24left

Well, you did say you were going to the beach

You could easily relax, get some sun and return to this thread when all of the horses are long gone and the circular discussion and debates have ended. Or come up and visit. The snow is melting.

CZAMFlyer

This is a great example of a very uninformed and careless statement. We can do better than this.

As the proverbial tire keeps spinning, the example keeps digging in. How much time have you spent in the training departments of either of the two airlines you are blaming?

RatherBeInYOW

Absolutely. And even if it is a training issue, or an experience issue, I can almost guarantee that is not the only issue.

My dad is a pilot. When I was a kid and they used to deliver TP 185 - Aviation Safety Letter - Transport Canada by good old fashioned mail I used to love reading them when they came in. I still read them online. You know what? It is always a combination of factors that lead to an issue. Blaming pilot experience / training is just as shortsighted as blaming MCAS. I'll bet a good chunk of money the result is some combination of hardware issues, software issues, airline operations, pilot training and that there will be blame to go around for Boeing, the airlines and the pilots. Because these accidents are rarely just one hole, they are the results of 3, 4, 5 holes in the Swiss cheese lining up.

Bohemian1

@24left clued me in to a parallel thread on the UA forum. Which led me to this excellent article:

Ground the Pilots ...

WaytoomuchEurope

There are multiple comments in this thread about 3rd world countries, the safety of their planes, and the manner in which their crew are trained.

I would venture a guess there isn't a single person within this thread that has any empirical evidence proving that pilots from LionAir, Ethiopian or any other airline don't read training manuals.

Just stop. It's disrespectful, disparaging, and more than likely entirely untrue.

D582

And MCAS only exists because the physical design of the plane is flawed to begin with due to Boeing's cheapness.

Shareholder

I wouldn't blame these pilots for not reading their manuals or not having passed their training. However, it is generally acknowledged that there is a major pilot shortage in the world, particularly affecting 2nd and 3rd tier airlines in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The older, more experienced pilots at these airlines will be flying the wide body planes on long distance flights while the newbies are assigned to local and regional runs on narrow bodies. Most of these countries do not have the same regional airline model that has developed in North America and Europe, and which feeds pilots through a in-the-field training process involving several years of flying RJs of all sorts before moving up to "the majors" where they work their way up the fleet. This gives our mainline pilots far better experience and ability to deal with the unexpected. Unfortunately this model does not exist in much of the rest of the emerging airline world, so young relatively inexperienced pilots take the cockpit in planes 5-10 years sooner than is the case here and in Europe. They can't help but not have the same in-the-field experiences that would permit them to make certain decisions. So I for one would not blame these pilots for their lack of such skills on anything other than relative experience at the yoke of a modern airliner.

That said, something's not right with the software that forced both sets of pilots to handle their respective incidents. We all know the Microsoft bugs that plagued that Seattle company's software releases, always requiring fixes. Let's hope Boeing's software engineers and programmers are better than those of their neighbour.

StuMcIlwain

Maybe the ET pilots read the training manual. I have no way of knowing. But without question, if the captain only had 8000 flight hours and the first officer had 200 flight hours of experience, which is what has been reported, then they were very inexperienced relative to what we are used to on airlines such as Air Canada.

That doesn't mean that the pilots were at fault in the ET accident. But I'm sure it's being looked at as a contributing factor.

songsc

Bohemian1

I'm not sure what your product is, but these are commercial aircraft. Reading the manual is not optional, just like having enough hours, getting type checked and doing dreaded time on the simulator are not optional either. That's what helps make flying largely routine and safe.

KenHamer

4.4 months.

Facts matter.



Many electronic components suffer what is known as a high infant mortality rate. That is, if an electronic component is going to fail early in its life. If it survives its childhood it is likely to last a very long time.

The end result is that electronics often fail when they are very young or very old; not so much in midlife.

CZAMFlyer

8000 hours would be considered a very good amount. You have likely flown on AC widebodies captained by pilots with fewer hours. Hours alone shouldn't be correlated with competence. There are so many other factors at play, notwithstanding the clouds around what 'competent' means.

200 hours if accurate, is surprising; an ab initio pilot candidate generally requires 250+ hours just to get the required licenses before sitting in anything resembling a complex airplane with 150+ passengers.

The current pilot shortage doesn't just affect foreign airlines. Jazz hires pilots without an Airline Transport Pilot License and Air Canada is accepting pilots with far fewer hours than what you think you are used to. It's not necessarily a bad nor unsafe thing; I state this to crack the perception that flying AC means you have a grizzled veteran at the helm.

yhzflyer

Anybody with any common sense knows this, but in the MAX case there ARE similarities, and in those circumstances it is incumbent upon authorities to exercise the precautionary principle until they know more. And we have it on good authority (you) that Marc Garneau knows what he is doing. Or maybe you've changed your mind on that because his decision now does not reflect yours.

24left

Just posted an hour ago


Boeing 737 Max Hit Trouble Right Away, Pilot’s Tense Radio Messages Show

March 14, 2019 - By Selam Gebrekidan and James Glanz

QUOTE:

"ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The captain of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines jetliner faced an emergency almost immediately after takeoff from Addis Ababa, requesting permission in a panicky voice to return after three minutes as the aircraft accelerated to abnormal speed, a person who reviewed air traffic communications said Thursday.

“Break break, request back to home,” the captain told air traffic controllers as they scrambled to divert two other flights approaching the airport. “Request vector for landing.”

Controllers also observed that the aircraft, a new Boeing 737 Max 8, was oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet — a sign that something was extraordinarily wrong."

......"The person who shared the information, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the communications have not been publicly released, said the controllers had concluded even before the captain’s message that he had an emergency."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/w...​​

Simon