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Comment by myko | Hacker News Reader

I didn't recall the specifics here but it's worse than I assumed from your comment, trump blamed "foreign pilots" for the crashes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-two-faulty-boe...

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IIRC, the argument was that there exist a special manoeuvre which can make it possible to save the plane by slowing down the the plane airspeed so the pilots can manually turn the wheels controlling the trim. So some pilots were claiming that "no American pilot would let this happen", I guess due to their superior training.

It wasn't just a distasteful position, but also the largest American 737 MAX operator opted in for the extra safety package which included a second angle of attack sensor and "sensors disagree" light which would have reduced the chances of this happening anyway[0].

Making faulty planes then selling the extra features for detecting the faults and claiming that if you can't fly a faulty plane you are not a good pilot is psychopathic IMHO.

[0] : https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-fe...

Boeing looking lustfully at the B2B SaaS market

My pilot neighbor, who is a captain at a major domestic us airline that flys maxes, also blamed foreign airlines pilots for lack of proper training.

What was the training? From what I read the plane was sold as being flown without the need for new training to counter the Airbus jet?

Our club has few professional pilots and iirc their more or less shared opinion was that boeing fucked up, but the expectation was that pilots training should have prevented the crashes. Regardless of Airbus, Boeing expectation still is that pilots can fly with minimum automation, and if something is wrong / odd they know how to disable it all, take full control, gain altitude and figure things out.

iirc the proper course of action for this failure condition was to perform manual cutoff of the stabilizer trim, which is considered a mandatory memory item for flying even normal Boeing 737s (non max)

basically, on runway stabilizer events, you must know to turn off the autopilot: https://www.johanpercherin.info/airline-pilot-training/boein...

apparently the differences in training have resulted in the lack of knowledge in this area for foreign pilots, which turned a recoverable failure into an irrecoverable one

disclosure I'm just going from memory from reading about 737 max analysis, there might be more to it than thi

Edit: as expected the situation is more nuanced, see here for elaboration on why even successfully performing stab trim cutoff may not have been sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769100

What proper training? Boeing deliberately decided not to document the new behavior, and the entire point of MCAS was to avoid needing new pilot training.

Sounds like your pilot neighbor is just a bigot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769580

Which airline does he fly for? Hopefully one of the ones already on my shit list and I don’t have to add a new one…

Not only that but the flight test software written by the offshored 9$/h Indian contractors sure didn't help...

Can you share a link to this? I would like to read up more on the conditions that the flight test software was made.

https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-outsourced-737-max-re...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

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