Ethiopian Airlines: 'No survivors' on crashed Boeing 737 max

[boeingboy]

Farther to my above post - I find this rather interesting regaurding the Ethiopia crash....

On Mar 18th 2019 the airline clarified, the first officer had accumulated a total of 350 flight hours.

Following the Nov 6th 2018 release of the Boeing Bulletin regarding MCAS in the aftermath of the crash of the LionAir the airline did distribute the bulletin to their flight crew a number of days later following a reminder. Ethiopian Airlines had been equipped with one Boeing 737-700 NG simulator only when the first MAX aircraft were put into service, the first 737-8 MAX simulator was put into service mid January 2019. Only in March 2019 a trim runaway lesson was included in the NG and MAX training syllabus. Flight crew are scheduled to go through a simulator session every 6 months (as per industry standards), the accident flight crew may thus not yet have received training on a stabilizer trim runaway (in the NG or MAX Simulator).

So let me get this straight....a newbie in the right seat (don't know captains experience yet), The airline made all pilots aware of the possible problems and the procedure to follow (stab trim runaway) and yet - at least some of their crews have never been trained on a stab trim runaway in either model?????? (They operate 26 NG models)

Yea - lets blame the machine for this.

[boeingboy]

How do you explain that Air Canada 777 tailstrike in Hong Kong again?

I admit I'm not completely up to speed on that one - however....I never said pilots here were not immune to screw ups, just that if you look at the number of accidents lately where the automation or systems failed and the pilots were unable to hand fly the airplane - there are a lot more of these accidents elsewhere.

If 2 airplanes are crashed due to pilot error - is that a reason to ground a fleet? No - it's not

Of course that's not to say Boeing didn't think things through fully. There does need to be a fix. It was foolish to run any system off just one system instead of 2, and I would have thought Boeing would have learned that after the Turkish airlines accident a few years back. An emergency AD, mods, they happen all the time. It certainly is starting to look like pilot training and decision making is playing a large factor in these 2 crashes.

[A346Dude]

If 2 airplanes are crashed due to pilot error - is that a reason to ground a fleet? No - it's not

2 hull losses likely precipitated by the same issue, on a type with less than 2 years under it's belt? Seems like a pretty good reason to hit the pause button until this is sorted out. Boeing had their chance to fix it after the first crash and did not act. To call this a simple case of pilot error is overly simplistic in my opinion.

[sportingrifle]

Boeingboy....

If the problem was pilot performance or training, or merely a substandard part, that is what the AD would have addressed. A quick software patch or new part and we are good to go. This is not the case - Air Canada just announced that the grounding for their fleet will be for a minimum of 3 months. My sources in my past certification world are telling me that this is the low end of the guestimate. Obviously the problem is way past unskilled pilots.

The problem is that the MCAS system in the airplane has been found not to meet the FAR Part 25 certification requirements. If you wish I can post the relevant parts of FAR25, but the aircraft fails on issues of reliability, redundancy, and most importantly, controllability. FAR25 are the certification requirements that mandate that an aircraft can be flown by pilots who do not posses your skill or knowledge.

The big question now is does the rest of the airplane, certified by the same people under the same process, also meet FAR25?

Cheers sportingrifle.

[tbaylx]

They'll make the AoA a dual input, prevent MCAS from activating more than once and reduce the total amount of trim. It's a software fix that will require looking at the changes to MCAS, not the entire aircraft.
The original 737 went on to be one of the most popular aircraft of all time after fixing the rudder PCU problem which required far more effort to fix than MCAS will.

[telex]

They'll make the AoA a dual input, prevent MCAS from activating more than once and reduce the total amount of trim. It's a software fix that will require looking at the changes to MCAS, not the entire aircraft.

I hope you have advised Boeing of this simple solution!!

[boeingboy]

I hope you have advised Boeing of this simple solution!!

They have already informed the operators of this. They will do all that and MCAS will be prevented from operating if there is an airspeed disagree message.

[boeingboy]

Boeing had their chance to fix it after the first crash and did not act.

Actually - they did. they started on the revised software shortly after the accident and they advised everybody of what was going on and how to deal with it.

To call this a simple case of pilot error is overly simplistic in my opinion.

Really? A crew that was not trained in a common NNC item has to be blamed on the machine??????

[telex]

I hope you have advised Boeing of this simple solution!!

They have already informed the operators of this. They will do all that and MCAS will be prevented from operating if there is an airspeed disagree message.

I do not share your enthusiasm for an easy fix to this situation.

Transportation Department seeks audit of FAA’s certification of Boeing 737 Max 8

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/19/transpo ... 7-max.html

[A346Dude]

Really? A crew that was not trained in a common NNC item has to be blamed on the machine??????

I'm pretty sure there is no "Unfounded MCAS Activation" checklist, and I know there wasn't at the time of the first crash because no crews even knew MCAS existed. If such a checklist existed, and was trained for at time of delivery, I would agree with you that this is pilot error.

[Meatservo]

Everybody keeps thinking everything happened all at once and the crew was overwhelmed….that is not the case. The airspeed disagree and stick shaker came on at rotation. They were known, actioned and dealt with. It wasn't until about 2000 feet when the flaps came up that they got the nose down input....That's 1 problem to deal with. The flaps were selected back out and the trim stopped. So they climbed out normal. When the flaps were selected back up - the trim issue started again. then they maintained altitude and counteracted the nose down trim for 10 min. Im sure they only had one issue front and center - The repeated nose down input. Simple - cut out the trim.

One thing that is being overlooked is I have to ask what are these crews thinking in these parts of the world. the previous Lion air crew after they cutout the trim - continued their flight all the way to destination with the left stick shaker wailing away....why? Because their QRH didn't say to land at the nearest airport. I don't know about you - but I wouldn't need a QRH to tell me that before I was turning around. It seems like more and more of these places outside North America and Europe are getting to the point where their pilots cannot fly airplanes if the smallest thing goes wrong. Look at Air asia and the 777 in SFO were the pilots couldn't hand fly a visual approach on a beautiful sunny day. I think we need to look more at pilot skill and training than the machine.

Boeingboy, even though I don't know what happened to the Ethiopian machine,I couldn't agree more with the sentiment in the last part of your post.

But this business of not being able to fly aeroplanes- what's being done about it, even here in Canada? Maybe you work for a carrier that has S.O.P.s that encourage a certain amount of autopilot-off flying. The SOPs where I used to work specifically mention it. Once upon a time they even encouraged manual flight with AND without the flight directors, but this part disappeared after a revision and I suspect it was after they found out some of us were actually doing it. And if your S.O.P.s "allow" a certain amount of manual flight, how is this paying off for the company in terms of ensuring that it's actually happening? If you engage the automation at 400' and leave it on right until short final, on every flight, no matter if it's dark, rain, or shine, even on bluebird days, how does this get picked up? When a guy gets 1000 hours in the right seat of a King-Air with all the automated bells & whistles, logs some of that as PICUS, screws off to Jazz or Encore as soon as the ATPL quizzes are passed and starts doing whatever they do there until one day a year or less later he's the captain, at what point did anyone ever evaluate his ability to actually fly a plane, or encourage him to get comfortable with it? I know guys who say they have done so much hand-flying that they don't care if they ever do it again and feel they don't need to practice. I know guys who are roundly praised as "great pilots" by sim instructors and management because if their amazing memorization and button-crunching but who I know and have seen, still can't be trusted to know where the wind is coming from in a crosswind or actually judge when and where and how much to flare, let alone watch over someone who has even less flying experience. It's all very well to talk about people knowing how to actually fly, but apart from one or two old farts who actually LIKE to fly, who's actually doing it? Who's actually making sure we are doing it?

I think for some companies, the only reason handflying isn't outright forbidden is because no chief pilot wants to be the first one to go THAT far. I think there are companies that allow for hand-flying in the SOPs and then use company culture to actively frown on it. Which makes me wonder, if, like me, you consider it your moral duty to retain all your flying skills, does that make you one of those anti-authority CRM nightmares, or does it make you the last sane man among fools?

[digits_]

I can see some similarities between the different levels of automation for cars vs airplanes.

With cars, they need to go from no automation to full autodriver where no human interaction is required, because an auto driver that only works 99% of the time and switches off just as you are about to hit something, won't work. So they need to bypass the zone where "some" interaction of the driver is required.

If you look at airplane automation, I believe we are operating in that grey zone where everything works 99% of the time. And while the consequences of in aviation are not as disastrous as they would be with cars, every now and then you have failures as these 2 accidents where things get out of hand. One could wonder why we don't jump straight to the 100% automation, until you realize that it was actually the safety equipment that failed, which doesn't install much confidence for 100% automation airplanes.

[tsgas]

Wow, this is a whole new level of stupid right here. Worried because the aircraft are parked at their airport. How do these idiots rise to a position of power?!

Socialists rise to power by making promises to the gullible, about free stuff ,and an Utopian society.

It's pretty gutless to falsify another poster's post to get in your little high school right wing cracker spew.

What are you talking about , Tovarishch ? Stick to the AOC program and all will be find, you silly commie.

[Meatservo]

It's pretty gutless to falsify another poster's post to get in your little high school right wing cracker spew.

What are you talking about , Tovarishch ? Stick to the AOC program and all will be find, you silly commie.

I'm just going to go copy the last couple of posts and move them ahead of this horseshit so the conversation between adults can continue

[Meatservo]

[quote=boeingboy post_id=<a href="tel:1072627">1072627</a> time=<a href="tel:1553024463">1553024463</a> user_id=763]
Everybody keeps thinking everything happened all at once and the crew was overwhelmed….that is not the case. The airspeed disagree and stick shaker came on at rotation. They were known, actioned and dealt with. It wasn't until about 2000 feet when the flaps came up that they got the nose down input....That's 1 problem to deal with. The flaps were selected back out and the trim stopped. So they climbed out normal. When the flaps were selected back up - the trim issue started again. then they maintained altitude and counteracted the nose down trim for 10 min. Im sure they only had one issue front and center - The repeated nose down input. Simple - cut out the trim.

One thing that is being overlooked is I have to ask what are these crews thinking in these parts of the world. the previous Lion air crew after they cutout the trim - continued their flight all the way to destination with the left stick shaker wailing away....why? Because their QRH didn't say to land at the nearest airport. I don't know about you - but I wouldn't need a QRH to tell me that before I was turning around. It seems like more and more of these places outside North America and Europe are getting to the point where their pilots cannot fly airplanes if the smallest thing goes wrong. Look at Air asia and the 777 in SFO were the pilots couldn't hand fly a visual approach on a beautiful sunny day. I think we need to look more at pilot skill and training than the machine.

Boeingboy, even though I don't know what happened to the Ethiopian machine,I couldn't agree more with the sentiment in the last part of your post.

But this business of not being able to fly aeroplanes- what's being done about it, even here in Canada? Maybe you work for a carrier that has S.O.P.s that encourage a certain amount of autopilot-off flying. The SOPs where I used to work specifically mention it. Once upon a time they even encouraged manual flight with AND without the flight directors, but this part disappeared after a revision and I suspect it was after they found out some of us were actually doing it. And if your S.O.P.s "allow" a certain amount of manual flight, how is this paying off for the company in terms of ensuring that it's actually happening? If you engage the automation at 400' and leave it on right until short final, on every flight, no matter if it's dark, rain, or shine, even on bluebird days, how does this get picked up? When a guy gets 1000 hours in the right seat of a King-Air with all the automated bells & whistles, logs some of that as PICUS, screws off to Jazz or Encore as soon as the ATPL quizzes are passed and starts doing whatever they do there until one day a year or less later he's the captain, at what point did anyone ever evaluate his ability to actually fly a plane, or encourage him to get comfortable with it? I know guys who say they have done so much hand-flying that they don't care if they ever do it again and feel they don't need to practice. I know guys who are roundly praised as "great pilots" by sim instructors and management because if their amazing memorization and button-crunching but who I know and have seen, still can't be trusted to know where the wind is coming from in a crosswind or actually judge when and where and how much to flare, let alone watch over someone who has even less flying experience. It's all very well to talk about people knowing how to actually fly, but apart from one or two old farts who actually LIKE to fly, who's actually doing it? Who's actually making sure we are doing it?

I think for some companies, the only reason handflying isn't outright forbidden is because no chief pilot wants to be the first one to go THAT far. I think there are companies that allow for hand-flying in the SOPs and then use company culture to actively frown on it. Which makes me wonder, if, like me, you consider it your moral duty to retain all your flying skills, does that make you one of those anti-authority CRM nightmares, or does it make you the last sane man among fools?
[/quote]

[Meatservo]

I can see some similarities between the different levels of automation for cars vs airplanes.

With cars, they need to go from no automation to full autodriver where no human interaction is required, because an auto driver that only works 99% of the time and switches off just as you are about to hit something, won't work. So they need to bypass the zone where "some" interaction of the driver is required.

If you look at airplane automation, I believe we are operating in that grey zone where everything works 99% of the time. And while the consequences of in aviation are not as disastrous as they would be with cars, every now and then you have failures as these 2 accidents where things get out of hand. One could wonder why we don't jump straight to the 100% automation, until you realize that it was actually the safety equipment that failed, which doesn't install much confidence for 100% automation airplanes.

[Shady McSly]

An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a powered, fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad spectrum of uses for airplanes includes recreation, transportation of goods and people, military, and research. Worldwide, commercial aviation transports more than four billion passengers annually on airliners[1] and transports more than 200 billion tonne-kilometres[2] of cargo annually, which is less than 1% of the world's cargo movement.[3] Most airplanes are flown by a pilot on board the aircraft, but some are designed to be remotely or computer-controlled.


The Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane in 1903, recognized as "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight".[4] They built on the works of George Cayley dating from 1799, when he set forth the concept of the modern airplane (and later built and flew models and successful passenger-carrying gliders).[5] Between 1867 and 1896, the German pioneer of human aviation Otto Lilienthal also studied heavier-than-air flight. Following its limited use in World War I, aircraft technology continued to develop. Airplanes had a presence in all the major battles of World War II. The first jet aircraft was the German Heinkel He 178 in 1939. The first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, was introduced in 1952. The Boeing 707, the first widely successful commercial jet, was in commercial service for more than 50 years, from 1958 to at least 2013.

[jakeandelwood]

Everybody keeps thinking everything happened all at once and the crew was overwhelmed….that is not the case. The airspeed disagree and stick shaker came on at rotation. They were known, actioned and dealt with. It wasn't until about 2000 feet when the flaps came up that they got the nose down input....That's 1 problem to deal with. The flaps were selected back out and the trim stopped. So they climbed out normal. When the flaps were selected back up - the trim issue started again. then they maintained altitude and counteracted the nose down trim for 10 min. Im sure they only had one issue front and center - The repeated nose down input. Simple - cut out the trim.

One thing that is being overlooked is I have to ask what are these crews thinking in these parts of the world. the previous Lion air crew after they cutout the trim - continued their flight all the way to destination with the left stick shaker wailing away....why? Because their QRH didn't say to land at the nearest airport. I don't know about you - but I wouldn't need a QRH to tell me that before I was turning around. It seems like more and more of these places outside North America and Europe are getting to the point where their pilots cannot fly airplanes if the smallest thing goes wrong. Look at Air asia and the 777 in SFO were the pilots couldn't hand fly a visual approach on a beautiful sunny day. I think we need to look more at pilot skill and training than the machine.

Boeingboy, even though I don't know what happened to the Ethiopian machine,I couldn't agree more with the sentiment in the last part of your post.

But this business of not being able to fly aeroplanes- what's being done about it, even here in Canada? Maybe you work for a carrier that has S.O.P.s that encourage a certain amount of autopilot-off flying. The SOPs where I used to work specifically mention it. Once upon a time they even encouraged manual flight with AND without the flight directors, but this part disappeared after a revision and I suspect it was after they found out some of us were actually doing it. And if your S.O.P.s "allow" a certain amount of manual flight, how is this paying off for the company in terms of ensuring that it's actually happening? If you engage the automation at 400' and leave it on right until short final, on every flight, no matter if it's dark, rain, or shine, even on bluebird days, how does this get picked up? When a guy gets 1000 hours in the right seat of a King-Air with all the automated bells & whistles, logs some of that as PICUS, screws off to Jazz or Encore as soon as the ATPL quizzes are passed and starts doing whatever they do there until one day a year or less later he's the captain, at what point did anyone ever evaluate his ability to actually fly a plane, or encourage him to get comfortable with it? I know guys who say they have done so much hand-flying that they don't care if they ever do it again and feel they don't need to practice. I know guys who are roundly praised as "great pilots" by sim instructors and management because if their amazing memorization and button-crunching but who I know and have seen, still can't be trusted to know where the wind is coming from in a crosswind or actually judge when and where and how much to flare, let alone watch over someone who has even less flying experience. It's all very well to talk about people knowing how to actually fly, but apart from one or two old farts who actually LIKE to fly, who's actually doing it? Who's actually making sure we are doing it?

I think for some companies, the only reason handflying isn't outright forbidden is because no chief pilot wants to be the first one to go THAT far. I think there are companies that allow for hand-flying in the SOPs and then use company culture to actively frown on it. Which makes me wonder, if, like me, you consider it your moral duty to retain all your flying skills, does that make you one of those anti-authority CRM nightmares, or does it make you the last sane man among fools?

I can't believe a company would frown on hand flying, that's just sad really. In my opinion crews should each have to hand fly one entire leg every day they work. What kind of pilot doesn't enjoy hand flying anyway.

[FICU]

I'm pretty sure there is no "Unfounded MCAS Activation" checklist, and I know there wasn't at the time of the first crash because no crews even knew MCAS existed. If such a checklist existed, and was trained for at time of delivery, I would agree with you that this is pilot error.

If the trim is trying to kill you what is the best course of action... keep pulling back till you can't anymore or flip 2 switches to cut power to the trim?

There doesn't need to be a MCAS checklist. It uses stab trim. There is an uncommanded stab trim runaway QRC that is all memory actions and it will save your life.

[telex]

Everybody keeps thinking everything happened all at once and the crew was overwhelmed….that is not the case. The airspeed disagree and stick shaker came on at rotation. They were known, actioned and dealt with. It wasn't until about 2000 feet when the flaps came up that they got the nose down input....That's 1 problem to deal with. The flaps were selected back out and the trim stopped. So they climbed out normal. When the flaps were selected back up - the trim issue started again. then they maintained altitude and counteracted the nose down trim for 10 min. Im sure they only had one issue front and center - The repeated nose down input. Simple - cut out the trim.

One thing that is being overlooked is I have to ask what are these crews thinking in these parts of the world. the previous Lion air crew after they cutout the trim - continued their flight all the way to destination with the left stick shaker wailing away....why? Because their QRH didn't say to land at the nearest airport. I don't know about you - but I wouldn't need a QRH to tell me that before I was turning around. It seems like more and more of these places outside North America and Europe are getting to the point where their pilots cannot fly airplanes if the smallest thing goes wrong. Look at Air asia and the 777 in SFO were the pilots couldn't hand fly a visual approach on a beautiful sunny day. I think we need to look more at pilot skill and training than the machine.

Boeingboy, even though I don't know what happened to the Ethiopian machine,I couldn't agree more with the sentiment in the last part of your post.

But this business of not being able to fly aeroplanes- what's being done about it, even here in Canada? Maybe you work for a carrier that has S.O.P.s that encourage a certain amount of autopilot-off flying. The SOPs where I used to work specifically mention it. Once upon a time they even encouraged manual flight with AND without the flight directors, but this part disappeared after a revision and I suspect it was after they found out some of us were actually doing it. And if your S.O.P.s "allow" a certain amount of manual flight, how is this paying off for the company in terms of ensuring that it's actually happening? If you engage the automation at 400' and leave it on right until short final, on every flight, no matter if it's dark, rain, or shine, even on bluebird days, how does this get picked up? When a guy gets 1000 hours in the right seat of a King-Air with all the automated bells & whistles, logs some of that as PICUS, screws off to Jazz or Encore as soon as the ATPL quizzes are passed and starts doing whatever they do there until one day a year or less later he's the captain, at what point did anyone ever evaluate his ability to actually fly a plane, or encourage him to get comfortable with it? I know guys who say they have done so much hand-flying that they don't care if they ever do it again and feel they don't need to practice. I know guys who are roundly praised as "great pilots" by sim instructors and management because if their amazing memorization and button-crunching but who I know and have seen, still can't be trusted to know where the wind is coming from in a crosswind or actually judge when and where and how much to flare, let alone watch over someone who has even less flying experience. It's all very well to talk about people knowing how to actually fly, but apart from one or two old farts who actually LIKE to fly, who's actually doing it? Who's actually making sure we are doing it?

I think for some companies, the only reason handflying isn't outright forbidden is because no chief pilot wants to be the first one to go THAT far. I think there are companies that allow for hand-flying in the SOPs and then use company culture to actively frown on it. Which makes me wonder, if, like me, you consider it your moral duty to retain all your flying skills, does that make you one of those anti-authority CRM nightmares, or does it make you the last sane man among fools?

I can't believe a company would frown on hand flying, that's just sad really. In my opinion crews should each have to hand fly one entire leg every day they work. What kind of pilot doesn't enjoy hand flying anyway.

Do you want the ten hour sector or the twelve hour sector?