> They had a 200 hour pilot flying in the right seat of the crashed airplane. Star Alliance or not, who in the hell defends a low-time student pilot flying right seat in an airliner?
So do European airlines and they have great safety records.
> I've heard from 3 different pilots from three different ME airlines
Oh really????? I find that hard to believe.
Anyway, I'll assume you aren't lying.
If you have conclusive evidence, why don't you do us all a favour and give it to the FAA and try to ensure those middle eastern airlines stay grounded or atleast out of American skies?
(If you aren't from America, do the above with the aviation authority in your country, and maybe FAA as well anyway)
If you're gonna say FAA is in the arabs' payroll and the whole system is rigged, then you're screwed regardless of whether the ME "local noobs" are bad.
> that suggests it's not the individuals, but the airline and it's processes that are at fault
No it does not necessarily.
If this kind of incident regularly happens, then yes the entire airline might be flawed. But at this point there is no evidence to believe so.
> the locals are untouchable, and get away with all sorts of bullshit
First up, why don't you ask your ME pilot friends the ratio of local and expat pilots in those airlines?
What makes you think the local pilots there are into "bullshit"?
Those middle eastern airlines aren't any worse than any other major airline from anywhere else. If you can prove otherwise, contact FAA.
>Not once, but TWICE, software taking readings from faulty sensors caused the airplane to nosedive into the ground, killing every single person on board, with the pilots powerless to take over.
I believe technically if they followed the runaway trim in memory checklist the system would have been disabled? This is how the pilot of the Lion Air flight the day before prevented disaster.
>At this point, I would consider it justice to see Boeing go bankrupt.
And what when this happens to Airbus, is that the end of air travel? As long as humans are involved, there will be issues. Airbus still averages pilot input, rather than providing feedback to each pilot, which has led to more than one accident (AF447 being one example, where one pilot tried to pull up out of a stall warning).
> Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes could have been prevented with better pilot actions.
Boeing tried to say it was the pilots for a long time. I don't want to fly on a plane whereby you need to be an exceptional pilot to not crash the plane.
> For an instrument/commercial pilot to lose SA at night on an instrument plan is hard to believe
If one relies on comments from AVH, Qatar might not have the best practices out there. Inappropriate culture could turn to bad results.
Plus there is no information for First Officer's flight experience. He could be a less experienced one.
>> They followed Boeing's checklist in one of the two, and still crashed.
They did not follow it completely, the last item is to leave the cutout switches in cutout, which they did not.
They cut the electric trim back in and inexplicably did not correct the trim or further manage it. I suspect that Crew Resource Management was not effective at that point and both pilots were distracted.
> There must be some despondent folks at the FAA right now. Years of trust squandered.
Can you imagine the real workers, now some idiot Trump named to be deputy director and currently is the acting FAA director wiped out so much of their work... oh dear.
Even if they had been 100% sure the plane is sound, just to keep the larger status quo they should've acted in accordance with the EASA.
> You've gone from "they flew a broken aircraft" to "alight, so they repaired it twice, but you cannot ever trust a malfunctioning aircraft again."
If you think I've changed my argument, you misunderstood my comments. I still think that they flew a broken aircraft.
I'll stand by my statement that 610 should never have taken off, and I'm somewhat surprised that it is contentious. I don't care if all the protocols were followed and the logs made (though obviously the pilots of 610 didn't understand what the previous pilots had done to respond to their incident) - in retrospect, we know that the aircraft was not airworthy going into flight 610, so something needs to change so that next time that is detected before takeoff. Whether that is better observation of the protocols or better protocols, I'm not sure.
> Pilots on the Lion Air flight were receiving erroneous speed readings, a problem that had occurred on three previous flights, according to the Indonesia National Transportation Safety Committee. They had radioed air-traffic controllers to say they intended to return to land.
Was that three previous flights of the same aircraft? And if so, why was it still in service?
> 4. suck it up and delay whatever flight that crew was scheduled for. It sucks, but it was their mistake to overbook and this isn't a safety-critical situation.
Isn't there a good chance this happened anyway? I heard the plane was grounded for 2 hours.
> but in a way that causes a failure mode that is not easily avoided or averted because of Human Factors, even by an aircrew that "knows their shit".
This is negated by the fact that the pilots on the flight before the Indonesian crash were able to save their aircraft because they recognized the symptoms of runaway trim quickly.
Wouldn’t you have said that after the first MAX crash? I mean if you’re a pilot and a 737 crashes, wouldn’t you be ALL OVER every detail of that crash?
> But those passengers would still be alive if it weren’t for bad pilots.
Are you an experienced pilot, intimately familiar with the 737 MAX, or otherwise an aviation expert qualified to be a judge of this?
I can't see how you could make such a statement with any auhtority otherwise, and your profile does not seem to indicate you are.
I am neither, but it has also come to light that Boeing hid MCAS from airlines and pilot training materials, and even hid details from the FAA.
Together with the quick worldwide action by aviation authorities, and the prolonged grounding, even in the US, is enough make this line of reasoning very doubtful.
> Not necessarily fair since one didn't even know what they were up against, and the other was trusting a Boeing checklist that wasn't guaranteed to work, and only stood a realistic chance at working if the failure did not occur at a critical stage of the flight
Well, it did get them back to positive rate climb, didn't it? :P Just, dubious subsequent actions gave that back.
> This is just poppycock, if not straight up, grade A bullshit; no personal disrespect intended to you, fine sir.
Well, it is absolutely personal disrespect, and adding qualifiers amplifies rather than undoes it. A decent person should do better.
> There would have been no need to consider the skill of the pilots if due diligence and proper redundancy concomitant to the actual hazards of the design had been done, which weren't due to management's pressure to get this damn plane flying on time at any cost.
I already said MCAS is awful, kthx? At the same time, it's exposed that many air crews in developing countries don't know how to deal with trim runaway. And trim runaway happens: switches get stuck. So the other links in the failure chain should be dealt with, so that they don't conspire to bring down aircraft under other conditions.
> So why fly on a 737MAX when any other plane out there is safer?
Well no one can fly one right now as they are all grounded. However, once they get approval for a fix from all countries, the airplanes get updated with said fix, and the pilots get whatever training required for the fix and thus can start flying again, why not fly them? Presumably, that failure type should never happen again and its record seems fine outside of this 1 problem.
Must be quite a somber experience piloting an aircraft just deemed unreliable by your employer...
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