Boeing and the Battle over Blame

I'm still astounded that there are credentialed pilots who happen to be electable that have the nerve to try to blame the Ethiopian pilot's for the disaster.

I'm not sure if it just comes out of some misguided sense of brand loyalty, or the campaign donations were just that high.

As the article mentions: A congressman blames the pilot's for not retarding the throttles to prevent overspeed.

Happily, this journalist did their research and got a second opinion which noted that:

>Addis Ababa is hot and high. >The stick shaker was on >The underslung engines actually were providing a pitch-up moment that was helping to counter the nose-down pitch caused by MCAS induced mistrim, pulling throttle would have caused even more nose down.

Not explicitly called out, but worth noting: >The plane was technically in Airspeed Unreliable as far as malfunctioning AoA sensors feeding garbage data to the computer to calculate CAS (Calibrated Air Speed) and TAS (True Air Speed) from IAS (Indicated Air Speed).or those that don't know, Airspeed is measured based off of pressure measured from devices known as out of tubes. This measurement alone is known as Indicated Air Speed. This measurement is sensitive to the orientation of the aircraft to the airstreams, so requires among other things accurate AoA measurement to actually derive an accurate number truly representative of the velocity of the plane relative to the local airstreams being sampled.

Given the circumstances, I'd recommend taking the Congressman's exhortations with a grain of salt. Not sure what dog he has in the game besides wanting to take cheap shots at Ethiopian Airlines, but the facts are far more in the realm of the pilot's having done everything they could and having to improvise/triage with faulty information at their disposal rather than gross pilot negligence taking place.