No, we're back to, "why the heck didn't Boeing honor the regulatory requirement for simulator training, and tell American it was the best you could do?"
Clearly, the condition is recoverable, with simulator training. Throw in a triple redundant AoA sensor on top of the training, plus the inclusion of MCAS implementation details in the training material, and things would likely have had a much higher chance of being dealt with without loss of life.
Would Boeing have had a harder sell? Yes. Would there have been a non-zero chance of losing out on the order? Yes.
Would 300+ people currently be pulp? I think not. I have a great deal of respect for the skill pilots develop. They are only human however, and are therefore subject to the same weakness of not being omniscient.
If MCAS was the bullet, Boeing's opaque communication, and refusal to not game aviation certification regulations was the gun. Of that, I'm fairly certain.
What plays the trigger pull in this sordid affair is the last thing that remains to be declared, but there are some seriously bright neon signs pointing at either somewhere in Chicago, or at the culture as a whole at Boeing.
Let the digging continue. Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Didn't read the entire thing.
Going to register later.
I actually wonder whether anyone with access to the simulator has tried pulsing the trim switches in sub 4 second intervals. Which depending on how the trim switches work, (I.e. are they continuously coupled, or do they act by moving around a discrete set-point) might be able to fend off MCAS by constantly resetting the time until reactivation long enough to give the trim system time to neutralize.
If something like that were done, a recovery below 5000AGL may be possible.
It's not by a long shot the most intuitive approach out there, and it doesn't generalize well, but for the specific MCAS behavior that's been revealed it may work.
(If there's any 737 pilots out there with insight, I'd be giddy if you'd offer some perspective.)
It sounds like the simulators all this testing were on didn't actually simulate MCAS, so the "fault injection" was done manually. Testing in the way you describe wouldn't provide meaningful results without an MCAS-capable simulator.
Hmmm. Then unfortunately we'll have to wait for that to be implemented I suppose. If the algorithm is as it has been described, it may work, but at this point is moot. The damage has been done.
Clearly, the condition is recoverable, with simulator training. Throw in a triple redundant AoA sensor on top of the training, plus the inclusion of MCAS implementation details in the training material, and things would likely have had a much higher chance of being dealt with without loss of life.
Would Boeing have had a harder sell? Yes. Would there have been a non-zero chance of losing out on the order? Yes.
Would 300+ people currently be pulp? I think not. I have a great deal of respect for the skill pilots develop. They are only human however, and are therefore subject to the same weakness of not being omniscient.
If MCAS was the bullet, Boeing's opaque communication, and refusal to not game aviation certification regulations was the gun. Of that, I'm fairly certain.
What plays the trigger pull in this sordid affair is the last thing that remains to be declared, but there are some seriously bright neon signs pointing at either somewhere in Chicago, or at the culture as a whole at Boeing.
Let the digging continue. Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.