> blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew
The same happened with MCAS, the pro-Boeing argument was that if those were American pilots it would have been fine.
The same happened with MCAS, the pro-Boeing argument was that if those were American pilots it would have been fine.
There is no way pilots form all over the world could "regress to the mean". They could not have been all, or most, "above the mean". The mean would be higher then.
I mean, those are pretty standard maneuvers, up to 4gs or so, in small aircraft, and I used to fly aerobatic frequently... but it just hits different somehow on an aircraft that weighs 70 tons and flexes visibly.
Between US pilots having to lie about their mental health and then having average pay far lower than people who use Claude code daily, they really aren’t sending their best.
Unironically whatever you think pilot training involves, we should probably double it. This would be extra good as raising the prices of flights will make fewer people fly. Far too many people right at this moment who shouldn’t be flying are flying.
If we could finish by forcing all airline seats to be at business class quality (thus average flight ticket costs are about 2X now as economics of scale kick in), than flying would become a humane practice rather than war crimes in the sky.
I’m pretty sure no American airline had the same situation that the airlines with the crash had because they paid extra for the redundant AOA sensor.
The MCAS issue was a major issue, but the ultimate fundamental flaw was Boeing not including a redundant sensor (which is the one that was malfunctioning in the crashes) in the base package as they should have.
The inexplicably considered redundancy in this part an optional extra, and as far as I’m aware there were no US airlines that hadn’t taken the optional extra package.
There was no redundancy AOA sensor option for MCAS.
All the planes were built with two AOA sensors, with the original MCAS implementation only using data from 1 sensor.
Edit: I was misremembering. Both sensors were enabled on all planes and MCAS only used one at a time on all planes.
What was disabled, unless paid for, was software which displayed to the pilots that the 2 sensors were disagreeing, which would immediately have alerted them to what may have been wrong.
> According to Bjorn Fehrm, Aeronautical and Economic Analyst at Leeham News and Analysis, "A major contributor to the ultimate loss of JT610 is the missing AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots' displays."[109] > The software depended on the presence of the visual indicator software, a paid option that was not selected by most airlines.[110] For example, Air Canada, American Airlines and Westjet had purchased the disagree alert, while Air Canada and American Airlines also purchased, in addition, the AoA value indicator, and Lion Air had neither.[111][112] Boeing had determined that the defect was not critical to aircraft safety or operation, and an internal safety review board (SRB) corroborated Boeing's prior assessment and its initial plan to update the aircraft in 2020. Boeing did not disclose the defect to the FAA until November 2018, in the wake of the Lion Air crash.[113][114][115][116] Consequently, Southwest had informed pilots that its entire fleet of MAX 8 aircraft will receive the optional upgrades.[117][118] In March 2019, after the second accident of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing representative told Inc. magazine, "Customers have been informed that AoA Disagree alert will become a standard feature on the 737 MAX. It can be retrofitted on previously delivered airplanes."[119]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
Boeing: Do you want a two line code which triggers a potentially life-saving warning when your flying sausage with wings has an important sensor malfunction?
Customer: Of course!
Boeing: That'll be $25K, thanks.
People talking about MCAS seem to simultaneously pound the line that everything on the aircraft the pilots encounter should be trained for and forget that adding new stuff to the flight displays will incur additional training that an airline may not want to deal with.
Is that what I'm reading?
If you want to see the way this looks on the flight displays that a pilot sees, this video shows some examples (generated from a flight simulator): https://youtu.be/L5KQ0g_-qJs?si=AtYkellEROnHZ89e&t=349
Unknown to the customer was that all machines were identical. The technician's "installation procedure" was to enter the Service Mode password, select the feature enable option, and exit Service Mode then run a test to make sure it worked.
This is pretty common in commercial/industrial manufacturing. The exception cost to omit certain hardware subsystems when building a product is often higher than the cost of the hardware itself, so it makes more sense to build everything identically and enable/disable features in software.
What a load of bullcrap. Full stop.
The crews of the two crashed 737Max were also well trained, skilled professionals.
That the US-based crews decided to re-engage the auto-pilot, and with that action, by sheer luck, managed to bypass the fatal MCAS issues, shows you exactly what it was: sheer luck.
These pilots reacted to a system malfunction of a system they hardly knew existed (thanks to Boeing's lies), that changed the aircraft subsystems behaviour in fundamental, undocumented ways compared to the previous generation of 737s, and that they were therefore not trained to handle. So skill differences did not enter the equation, luck did.
The choice was between doing the manual procedures they were trained to do to try to regain control, and the hail mary approach of re-engaging the autopilot wtith the hope the problem went away. With no time to do both. The crashed crews chose option 1, the US crews option 2.
This is like Tesla claiming that all crashes due to autopilot failures are driver faults because they are not properly trained... it is supposed to be a car driveable with a regular car license! If you need extra train to drive it properly, be explicit.
there's a 1992 wrap up book on that: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/robotica/article/abs...
all a bit before Boston Dynamics.
There was an optional 'AOA disagree' system that an airline could buy that could help pilots know when the MCAS was going crazy. US airlines, perhaps having more money, may have bought those (helping pilots with situational awareness), but airlines in developing countries (with presumably less money) may not have gotten them.
See perhaps §6.4 about Boeing giving that functionality to everyone:
* https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-08/737_RTS_Summ...
Very different from how a pilot has to handle strange situations. Being ready for anything in an airborne plane without a pause button is so much harder, impossibly hard, and not every air authority tries as hard to reach the impossible.
This is not just filling out reports and looking at stuff, they're in no way comparable to your local garage mechanic (and not to dump on them either: they too have to deal with out of the ordinary situations).
The responsibility issues are the same as with the pilots as well, they fuck up people die.
Also what fraction of engine test cell use is for engine maintenance? Is it a big amount?
But if that kind of test goes wrong the main outcomes are "hit stop" and "oh no it's too late". An emergency like that is not where much of their expertise is needed, their expertise is in other parts of their job.
After every overhaul. Typically every 2500 to 15000 hours depending on the type of engine and the workload. It depends on many economic factors whether or not an overhaul is economical, in some cases it is cheaper just to buy a new engine.