Post by mikegarrison on Dec 30, 2021 9:58:18 GMT -5
I don't have a subscription to the NYT. And I actually am not keen to comment too much on this. But as I said above, I was disappointed when I heard the author's NPR interview to basically hear nothing insightful and a few things that were outright wrong. It didn't make me interested in getting a copy of the book.
The less technical issues about corporate culture and such are almost certainly valid criticism, but also sounded over-simplified.
I still think this article is the best one I've ever read about this subject:
It was the most honest examination of all the systemic flaws that were exposed here -- airlines with shoddy procedures, pilots who are poorly trained to handle non-routine situations, corporate pressure to avoid requiring pilot training, a series of mistakes that led to the software issue, a series of mistakes that led to the hardware issue, and the issues involved in the air safety investigations that followed.
Ethiopia *still* has not released a final report or made the raw data available to the NTSB.
Bottom line is that the design assumed that pilots would quickly realize there was a problem with the trim system, turn it off, and follow the checklist for a malfunctioning trim system. This did not happen in either of the fatal crashes. So the assumption was incorrect -- but it also means the pilots did not follow the procedures they were supposedly trained to follow.
Lots of things went wrong, but many of them were glossed over because they didn't fit the narrative of "greedy Boeing management rushes out an unsafe airplane that the pilots had no chance to fly".
Why doesn't anybody seem to remember that the Lion Air plane had the exact same thing happen to it on the previous flight, but the pilots followed the checklist and the plane was landed safely? And that the Ethiopian crash happened months after all 737 pilots had been explicitly told that if this happened, they were to follow the checklist for a malfunctioning trim system?
The less technical issues about corporate culture and such are almost certainly valid criticism, but also sounded over-simplified.
I still think this article is the best one I've ever read about this subject:
It was the most honest examination of all the systemic flaws that were exposed here -- airlines with shoddy procedures, pilots who are poorly trained to handle non-routine situations, corporate pressure to avoid requiring pilot training, a series of mistakes that led to the software issue, a series of mistakes that led to the hardware issue, and the issues involved in the air safety investigations that followed.
Ethiopia *still* has not released a final report or made the raw data available to the NTSB.
Bottom line is that the design assumed that pilots would quickly realize there was a problem with the trim system, turn it off, and follow the checklist for a malfunctioning trim system. This did not happen in either of the fatal crashes. So the assumption was incorrect -- but it also means the pilots did not follow the procedures they were supposedly trained to follow.
Lots of things went wrong, but many of them were glossed over because they didn't fit the narrative of "greedy Boeing management rushes out an unsafe airplane that the pilots had no chance to fly".
Why doesn't anybody seem to remember that the Lion Air plane had the exact same thing happen to it on the previous flight, but the pilots followed the checklist and the plane was landed safely? And that the Ethiopian crash happened months after all 737 pilots had been explicitly told that if this happened, they were to follow the checklist for a malfunctioning trim system?