plane.

If there are significant deviations of the Max8 with the previous 737 models, that would constitute a safety risk IMO. Banning the plane probably wouldn't be the appropriate response, but we would at least ask Boeing to develop proper simulators and training so that Pilots would be more familiar with whatever the issue is.

Yes, but the 737 has been around since 1967, which is what the person your replying to was talking about.

Going between the 737 NG and the 737 Max would not be a big change even if they were different type ratings, but going from say some turboprop to a 737 would be a big change.

If this pilot was moving up to the 737 from smaller aircraft (which nothing says he did, its just speculation), it seems somewhat likely that he transitioned from either their retired turboprops or the Q400 fleet they have.

Hmmm... this seems to address my confusion appropriately. Make sense.

EA has other 737 models in their fleet. Their last accident, a 737-800, ET409 [1][2] out of Lebanon, CRM issues were cited as the primary factor. Not arguing with you, and they could have addressed all the training problems. But I don't think the previous accident should be overlooked when speculating. Especially, the fact that EA was hostile to the conclusions of the report. [3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_409

[2]: https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2010/et-b100125.en/pdf/et-b10012...

[3]: https://www.isasi.org/Documents/library/technical-papers/201...

Your source doesn't say that he graduated from flight school in 2010, but joined Ethiopian Airlines in 2010.

Edit: Source that says he graduated at Ethiopian https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/business/ethiopian-airlin...

EA operates their feeder flight school [1]. There is a PR from EA somewhere showing his yearbook photo from their graduating class 2010, but again it was in the Ethiopian press, I forgot to outline it.

[1]: https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/EAA/

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