Yeah, both main parties are stuck in the past. The BJP is horrible for obvious reasons, and there is no good opposition party. The upcoming election is going to be a shitshow.
264 karma · joined March 5, 2018
No this is not true. In near stall situations for which the MCAS is designed, a full deflection of the elevators is not enough to counter the stabiliser effects. I'm not sure about the entire flight envelope, but I guarantee there are other situations where the elevator cannot counter the stabiliser.
The right way to "regain control" isn't to overpower the stabiliser by inputs to other flight control surfaces, but to disable automatic stabiliser trim and manually trim the aircraft.
Agreed but the context is completely different. The airbus flight computers rely on data from three sensors and thus are triply redundant. AF447 happened in severe icing conditions with water ingressing into the pitot tubes on the ground. All three pitot tubes froze, causing all three sensors to report bad data. The aircraft identified the discrepancy and degraded from normal law to alternate law as expected so it would not make any decisions based on the faulty data. The crash ultimately was caused by the pilots being disoriented because of the very low visibility. The sidestick issue is a different discussion, but its not related to the 737MAX accidents.
The MCAS system on the other hand is not triply redundant, and that's what people have issue with. Boeing itself has more redundant envelope protections on the newer models like the 777 and 787.
The fact that Boeing themselves chose to implement flight envelope protections and FBW systems on their newer planes show that the industry in general is in favour of them, pretty much the only difference now is that the boeing yoke provides feedback.
In the case of Airfrance 447, all three pitot tubes malfunctioned due to icing conditions well outside the the expected range required for type certification for that aircraft. The aircraft also did degrade down from normal law as was expected.
Admittedly, the sidesticks on the airbus do not provide feedback but both pilots ignored the aural "dual input" warning, as well as the warning indication on the panel.
There are plenty of people (on this site and on reddit) who jump on to criticize airbus for the way it puts the aircraft's computer systems ahead of the pilots and claim that the 737's flight controls are preferable to pilots because the pilots have full control. I don't want to spark any airbus vs boeing debate, but I want to point out these accidents seem to discredit that line of thinking.