professional pilot still has not know how to fly an aircraft without automation.
- - and there is the irony and the elephant in the room. Automation has become the biggest concern amongst professional pilot groups and has been identified as the biggest safety issue due to the loss of sick and rudder skills. It has surpassed C-FIT.
Automation will always be there, you might think you are flying with it turned off but it's still operating at a different level. Pilot skills are eroding (look at the number who think "tail dragger" time is difficult, it's called conventional gear - damn) and Boeing, Airbus and the rest will continue ramping up automation to offset poorly trained and equipped pilots of the future.
Wow, if Vox says it’s true it must be. They’re obvious world leading aerodynamicist. No the engines were not put in the wrong place. They were placed exactly where Boeing wanted them. The aircraft is incredibly sound. The issues surrounding the design and building of the Max are moot. The two aircraft crashed because the pilots did not follow the drill, as perfectly payed out in the non-normals.
One of the best articles I've ever read. About not only the airplane and what happen in each accident - but more importantly of the way stuff happens in other parts of the world.
Really? To me it reads like a classic case of blaming it all on the pilots and "non-Americans". Meanwhile, he gives Boeing (that great American company) all but a free pass for their directly causal role in these accidents. They designed a flight control modification that included the potential for a single point of failure to cause a major disruption of the crew's ability to control the aircraft. Let's be honest, if this was an Airbus issue, the daggers would be flying.
Any attempt to explain away the MCAS debacle without criticizing Boeing's repeated insistence on keeping the 737 a common type, or questioning their decision not to run a full spectrum failure analysis on MCAS, will always be left wanting.
Hahahahaha, spoken like a die hard Airbus pilot. (Who has never left the shoreline and worked in a "Non American" environment.) I have, and it's positively stunning what passes for competency in some parts of the world. If you believe it was a Boeing only decision to keep the common type, maybe give Southwest Airlines a call and ask them how much influence they have inside the Boeing Corp. (HINT: It's huge!)
Southwest to Boeing: please please, common type rating, online ground school only.
Boeing response (should have been): sorry, the new fuel efficient engine placement...MCAS...this plane needs a 1 day conversion course including 1 sim session. If you don't like that, we're still taking orders for the NG!
I highly doubt Southwest uses a 737-200 sim anymore, so why is it crazy to expect that max training can be done on a ng sim?
Lol. You don't know the first thing about my experience. I've spent plenty of time working for foreign operators and have thousands of hours on both manufacturer's aircraft. They all have their good points - and bad. There's no doubt that competency standards are not the same everywhere, but if you're going to sell safety-critical products to such places, you'd best be prepared to hand over a product they are capable of using consistently. Like it or not, our litigious world forces manufacturers to cater to the lowest common denominator. It sucks but it's also reality. They're hardly perfect but Airbus has generally outdone Boeing in this regard.
Blaming Southwest for Boeing's corporate decisions is classic deflection. What were they going to do, buy Airbus instead? If you knew anything about the man who started Southwest, you'd know that was a non-starter. He was a loyal American through and through, and there's nothing wrong with that. Companies who bow down to customer pressures that involve compromises and cutting corners are destined to disappoint both themselves and those customers. Where I work today, we reject customer requests to cut corners regularly, but we do so with proper evidence and justification. It's called due diligence - a lesson the senior management of Boeing needs to relearn.
