Am I missing something here? Isn't it normal for off-duty pilots to ride in the jump-seat?
Being in the right place, and happening to know exactly how to deal with what would otherwise kill the pilot and all the passengers, is incredibly fortunate.
Check out the Asiana crash at SFO for an example of where CRM failed hard. The pilot flying in that case was told by the other two pilots in the cockpit how to avoid the crash and he STILL flew a perfectly serviceable plane into the ground in perfect weather on an extremely easy visual approach.
It's good the pilots took advice -- but they should not have needed that advice because they should have been trained to operate the system properly.
The whole thing reflects very poorly overall:
- The pilots were not trained properly on the new system, and a third pilot who happened to be hitching a ride had to tell them how to operate the plane.
- The plane was allowed to fly again the next day despite the malfunction, none of the pilots flying it were properly trained, and everybody died.
- The incident was not reported properly at the time, nor was it reported after the same plane had crashed the next day.
It's hard to train for something that doesn't exist according to Boeing
The plane was allowed to fly again the next day despite the malfunction
The plane was serviced between flights, and assuming that Lion Air actually did what they claimed, Lion Air maintenance followed the Boeing instructions by the book.
The incident was not reported properly at the time
The malfunction was written up in the maintenance log and the issues were addressed. Unfortunately because Boeing refused to disclose the existence of MCAS the pilots wrote it up both as what they saw (EFS non-op, IAS disagree), and if memory serves, they also suspected the one algorithm they knew about (STS)[1].
From the article:
> The so-called dead-head pilot on the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down, according to the people familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize.
Clearly only one of the pilots memorized the checklist, but they were all required to do so. Presumably the pilots who crashed the plane the next day didn't memorize it either.
I've already posted the checklist. If you've memorized the checklist you'd know that it says to stop if the trimming stops once you hit the push buttons on the yoke. MCAS stops trimming when you manually input opposite trim (and you can see this on the black box graphs from the preliminary report).
Absolutely not, I know several airline pilots and they deadhead in economy seats.
Downvote away...
So yes, I will try not to break the site guidelines again (I agree this is a clear case of breaking site guidelines). It just makes me sad how HN used to be a place where people could ask genuine questions and not be downvoted to invisibility, for whatever reason.