5 hours ago, KevinAu said:

 It’s a stick pusher, nothing more, nothing less.

No it is not. This is logic that manipulates the very powerful STAB and not the elevator....and it stays there. Stick pushers would nudge and then release.

3 hours ago, cowpatz said:

No it is not. This is logic that manipulates the very powerful STAB and not the elevator....and it stays there. Stick pushers would nudge and then release.

You’re right, it’s much more.

 

More to the issue, Mentour explains the memory items for dealing with a runaway trim condition, including a demo in a simulator:

 

14 hours ago, DrumsArt said:

...liberalism should sometimes be a little less liberal when it concerns security...just saying.

It wasn't 'liberalism' that gutted the FAA's budget, but this is not the place to discuss such issues. Let's please avoid forcing a thread lock.

18 hours ago, KevinAu said:

Where I think you’re off base, is that you’re describing mcas as some kind of flight handling quality correction. And in fairness, it’s probably what Boeing’s engineers fell into thinking of it as too.  But it’s not. It’s really a stick pusher. There is no handling quality to a stick pusher. It is blunt force trauma. It yanks the control column completely out of your hands. Mcas is just a pusher that uses nose down trim and doesn’t yank the stick out of your hands. But when it kept running unchecked, it ran the trim full nose down on those guys. They were dead. There is no way you can fight that with the yoke. The mindset of this mcas as a correction for some newly induced pitch divergence at high alpha is the wrong kind of mindset that made them think it was ok to rate it acceptable for single point failure. If they surrendered themselves to the notion that this was a stick pusher, they would have treated it with the proper kind of failure analysis and consideration. They added it in lieu of a real stick pusher in order to avoid adding a training requirement for pilots and convinced themselves that it wasn’t a stick pusher. They installed a stick pusher without telling anybody. That’s why those two planes crashed.

I agree. I didn't talk about it as an actual stick pusher. But I think my point about it being required on the MAX in order to get the plane certified still stands. It's my understanding that the way the pilot would intentionally induce a stall does not meet the FAA's requirements in that regard without MCAS because the actions on the control column would be different. That's at least what I've picked up.

4 hours ago, n4gix said:

It wasn't 'liberalism' that gutted the FAA's budget, but this is not the place to discuss such issues. Let's please avoid forcing a thread lock.

You're right...Sorry, apologize. Feel free to erase it.

Richard

On 3/29/2019 at 1:40 AM, 188AHC said:

As of January of this year,  350 737 Max 8 have been built and were flying. Statistically  the loss of 2 even within a short period of time  is not extremely significant. 

it is highly statistically significant

On 3/30/2019 at 12:38 PM, threegreen said:

The point where it went wrong is the initial design of MCAS (plus Boeing not telling about it) which should have been designed like it is now with the fix. This, in my opinion, however, is not even remotely enough to suggest the whole plane as a decision and concept is a mishap.

Fair enough, except that bolting on MCAS (and SRS for that matter) to a non-FBW aircraft to keep it in the air does seem a less than ideal solution. It pits the pilots elevator authority against the (much stronger) automation stabiliser authority.

A newly designed plane would be truly FBW from the ground up (like the 777 and 787) and would therefore provide a much more sensible approach to automation authority, probably controlling the elevator position until overriden by pilot column input (like the autopilot can be overriden). It would certainly have more than a single un-validated AoA input controlling MCAS which is mind blowing for a critical automation system.

You might not even need MCAS because the engines could be further forward in a new design.

You are right though, if Boeing had not made safety lights optional extras, if they had trained crews about MCAS and used more than 1 AoA input and not triggered 2.5 degrees every 10 seconds etc. people wouldn't have died. But the chain of events started in trying to eliminate both costs in crew training and (as whistleblowers have revealed) cuts in design time and testing that would have considered these exact failure scenarios.

What frustrates me most though is that after the first 189 deaths both Boeing and the FAA refused to analyse the situation honestly. Pointing fingers (wrongly) at both the crew and airlines. We now know they let Boeing self certify 🤦‍♂️ the aircraft and allowed them to sell safety features as extras (to reduce crew training costs and compete with Airbus).

Did you see the senate hearings? Disgraceful, when Senator Markey asked FAA Adminstrator Elwell 'do you think Boeing's practice of selling the AoA indicator and warning lights as optional extras contributed to the crashes' he replies 'the AoA inidicator... the AoA vane is not, the AoA vane is not an optional piece of safety equipment on the plane'.

Despicable, intentionally not answering the question and misleading the investigation. No one mentioned the AoA vane you weasel.

 

Edited April 2, 20197 yr by DellyPilot

Talk about ducking  answering the question. As usual, the FAA's one goal is to cover their butts. . 

Edited April 3, 20197 yr by Jim Young

They will not be covering anything when the lawsuits start flying, and it would not surprise me if the airlines that had them on order don't do the same summer schedules gone to pot. 

Air canada in April are having to put their max drivers In the sim because they are going to miss their 3 in 90 days takeoff and landing recency. Which is a standard rule, so the other airlines will be doing the same.  Not only is it very expensive it means you loose pilots for 3 days or so.Which also means you cant use them for other duties if they have an lpc for another aircraft type if their in the fun box. 

I hope the airlines start getting lawyered up because its going to hit them hard as summer has just started this week. 

Edited April 3, 20197 yr by tooting

Just rejoined AVSIM from some time away so I would love to rejoin these topics once again. This one is upsetting. Always loved the 737 so to see it end up like this is very upsetting. Boeing should have seen Project Yellowstone through to the end, which was meant to replace the entire fleet with a modern fleet of 3 Boeing Aircraft, instead they only released 1 of 3 of the aircraft in the Yellowstone Project with what became the 787.

When they abandoned Project Yellowstone they decided it was cheaper to patch the 737 and the 777 instead. 737 is very upsetting as from the front, those engines are no where near the original design of the 737-100. so you write software to overcome the imbalances.....yes it could work over time, but a bunch of former and now mostly dead  Boeing Engineers are rolling in their graves...Who could imagine this company could end up this way.

Too bad they tried to sue Bombardier for doing something new, but instead should have done exactly what Bombardier did all along, which is coming up with something new. Very upsetting to me being a Boeing Fan for many years. 

If I never fly in a 737-MAX in my lifetime so be it, and I do love the old school 737 and fly the PMDG NGX all the time in the sim. I just don''t agree with patching something that old for so long to save money, and to sue others for doing what you were supposed to be doing all along is unconscionable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Yellowstone_Project

Edited April 4, 20197 yr by Matthew Kane

News from the initial report investigation:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47812225

Quote

"The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly [that were] provided by the manufacturer but were not able to control the aircraft," Ms Dagmawit said in a news conference in Addis Ababa.

So it seems pilots were doing the "Right" thing and despite of this their were unable to prevent the Airplane from the nose dive.

Quote

In a statement, the chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines, Tewolde GebreMariam, said he was "very proud" of the pilots' "high level of professional performance".

I don't see how Boeing is going to get a "get out of the jail free card" on this one..

Regards,

S.

 

2 hours ago, simbol said:

News from the initial report investigation:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47812225

So it seems pilots were doing the "Right" thing and despite of this their were unable to prevent the Airplane from the nose dive.

Regards,

S.

 

We don’t really know that yet. As a refresher, here is the procedure that they should have been aware of that day http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/fe8237743be9b8968625835b004fc051/$FILE/2018-23-51_Correction.pdf

The use by the spokesperson of the word ‘repeatedly’ is odd. The most important part of the procedure is flipping the trim cutout switches off. That is only done once. There is no aspect of that which can be described as ‘repeatedly’. To me, it sounds more like they were only trying to use the yoke trim switches to trim her back up ‘repeatedly’. Which would be a losing battle. The only thing that would have saved them would have been to turn off the trim and use the manual wheel to trim her nose up again.

I can see possibly cutting out the trim but not being able to hand spin the manual wheel up enough, in time. But they have said that the jackscrew was in the full nose down position, which eliminates that scenario. That indicates that no attempt was made to use the manual wheel or the trim system was still on.

If they cut out the trim, but then turned it back on at some point, then that would not be following the procedure, since they were supposed to leave it off. Reactivating the trim would have reactivated the mcas and the plane would continue trimming nose down again.

If they cut out the trim, but then the trim ignored that and continued to run, that would indicate to me that some pure Christine like evil resided within that plane.

I wouldn’t put much stock in the words of airline spokespeople or government ministers, they’re not pilots or investigators, so they have little understanding of procedures or technicalities. The use of the words ‘repeatedly’ and ‘all’ in the same statement indicate that this person is a lay person who didn’t fully understand the information given to him by an investigator.

Edited April 4, 20197 yr by KevinAu