canopus27

His comments are not that speculative .... here's an official press release from Ethiopian Airlines:
https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...on-ET-302.html

It says (in part):
Scary stuff.

Mauricio23

"Aviation safety consultant John Cox, chief executive of Safety Operating Systems and formerly the top safety official for the Air Line Pilots Association, said that’s because in the later 737 models that followed the -200, what was called a “runaway stabilizer” ceased to be a problem"

Boeing really did go for the common type rating - it brought back a serious flight control issue that had last been seen on the 737-200.

robsaw

Precisely.

And, yet we still have all sorts of speculative blaming and scenario forecasting based upon much less than thorough root cause analysis (or at least disclosure of such).

J. Leslie

Stay tuned...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...box=1554414266

ffsim

RangerNS

Yes speculation, which is fun.

My only argument is that the aircraft is "not fine" and I don't need to be an expert to see that. Two have crashed.

J. Leslie

My totally non-expert opinion leans toward "not fine" as well. It makes me wonder what else is wrong with this thing.

Fiordland

Yes. It is one thing to say there is an error in the control algorithm in the software. It is a very different situation if they disconnected the computer and they still can not recover the aircraft. That is much harder to fix that a software patch.

Plumber

This!!
I have been wondering the same thing!

expert7700

Half joking here.

after the long fix/certification process is done worldwide and the 737MAX returns to the skies, much of the public will fear this aircraft for years.

with reports of booking engines allowing people to filter out the 737max from flight results, someone could start selling an insurance policy that monitors for changes and kicks in if you book a NON 737 max flight and the airline changes schedule or does a last minute equipment swap to a MAX. The policy would pay for changes or tickets on a non-MAX plane

If nothing else they'd get worldwide media attention by publishing a website and getting ready to go to market.

marke190

Or they could just sign up for the excellent "Unofficial AC Schedule Change Notifier" crafted by canadiancow @:-)

https://flyertalk.canadiancow.com/ac...ange/index.php

Mountain Explorer

Umm, I think the point was that this policy would pay the change fee in the event you get swapped onto a Max. I'm guessing canadiancow is not going to pay that fee for everyone

RatherBeInYOW

Looks like:

• There were serious issues with he AoA and probably some of the other sensors. The incident aircraft had numerous items it its maintenance history that were never resolved (they just didn't recur). Investigators and Boeing need to understand why, as this was an issue with Lion Air and there was also an issue with a Sunwing 737 MAX8 (at cruising altitude) a few months ago as well, although they managed to handle it. This is not normal.
• The crew correctly used the stab trim cutout and tried to manually trim the aircraft. They were having issues though, because for whatever reasons they had lot of power applied and trimming the aircraft at those speeds challenging.
• For whatever reason they re-enabled the automatic trim, which is completely against the instructions provided by Boeing. Again for whatever reason when did they were not trying to use the electric trim, then MCAS re-engaged, pushed the nose down and then they were all dead at such low altitude.

As suspected, there are issues with the plane again just like Lion Air (why were they getting such erroneous data in the first place?) and the crew made some, well, odd choices. Why did the FO not take over because his instruments were not fubar and stick shaker was not going off? With all the issues going on why did they just retract flaps and enable the autopilot and try for FL320? Why did they not follow the prescribed procedure for runaway trim and re-enabling auto trim (despite the ridiculous press releases to the contrary put out by Ethiopian Airlines and the Ethiopian Minister of Transport which were total horse junk). And then the final link in the chain was MCAS kicking in at high speed and low altitude and killing everyone.

Even though the preliminary report gives us more questions than answers, the ridiculous narrative of 737 MAX = MCAS = Boeing = Bad which is being perpetuated by most of the internet and most of the people on this board looks to be a gross oversimplification. More evidence of the terrible design of MCAS, and although the proposed changes to MCAS might have saved the lives of the people on board they could not trim the aircraft even when it was disabled. Even after the MCAS changes are implemented the problems are deeper; at least we need to understand what is going on around sensor failure and around the control problems they had independent of MCAS. And as expected it looks like the crew made some errors too. Like most other aviation accidents this looks like a chain reaction of events where we've got issues with hardware, software and people lining up in a tragic manner.

But given that there are more questions than answers now I am not sure the MAX gets re-certified any time soon. I hope AC is making plans past the end of May for this.

canopus27

@RatherBeInYOW, I agree with all you wrote.

When it comes to the crew's decisions, I have two additional observations.

First, as much as we all hope that the crews on our particular flights are the very best - by definition, half the crews out there are "below average". Planes should be built to be able to fly reliably with not just average crews, but also by the bottom few. Of course there are standards, but we can't hope, expect, or require that every crew member be the best of the best. The plane needs to be designed to handle that.

Secondly, I'm really reluctant to criticize behaviors of the crew when all hell is going off in the cockpit. It sounds like this crew did follow the prescribed actions (the stab cutoff), found that they still had control problems, probably panicked, and started to improvise. No, that's not great .... but it seems only fair to cut them a little slack. Combine the obvious fear & panic that occurred, with the above observation that not every crew will be above average .... and it may not be an ideal state, but it's not that hard to understand either.

RatherBeInYOW

I couldn't agree more. This was a fairly junior crew (Captain who was young with a lot of FO hours but rather few Captain hours, and a FO who was brand new) but that isn't the point; they were trained to standards and the systems in the aircraft failed them. It is too soon to say how much of a role they played in the crash, just that they played one, but it certainly seems like they were battling against very difficult odds with the plane. We won't know more for many months most likely.