Sure, but 737's have crashed before from crews getting the nose too high on departure, so... arguably the entire 737 fleet would benefit from a "proper" MCAS.
The people who built MCAS thought they were taming a 737 handling weakness that was worsened by the new engines. Again-- a normal kind of thing to have to work on when stretching jets.
Not stalling on takeoff is pilot 101. If an aircraft is prone to it I personally do not want layers of software hiding the issue. It's practically a law of nature that software is full of bugs.
Better avoid Airbus, then, because there's a massive control law between the pilots and the actuators to create a "do what I mean" interface with envelope protection and all kinds of characteristics tamed.
Thanks. I couldnt agree more. It would make sense if the bar was higher for adding control software than training pilots. To me it seems like the type cert problem was backwards.
In fairness, we've added a whole lot of automation since 1970, and most people think that increased automation has been a key factor in why aviation is so much safer overall. (Along with crew resource management).
Automation definitely has directly killed people, though, too.
Boeing was proven wrong by the two crashes but it's not a priori obvious that pilots wouldn't know to manually trim the stabilizer and then pull the cutout after MCAS kept kicking in.
They were following Boeing's advice! Boeing said if MCAS misbehaves then pull the cutout. They did that but then they couldn't move the manual trim wheel because of the forces on the stabilizer. So they reenabled the electric trim, at which point MCAS jumped in again and everybody died.
They couldn't move the manual trim wheel because the plane had been allowed to overspeed.
It was climbing at Vmo; they could have pulled back the power to not let the plane overspeed, rather than exceeding Vmo.
Hopefully at Vmo they could move the trim wheel, but if not, they could wait until they had a few thousand feet more height, aerodynamically unloaded and trimmed.
> So they reenabled the electric trim, at which point MCAS jumped in again and everybody died.
They re-enabled the electric trim, and touched the electric trim switch a couple of times but left the plane far out of trim. I can't figure this out-- there's even an indicator that makes it obvious you're out of trim. Why re-enable electric trim and not really use it?
Then after a timeout after they pushed the trim switch, MCAS jumped in again and everyone died.
That's what you would do, you weren't there though, they were. Confronting a system whose implementation details were not well known, already two potential memory item checklists into the flight to the ground.
It's easy now to point the finger and say "Airmanship" when you know the innards of the damn thing. They had one airworthyness directive, and maybe a grand total of five paragraphs in the entire manual, plus a memory item checklist that didn't accurately reflect the detail of an MCAS failure. An MCAS failure is not continuous uncommanded trim. It's discrete pulses,
I appreciate the detail and effort, and you certainly speak as an experienced member of the industry; but pushing this off to the pilot's when there is so much that had to happen before the plane left the factory for them to be in that position is a bit much.
There is whistleblower testimony that the decision to not implement a multi-sensor MCAS was intentional to avoid the financial consequences of having to have pilots put in simulator time.
You can't sit here and say the pilots weren't good enough when the manufacturer went out of their way to make sure they could skulk a plane by regulators with the least amount of training humanly possible, safety be damned. To do so is not just mad, it's unconscionable. It's the very thing of insanity. A Catch-22 if I've ever heard one.
OK, so you're here to ad hom and mock (in your other post) and then not actually speak to the question asked here (when your plane is climbing, why would you re-enable electric trim, and then not even bother to significantly retrim the plane?)
This is not the behavior I expect from someone whom I'll voluntarily talk to.
The people who built MCAS thought they were taming a 737 handling weakness that was worsened by the new engines. Again-- a normal kind of thing to have to work on when stretching jets.