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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

The most despicable thing besides all these that Boeing did was to start blaming the pilots, trying to use xenophobia and blaming it on 'third world' pilots first [1] though it was clear even from the start that there is nothing any pilot could have done so close to the ground [2].

That was disgusting and has me lose the last bit of sympathy I've had left for The Boeing Company.

[1] https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/boeing-ceo-puts-partial-bl...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/db8a09b8-56aa-11e9-a3db-1fe89bedc...

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This was not just Boeing and was common across wide swaths of professional pilots. Based on conversations with pilots I know and trust and who flew with non-US, non-major-Western European (and Australia) carriers, I’m deeply skeptical of many foreign operators and their realized safety record does not match the US/AU/major EU air carriers.

The second crash may have been avoided by timely application of the NNC procedure for runaway stab trim, right?

The 2nd crash would have been prevented by Boeing listening to the American Airlines pilots’ union call to ground the MAX after the 1st crash. You can't put this one on foreign pilots, when American pilots called for grounding the MAX.

Yeah, first paragraph of the GP was agreeable. Then the second one veered abruptly into weird corporate apologism.

"Man if only those "other" victims weren't so dumb, then my favorite company wouldn't have to suffer bad PR!"

Pilot error can be (and apparently was) a factor, no matter how at fault Boeing also was, and no matter how understandable the errors may have been under the circumstances. The Lion Air Pilots did not follow the trim procedures that had saved the prior flight, and the Ethiopian pilots didn’t keep their speed under control, among other things.

Didn’t we just have an article yesterday on how difficult it is to recover from this event in a simulator, in which the pilots knew exactly what was wrong and what was going to happen.

Blaming the Ethiopian pilots (One of the safest airlines in the world btw) for getting over speed during the workload induced by runaway trim is disrespectful.

By now, near every professional pilot agrees that these are near unrecoverable events unless you assess and cut the trim in first 15 seconds or so.

Blaming Lion Air in the first hours after the crash, with their somewhat sketchy history, was understandable.

Everything after that is uninformed or racist.

Getting over speed is an understandable error, and it's neither disrespectful nor racist to mention it as an error when discussing whether pilot error occurred.

Lion Air as such deserves blame for putting a broken plane back into the air; that's a bigger "third world factor" than pilot error, but it doesn't remove all pilot error from the flight.

The industry has stopped blaming things on "pilot error". It's not constructive, and in 90% of the cases it is the wrong conclusion. That in itself is dangerous because it means you stop looking for the real cause and ways to prevent it in the future.

The current view is that a mistake by the pilots can not be allowed to bring a plane down. If it does, the plane, software or procedures are designed wrong. And from my experience the industry (at least in Western Europe where I fly) really lives by this.

I don't represent the industry; I was just responding to a comment about pilot error. I was taking it as a given that we already know the ultimate cause was bad software. But that bad software didn't crash the planes every time, only under certain conditions, and after certain pilot actions or inactions.

Racist? The Ethiopian copilot had less than 300 hours total time. In the US, 1500 hours is required. Lion Air’s history of deficient processes is also not a function of race. Pilot standards are much lower in other non-American/non-European countries.

The fact that the US flies more and has fewer accidents isn’t “racist” nor lucky.

What is Racist is that Boeing is using perceptions about foreign airlines to shift blame and scapegoat... when clearly Boeing was the party trading safety for profit here. Boeing, "the Americans", knew and did nothing. There is no evidence that more flight time or experience would have changed the outcome. Who has 5,000 hrs of MCAS fuck up protocol? Sometimes those with less experience handle new technology better.

I doubt it was racism when regular American (and Western) chauvinism is plenty to do the job of discrediting a third-world airline--not to mention that most Americans couldn't tell you what race Indonesians are.

>This was not just Boeing and was common across wide swaths of professional pilots.

One of these two groups was in posession of a rather importantly wider set of information than the other.

As far as I understand there was nothing pilots could've done. They were too close to the ground to counteract the trim. They explicitly followed procedures.

Human factors may have been a contributing issue, but it seems like the root cause was the design/implementation.

In most major catastrophes/mishaps, there's a number of proximate causes (i.e. the pilots didn't do 'X') that 'could' have prevented the issue. But focusing on these to the distraction of focus on the root cause is a sure way to increase the risk of another failure.

Installing a larger oil pan won't fix your car for long if the root cause is a bad filter design.

there's no East vs West Europe in aviation. All EU airlines adhere to the same stric EASA rules.

You are not being fair here. Stating that Lion Air has a questionable safety record is not xenophobia, nor is it blaming the pilots when you speak of a chain of events and note that "in some cases, those procedures were not completely followed".

> nothing any pilot could have done so close to the ground [2]

FWIW, the pilots in the doomed Lion Air plane on the flight just prior to the accident flight did just that.

There is enough wrong with the 737 MAX, Boeing, the regulatory regime, etc. No need to become hyperbolic and inaccurate.

> FWIW, the pilots in the doomed Lion Air plane on the flight just prior to the accident flight did just that.

Not the pilots so much as the person sitting in the jump seat (who suggested disabling electric trim). It essentially took three pilots to save that plane.

It took one pilot who knew what he was doing.

Did he really knew the MCAS issue? I mean that every time you stabilize the plane it will point it down even harder?

The pilots did not know about this problem, they corrected the issue a few time the problem was that after a few correction MCAS corrected extremely and cutting it off at that point was useless because the pilots did not had the physical force to correct the plane.

The other pilots that rescued the situation in the simulator did it by using a technique he read on a pilot forum after the crashes, so it is obvious that a regular pilot that was train using Boeing manuals and followed Boeing guidelines for this problems could not save the plane(at least not in 100% of the cases).

Sure there may be super pilots (like we have super programmers that can read assembly stack traces) or lucky pilots but you don't want to excuse Boeing crimes by the fact that some pilots were lucky.

> Sure there may be super pilots (like we have super programmers that can read assembly stack traces) or lucky pilots but you don't want to excuse Boeing crimes by the fact that some pilots were lucky.

Agreed, but don't write (as GP did) that "there is nothing any pilot could have done so close to the ground".

The "there is nothing any pilot could have done so close to the ground" was alluding to the Ethiopian accident. They were a mere thousand feet from the ground.

It's exponentially easier to recover from a lot of issues, even a stall, when you have 40,000 feet of distance (and thus a lot more time) to play with rather than not even a thousand feet off the ground.

"At 8:39, as the jet reached an altitude of 8,100 feet above sea level, just 450 feet above ground, its nose began to pitch down"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-final-minutes-of-ethiopian-...

You are mathematically correct, it is impossible to prove that, even the case with the third pilot is not a contra-example because it probably was not the exact same issue.

That's disingenuous.

The third pilot wasn't having to exert 40+ pounds on a control yoke.

The third pilot had a full view of the center console without the burden of having to read and understand a large amount of the information normally considered critical to "flying the plane".

He was therefore in an advantaged position to troubleshoot less obvious root causes of the anomalous behavior.

He didn't know about MCAS, but he definitely got an rueful of trim wheel happily clicking away.

It's why Crew Resource Management is such an important thing, and why people who can pilot have been known to step up and assist crews during emergencies.

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