Just watched the two Mentor Pilot MCS videos.
What an utter cluster fuck,
Boeing added a system that wasn't even needed that they thought was easily ignorable if it malfunctioned as long as you did the Thing, and then didn't tell anyone what the Thing was.
They basically designed an escape room that you have to solve whilst hurtling at the ground at Mach 0.75 while pulling back on the control column with half your body weight.
Astonishingly, the first bunch of pilots on LionAir actually managed to solve that escape room and lived. It was the guys who took it out the next day who died.
And then the Ethiopian pilots, who had read the instructions that Boeing had provided after the first crash, did what they were told to do and it didn't work because while the escape room was actually solvable (hold the trim button constantly until the pressure on the column disappears then flip the stabiliser switches to off, or throttle right back and set the flaps to 1º when the plane slows down), Boeing's instructions put while flying manually in bold, so that was the bit everyone remembered, and instead they kept trying to engage the autopilot, which didn't work and never would, because the failure mode only occurred when the plane was so confused that autopilot wasn't going to work anyway.
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Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Katie Fenn
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •@christineburns Meanwhile, they were selling dual redundant flight speed indicators, a key safety feature which marginally increased costs but would have prevented the disaster, was being flogged as a premium optional extra.
Post McDonnell Douglas Boeing is a fractal of corporate horrors.
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Kincaid
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •went from building planes that could take negative 3g and recover from an inverted dive*, to...whatever the 737 is...
*With some minor damage like loss of a stabiliser and the undercarriage blowing off but who's counting, it still landed
Sarah Brown
in reply to Kincaid • •@Kincaid The Max is probably now quite a decent aircraft. It has the compromised version of the LEAP because the landing gear is too short, but it does surprisingly well regardless.
But as originally produced, it was a murder plane and unfit for purpose, simply because of this stupid bit of software that made piss all difference to normal flying, but could be tricked into killing everyone on board remarkably easily.
It's still there, but it's been defanged now.
Ed Davies
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •And all to save a few-days-long differences course to add a new rating on pilots' licences. Read some notes, take a multiple choice online test. Maybe an exercise or two in the sim. Perhaps repeated at every third or fourth sim check. Would have cost the airlines a tiny fraction of their training budgets.
Pure marketing.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Ed Davies • •Z̈oé
in reply to Katie Fenn • • •like this
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Z̈oé • •@Z̈oé ⛵ @Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖ @Katie Fenn “hold the trim button until the force goes away then follow the runaway stabiliser checklist”.
So few words to not kill 300 people 😞
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