The Minority Marksman.
"When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet."
-a Ch'an Buddhist axiom.
The erroneous MCAS activation was the main contributing factor to these accidents, however the crew's inability to handle the situation, maintain aircraft control, and run the appropriate checklists in an appropriate time frame is what doomed them.
If it was simply a foreign pilot training issue, the planes wouldn’t be stacked up collecting pigeon poop at airfields from VCV to BFI. What that problem is, how deep it goes, and what the .feds are going to decide covers everyone sufficiently is another story.
Working diligently to enlarge my group size.
This assumes that foreign aviation agencies and the FAA are acting in a rational, non-political manner as they make their grounding decisions.
As Suvorov said, the erroneous MCAS activation was the “trigger event” in the two fatal accidents, but, contrary to popular press reporting, it did not doom them to an inevitable crash.
Two low-competence crews responded slowly and inappropriately to what was essentially uncommanded nose-down trim.
Boeing certainly needed to document MCAS functionality better, and address the lack of redundancy in AOA input.
However, US airlines have dramatically more MAX flying time then Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, and a US carrier has not experienced an AOA failure, nor an erroneous MCAS activation. I would submit that maintenance practices in the United States, and the caliber of pilots flying for the majors would combine to make the existing MCAS situation a non-issue. It should be fixed, but this extended grounding is a political game to avoid ever mentioning that sub-par pilots in third-world airlines couldn’t hack a straightforward problem - one that was possibly induced by poor maintenance practices.
I think that both Boeing and the FAA are afraid of the political fallout (being called racist) for stating the truth about the primary cause of the fatal accidents.
We shall see. <shrug>
Working diligently to enlarge my group size.
I'm not a pilot, but my humble point of view is that mechanical/electronic devices should be as forgiving as possible, and safety procedures redundant...
Hoping for a flawless pilot reaction in every case is a recipe for failure.
I know it is a balancing act, we shall see.
Planes today are so automated that they practically fly themselves. But no matter how forgiving or redundant the systems are, you can still lose an engine or sensor or control surface to a bird strike. It's for that those emergency situations that we insist on having pilots in the cockpits, and those pilots had better know how to manually fly the airplane in those situations.
If you only train your pilots to babysit the autopilot... That's the recipe for disaster. It's like (since this is Pistol Forum) training cops how to shoot with 2 hands, but because Glocks are so reliable and hold so many rounds, not bothering to train them how to clear a malfunction, or reload, or shoot one handed. Or Firefighters training how to sit around the firehouse waiting for a call, how to wash the trucks, where to store their boots, but never actually practicing how to put out a fire.
Anti-astroturfing disclaimer: I am the owner of Bagman Tactical (custom tactical nylon).
I know, I'm not talking about the pilost merely "babysitting the autopilot". But waiting for a perfect human response in case something fails (which they always do) is the other extreme.
The trick is finding the middle ground, knowing how forgiving can you make a system before detracting from some othe qualities, or adding too much complexity, cost, etc....
Bloomberg is reporting: They must have killer customer service.
The article goes on to discuss that Boeing hired Russian engineers who didn't understand that smoke detectors need to be hardwired into the airplane.
Yet another reason to stay off Russian airliners.
If we have to march off into the next world, let us walk there on the bodies of our enemies.