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Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

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Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#251

Post by mlyle »

joe_the_user wrote: post #234
dahart wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! Your comment reminds me a lot of this 1998 article about the ValuJet crash in Flordia https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-les... Specifically it's the argument in the article that large disasters often have multiple causes. "Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an air…

Specifically it's the argument in the article that large disasters often have multiple causes. "Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?" But that's exactly what's disingenuous about the GP's claim. Many disasters do indeed involve a sequence of mistak…

> The situation with 737 max was one terribly system and the pilot's complete inability to stop this - inability that could have been anticipated and which was the product of the original bad design.

You accuse me of being disingenuous and immediately follow it with a false claim.

This is untrue. Stabilator trim can be turned off. Indeed, before Lion Air 610 the previous flight had experienced the problem and had dealt with it correctly.

Also, re-trimming using the trim switch disables MCAS for some number of seconds.

In the case of ET302, they turned the system off, but allowed the aircraft to overspeed and were, as a result, unable to retrim manually. Still, they had a positive rate of climb. It is only when they turned it back on in violation of training/checklist and inexplicably did not use it to retrim nose up that they were doomed.

> This kind of disaster certainly can happen but the situation with the 737 Max was Boeing pushing an old design far beyond it's limits because of the threat of losing market share and regulators allowing this.

I strongly disagree. I think it's a badly engineered system but things like this are part of the normal design refinement that happens when planes are stretched and iterated upon. The 737 has bad handling on pitch during departure; bigger, more powerful 737's have it worse, and it makes sense to fix this.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#252

Post by AdrianB1 »

avar wrote: post #203
AdrianB1 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, trying to clarify but there is too much to tell for a full picture. In a B737 you are not allowed to do most maneuvers you do when flying a small plane or a fighter; not necessarily acrobatics, but even more basic things like stalls, spins, side slips or flying without engines, which is something I regularly do to maintain my proficiency. That means 10,000 hours of limited, routine flying does not make a lot o…

Aren't those maneuvers done in simulators?

A simulator is to flying what porn is to sex: a simulation pretty far from reality. I had a lot of simulator time when I first flew a plane, it still took me 8 hours to be able to fly it in real life and that was a very simple 2-seater trainer.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#253

Post by joe_the_user »

mlyle wrote: post #251
joe_the_user wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically it's the argument in the article that large disasters often have multiple causes. "Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?" But that's exactly what's disingenuous about the GP's claim. Many disasters do indeed involve a sequence of mistak…

> The situation with 737 max was one terribly system and the pilot's complete inability to stop this - inability that could have been anticipated and which was the product of the original bad design. You accuse me of being disingenuous and immediately follow it with a false claim. This is untrue. Stabilator trim can be turned off. Indeed, before Lion Air 610 the previous flight had experienced the problem and had dea…

I believe my position is that of the strong consensus of the long debates that have gone on in detail here and in numerous mainstream and technical publications. I can't summarize all the arguments there and I won't try but the conclusion has been Boeing is to blame (period).

In this day and age, I'm suspicious and annoyed even small effort to improperly spread blame when that spreading serves powerful interests.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#254

Post by mlyle »

joe_the_user wrote: post #253
mlyle wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The situation with 737 max was one terribly system and the pilot's complete inability to stop this - inability that could have been anticipated and which was the product of the original bad design. You accuse me of being disingenuous and immediately follow it with a false claim. This is untrue. Stabilator trim can be turned off. Indeed, before Lion Air 610 the previous flight had experienced the problem and had dea…

I believe my position is that of the strong consensus of the long debates that have gone on in detail here and in numerous mainstream and technical publications. I can't summarize all the arguments there and I won't try but the conclusion has been Boeing is to blame (period). In this day and age, I'm suspicious and annoyed even small effort to improperly spread blame when that spreading serves powerful interests.

Basically all of aviation safety is about the spreading of blame and plugging up holes.

Either approach is wrong: just pointing to the pilot and saying "hah-hah error" without considering what led to the error is what aviation did for decades. "Crash less!" we said to pilots, and were surprised when things didn't improve much. But you can't ignore crew performance, either.

The crews that crashed did not do great. But if a system is regularly putting crews to the test in a way that requires high levels of personal performance to survive, that's a bigger problem.

And MCAS is more easily improved than the rest: we can more easily reduce the frequency and severity of that "testing" than we can improve all flight crews. But we shouldn't ignore the problems in crew decision-making, and the related training choices (e.g. not requiring crews to demonstrate handling of runaway trim in some jurisdictions).

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#256

Post by markdown »

treis wrote: post #84
dahart wrote: post #62

This seems like a good thing, they should be testing with people who don’t know the answers. Though I can’t help but wonder if this is a very subtle re-framing of the Max accidents to shift blame back towards pilots. This approach of a regulatory agency recommending “average pilot” testing makes both the agency and Boeing look good, and tends to downplay the fact that Boeing intentionally avoided training the pilots,…

>Though I can’t help but wonder if this is a very subtle re-framing of the Max accidents to shift blame back towards pilots. Blame is a loaded word. Boeing assumed that pilots could be relied upon to recover from a MCAS induced runaway trim. Practice has shown that they can't. Whether Boeing or the pilots is at fault is, from a safety perspective, irrelevant. The bottom line is that an assumption was made, it was wro…

> Using average pilots instead of highly experienced test pilots is a sensible step to prevent a repeat.

It wouldn't have made a difference without the training for this specific MCAS issue. Highly experienced test pilots would have been equally unable to recover had they been flying the planes that crashed.

Normal runaway trim is easily handled, but the MCAS-induced runaway trip had the cockpit lighting up with all sorts of errors and warning lights and beeps. The only way to deal with this is to pick up checklists and start going through them... which you simply couldn't do because there was no time.

So using pilots selected at random from various airlines is a great idea and should be implemented, but it would not have prevented this situation. Only training might have.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#257

Post by jdietrich »

joe_the_user wrote: post #234
dahart wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! Your comment reminds me a lot of this 1998 article about the ValuJet crash in Flordia https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-les... Specifically it's the argument in the article that large disasters often have multiple causes. "Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an air…

Specifically it's the argument in the article that large disasters often have multiple causes. "Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?" But that's exactly what's disingenuous about the GP's claim. Many disasters do indeed involve a sequence of mistak…

>But that's exactly what's disingenuous about the GP's claim. Many disasters do indeed involve a sequence of mistakes of different sorts but that's not really the case here. The situation with 737 max was one terribly system and the pilot's complete inability to stop this - inability that could have been anticipated and which was the product of the original bad design.

MCAS is a badly designed system, but many other stabiliser control failures could cause the aircraft to rapidly lose altitude. The solution is the same in all cases - flip the cutoff switches to disconnect automatic stab control and trim the stabiliser manually using the wheel on the center console.

The flight crews in both MCAS-related disasters showed serious failures in airmanship and a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of flight. They were taken by surprise by MCAS, but they should have been more than capable of swiftly handling that situation; their inability to do so is symptomatic of broader failings in the training and culture of pilots in many emerging markets.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/16/world/asia/li...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#258

Post by kayfox »

computerex wrote: post #232
kayfox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... I said the design was bad and your saying I'm not harsh enough in that? Are we trying to solve engineering problems by getting emotional about them or something?

Out of the six points you mentioned, you blamed everyone, blaming the pilots twice, and merely mentioned this against Boeing: > The flight computer system and MCAS was implemented problematically, relying on one input because the expected control authority was very low, and then when that was not changed the system was not re-architected. Do you have a personal stake in Boeing or something? Because you appear very bi…

Every time we blame a crash on pilots, we are blaming it on training. Aside from some truly exceptional cases,* pilots who contribute to a crash are having issues because they have not been trained adequately in dealing with the situation. I believe that these two crashes indicate there is a need for reinforcement of the CRM training and also more training on unexpected situations.

We can try to blame Boeing for the lack of this training, but Boeing cant force airlines to do anything but the type specific training. They cant force airlines to do recurring training, they in-fact rely on the regulators to setup structures to make sure this all happens.

I don't have a personal stake in Boeing, I have a personal stake in not dying because someone decided breaking one link in the failure chain was adequate.

* These would be the cases where the pilot crashes the plane on purpose, for which some airlines have dealt with systematically and with associated training on prevention.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#260

Post by wespiser_2018 »

This is probably a good idea, using testers closer to your target audience should improve results a degree. However, I think this is kind of missing the point. Wasn't the problem with the MCAS system on the max that the system was added to the airframe without re-qualification required? Shouldn't the solution address how Boeing and the FAA qualify aircraft for qualifications, not how the aircraft itself was tested?
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