Third Pilots' Union Raises Concern About Boeing 737 Max Jet

If this is true I am going to lose all my confidence in Boeing.

I have less ire for Boeing than I do the FAA.

There was an interesting comment on airliners.net that the USSR operated new airliners on freight services for several years before putting them on passenger services. So far I've confirmed that for the Tu-154 trijet, for example, which flew freight for two years before taking a revenue passenger.

But in the West there has always been a tension between certificating for safety versus commercial imperative. Why hasn't the 737Max been grounded pending investigation? Because that would lead to companies losing money. Why would the FAA care about that? Because it considers manufacturers and airlines as 'stakeholders'.

I think I read somewhere that they are not getting the 'pings' from the Cockpit Voice Recorder like they did the Flight Data Recorder, which was recovered.

I believe the force of impact, which was almost vertically nose down at high speed just caused such a shattering of the airplane that it might have fatally destroyed the CVR, or else driven it under many feet of mud and silt.

Re: Your last point - I think this time around the CVR could vindicate the crew and point the blame at Boeing, so it may seem in their best interest to recover it and have extra proof for the court case. Then again, the level of corruption in Indonesia could affect what happens with the recovery process.

They have grounded aircraft before, so we know they aren't inherently opposed to that.

I would tend to trust the FAA, given the rather impressive track record of aviation. The difference from "Oh, the humanity!" to today, where North America and Europe have entire years without fatalities is astonishing. It's even more impressive considering passenger-miles/p.a. increased by something like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.

So it would seem that the FAA is doing a rather good job with these decisions. And "not considering airlines as stakeholders" may sound sensible, but is actually a phrase devoid of meaning: If you want to consider safety only, you or I or the Russians could come up with the trivial (and only correct) solution, which is to ban air travel.

Having flown with regional carriers in Russia during my (and their) wild times in the 90s also makes your praise of their processes suspicious of being parody. I personally saw a pilot take a sip from a suspiciously small bottle of clear liquid. But my seat neighbour reassured me: If you think it's dangerous to fly with a drunk pilot, you should see the way he flies when he's sober!

I'm almost certain that the solution in this case will be training. Almost exactly as you've said in another comment. The correct response to an commanded stabiliser movement is to set the stab trim switch to cutoff. Pilots will probably experience this failure mode in their next recurrent training.

The accident is more than likely to be attributed to a system being added without sufficient guidance being added to the PoH, some degree of maintenance failing on behalf of the airline and finally a failure of the pilots to identify an issue and take appropriate action.

It's unlikely that those particular holes in the cheese will line up again in the near term given the emergency AD. No reason to ground the fleet.