Your UA232 comparison completely misses the point that was a failure impacting the primary flight controls; MCAS has no affect on primary flight controls, only secondary flight controls. The third world crews crashing the MAX had more options and control authority available to them than the UA232 crew did.

I think you've completely missed the point of my reply. There were a whole series of failures during the flight leading to these MAX crashes. The assertion that everything has to work perfectly or disaster happens is what I was disagreeing with, aside from a few systems with a catastrophic impact on safety (the level A systems), a single failure doesn't bring the airplane down. Neither MCAS nor the secondary flight controls are such a system.

The delay implies no such change to training. You're just making up conjecture to suit your narrative.

Yea, but it costs a lot to get better than a 300 hour wonderkid up there.

Perhaps the CAAs in the countries where these crashes are happening should take a page from the FAA regarding pilot qualifications?

If you're going to call out others for making stuff up, you shouldn't do it yourself. You have no idea how skilled the ET flight crew was. For all we know, they may have been better than most in the US... or not.

It isn't, though. That's why it was able to be certified under the same type certificate. (And, incidentally, the fact that it's not materially different has been driving certain posters nuts, because it's allegedly an indication of Boeing's pursuit of profits over safety -- the implication being that a clean sheet design would have been safer). The fact of the matter is, the 737 MAX, under the covers, is a 737, meaning that it has a full set of manual (hydraulic) flight systems. For the purposes of controlling the aircraft, you can turn a 737 MAX into a classic 737 by turning off the various automated systems. Now, it won't handle exactly like a previous 737, which is why the MCAS was built in the first place. But you can fly it.

If the legacy systems no longer meet the business requirements, it's not wrong to throw them out. However, that doesn't mean that all old systems should automatically be thrown out, which is something that happens all too often in software, and, more to the point, is something that some people seem to be doing with regards to the MAX.

Boeing expected the pilots to be able to recover from a failure of this system, just as they've been able to recover from the failure of the electric stabilizer in the past. It doesn't necessarily follow that they've pushed the 737 design too far, because you can still turn the systems off and fly the plane by hand. At the end of the day, it's quite possible that a runaway stabilizer in a 737NG would have led to the same disaster if it had failed in the same way that the MCAS did.

IIRC, the ET captain had several thousand hours. Also, let's not make the simple correlation of hours = experience. Experience is far more complex than that.

I agree the whole thing was a such a complex set of things, any one of which if only just "one" or series could have likely negated the two tragic accidents. We could have worked backwards from 1) Deciding to leverage an old design for TTM 2) deciding to move the engines forward as the solution 3) adding software to compensate for a flight envelope risk 4) Not forcing extensive training and simulation for all new MAX pilots 5) redundancy for sensors 6) sensor warning 7) throttling the software and on and on.

In the end it is a failure of comprehensive program management at BA, the FAA simply isn't in a position to see and be at every decision point and understand the complexity made in a plane, software, etc. etc. Boeing and its management team bear full responsibility for this and the lives lost, hopefully no more and lessons learned for both airbus and BA going forward.

Especially in the cockpit.
BTW, the 29 year old captain had 8000 hours, and the copilot had just finished flight school, so only 200 hours.

So how then does a pilot get "experience" if hours=experience? What's the magic number? And how does a pilot get hours if not by sitting in an aircraft of that type, taking off, landing, and flying the airplane?

In the US, the minimum is 1,500 hours. The magic minimum.

Points Guy summed it up....

https://thepointsguy.com/news/how-mu...o-pilots-need/

Whether a pilot is on his first day or his last, it isn’t going to fix an airplane that was flawed from its inception.

A more experienced pilot may be able to avoid getting into that situation.

However, I'd still prefer not to fly on a plane where it's so easy to get into an unrecoverable situation. Other planes have pilots with the same experience requirements and the were not being crashed at the same rate.

It is mathematically possible that this plane is no more likely to crash than any other, and 2 crashes so close together were nothing more than coincidence. But that's not something that I'd like to risk my life on. If I'm wrong and I go out of my way to avoid the plane for no good reason, it costs me very little.

Some very qualified pilots here in the US notified the FAA that the lack of disclosure of the MCAS was dangerous.

They also should be telling pilots to get hours in the gym as the force required to jack the stabalizer back up (which is what the hand crank does) can be extreme and is not simulated properly in training.

Training does matter of course. But the FAA emergency notice after Lion made it clear the recovery procedure is NOT the same on the MAX, and pilots were never trained on that.

EDIT: By the way, would that false light be of any value for pilots diagnosing the issue quickly if it actually worked?

I didn't make anything up, I pointed to the factual lack of experience in the right seat of the Ethiopian cockpit. Show me the 300 hour pilots flying 737s for scheduled passenger ops in the US.

The most common path would be doing other commercial flying without 100+ passengers in the back. Time in type isn't nearly as important as total time when it comes to aeronautical decision making.

No amount of lights is going to change the need to expeditiously run the trim runaway procedure when the trim runs away.

And some very qualified pilots here have pointed out that no amount of disclosure on MCAS is going to change their response when they have a trim runaway, regardless of triggering mechanism.