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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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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