I have a hard time believing the statement from the fine article that the presence of the MCAS system was unknown to the pilots. I'm not a pilot, just an interested spaceflight and aircraft enthusiast, and I know about that system. There is no way that the pilots did not.
Maybe the pilots did not receive proper sim time on a 737MAX, which I believe has different enough instrumentation and automation systems to require a separate sim from the standard 737. But they almost certainly knew which systems were on the plane, and how to operate them under normal conditions.
>Maybe the pilots did not receive proper sim time on a 737MAX, which I believe has different enough instrumentation and automation systems to require a separate sim from the standard 737
Isn't part of Boeing's marketing strategy that the 737MAX actually DOESN'T require additional training? The entire point of MCAS is to make the larger 737MAX react to control inputs just like a smaller 737, so flight crew can just fly them all "like a 737".
There were too many warnings already. That was the problem. More warning could not have helped. Instead, the fact that the pitot tube was inoperable should not have led to so many alarms, just one, and not an urgent one since the autopilot could have kept the throttle at its current setting. (Air speed is independent of land speed, and it's much more important to know the airspeed than the land speed, but wind speed is not going to fluctuate so much, so land speed can be used as a proxy for airspeed in that situation, and anyways there wasn't anything to be done about the lack of airspeed indication in that situation.)
Not silently. There's a voice alert, "Priority Left" or "Priority Right", and a red light. But with other alarms active, it's likely to be missed.
Airbus statement on sidesticks. [1]
Boeing position on sidesticks.[2]
This is a long-standing controversy. The F-16 fighter was the first aircraft produced with a sidestick. But that was so the pilot could control it during high-G maneuvers. Airbus's use of it has been controversial for years. For a good overview of the Airbus control system, read "Fly by Wire", by William Langewiesche.
But that wasn't the problem with Lion Air.
Airspeed. Attitude. Vertical speed. Altitude. If the pilot is operating on wrong information for any of those, they may lose control of the aircraft. All large aircraft have more than one of each of those. But when they disagree, or fail in a common mode, big trouble.
Whether some other data source like GPS or inertial should be used to back up those is an open question. GPS can and is jammed. Inertial systems drift. Both are complicated. The classic instruments are so simple. But they rely on tubes to holes in the aircraft skin, which might become plugged for a number of reasons - ice, maintenance covers, insects, or dirt.
This narrative is incorrect. The aircraft gave audio and visual warnings when there were multiple control inputs. And we can infer that the crew on AF447 noticed them because the 2 (IIRC) instances of dual input lasted less than a couple of seconds.
And the captain actually noticed it, told the pilot pulling back on the stick to push forward, who did momentarily and then he pulled back again.
If you read the whole transcript and report it really does show just how wrong the pilot pulling back got it. And it speaks to the training and understanding that pilot had of how to fly the electronics vs how to fundamentally fly an aircraft.
To me, this moment is one of the failure points in the incident and is entirely the captain’s fault.
Captain: What the hell are you doing?
Benin: We've lost control of the plane!
Robert: We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything
Now, instead of a team working jointly on a problem, we have two juniors feeling that they have to justify and defend themselves to their captain. It’s a really poor psychological position to be in with a time-critical problem to be solved.
It’s a human response, obviously, but I’m betting it’s the opposite of what his training would have recommended.
IMO, in that moment, the Captain either needed to get his crew problem-solving, or take control himself. unfortunately he did neither.
My understanding is that aerodynamic modelling and simulator runs have shown that a committed decision to push nose-down, regain airspeed and recover from the stall, could have been successfully initiated all the way down to 5000 feet. The Captain had another 2mins 15secs (approximately) before reaching that level, and another 30 secs before impact after that.
There was time, if only someone had said the word
‘stall’ out loud.
I'd expect it from a student, because they're operating consciously. I'm not sure I'd expect it from someone who is in shock, who's experienced thousands of hours of uneventful operation and suddenly everything has changed.
I don't know easily panicked mentality can be tested for. Training is one thing, but training is typically designed to instill automatic response to predetermined stimuli. Sometimes what you want is a reset back to first principles and activation of conscious reasoning. Which is exactly what you don't get in shock or panic, and is the reason for training automatic response.
Boeing uses force feedback so the two pilots are aware that something is counter-acting their input.
I really don’t think the Airbus strategy is defensible - certainly not when the two inputs are far apart!