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That seems quite wrong - maybe got garbled somewhere. Boeing’s official instructions to to all operators after the Lion air crash was to follow existing stabi

That seems quite wrong - maybe got garbled somewhere. Boeing’s official instructions to to all operators after the Lion air crash was to follow existing stabilizer runaway procedures by flipping two switches in the center of the aircraft to disable electronic control of the stabilizer. (You can see a video of this procedure from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pPRuFHR1co&t=154 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pPRuFHR1co&t=154)

bshipp 8y ago
Thanks, that makes much more sense. Maybe they figure it's faster in an emergency to simply pop out the flaps one notch instead of the pilot attempting to find a button which they rarely press. Although, truth be told, I imagine every 737 pilot is keenly aware of that button's location now...
- matt-attack 8y ago
  I would have thought that was true after the first crash. I'm honestly baffled how it could happen again. If I was aware of this issue from the Lion Air crash, wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? I mean, if a plane crashes, doesn't every pilot in the world inquire about what caused it? I wouldn't think that would escape a single pilot. Or do I have it wrong? Do they not perceive crashes the same way the general public does?
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Investigations tend to keep things hush till they have final conclusions, and everyone involved is scared of lawsuits so doesn't want to talk about problems or workarounds on-record. Talking about a workaround or distributing a fix before it's vetted by all the right people and procedures could also be legally risky if the workaround causes other issues. That tends to mean a lot of issues re-occur multiple times before they're resolved.
    - Joakal 8y ago
      Hush? It's an airplane. Shouldn't the same models be grounded? Of course, it didn't help if Boeing blamed the pilots (if it was true?). This would imply to other pilots that everything is ok with the planes.
      - londons_explore 8y ago
        Even a plane with a bunch of faults is much safer than a typical journey by car. Ground a few planes, and the extra car journeys caused by people choosing to drive due to disruption to their travel plans easily causes more deaths. Humans are particularly bad at handling unlikely events (such as the risk of a plane crash), and in those cases, their 'gut reaction' frequently is the wrong one.
        jacquesm 8y ago
        If I had the choice between a 'typical journey by car' vs a 'plane with a bunch of faults' I'd definitely prefer the typical journey by car. A 'plane with a bunch of faults' could range from a non-issue to an imminent crash, a typical journey by car tends to do what it is supposed to do, it is the 'exceptional journeys by car' that are the problematic ones. Air travel is safer statistically because most planes do not have 'a bunch of faults', when you start out with faulty planes the stats will rapidly turn against you.
        notfromhere 8y ago
        Cars have a lot of issues, but those issues are more forgiving than a similar issue in a plane. If my cars engine has issues, I can pull over. If a plane's engine has issues, there's a good chance its going to kill everyone on board
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      The FAA did put out a notice to pilots last year, I don't know if that kind of information reached Ethiopia Air though > Following the [lion air] crash, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency directive warning that faulty AOA data could trigger a dive, and requiring pilots be made aware of a "runaway stabiliser" checklist.
  - dingaling 8y ago
    > wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? Perhaps so, but with alarms blaring and potentially misleading data on the flight displays and the aircraft bucking around near the terrain at 400 knots... Things might be difficult to put into context.
  - acqq 8y ago
    > If I was aware of this issue from the Lion Air crash, wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? Knowing that some new mechanism exists that can mess your flight doesn’t necessarily help much: The truth is that the plane even with that new device turned off behaves differently than the plane for which you trained! The cause is Boeing’s lie that it’s “just more efficient old plane” when in fact it is a new plane with different and worse flying behavior. The device was implement to hide that fact. So even if you as a pilot know about it, until you diagnose it and turn it off the plane can already be in the almost unrecoverable state. But once you turn the device off you‘re supposed to save the plane for which you weren‘t trained and in the alteady hard-to-save state!
- avs733 8y ago
  Tons of reasons this can happen. Best analogue I have is to patched security vulnerabilities in software still existing in some systems because a sysadmin isn't aware.

bshipp 8y ago

Thanks, that makes much more sense. Maybe they figure it's faster in an emergency to simply pop out the flaps one notch instead of the pilot attempting to find a button which they rarely press. Although, truth be told, I imagine every 737 pilot is keenly aware of that button's location now...

matt-attack 8y ago
I would have thought that was true after the first crash. I'm honestly baffled how it could happen again. If I was aware of this issue from the Lion Air crash, wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? I mean, if a plane crashes, doesn't every pilot in the world inquire about what caused it? I wouldn't think that would escape a single pilot. Or do I have it wrong? Do they not perceive crashes the same way the general public does?
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Investigations tend to keep things hush till they have final conclusions, and everyone involved is scared of lawsuits so doesn't want to talk about problems or workarounds on-record. Talking about a workaround or distributing a fix before it's vetted by all the right people and procedures could also be legally risky if the workaround causes other issues. That tends to mean a lot of issues re-occur multiple times before they're resolved.
  - Joakal 8y ago
    Hush? It's an airplane. Shouldn't the same models be grounded? Of course, it didn't help if Boeing blamed the pilots (if it was true?). This would imply to other pilots that everything is ok with the planes.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Even a plane with a bunch of faults is much safer than a typical journey by car. Ground a few planes, and the extra car journeys caused by people choosing to drive due to disruption to their travel plans easily causes more deaths. Humans are particularly bad at handling unlikely events (such as the risk of a plane crash), and in those cases, their 'gut reaction' frequently is the wrong one.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        If I had the choice between a 'typical journey by car' vs a 'plane with a bunch of faults' I'd definitely prefer the typical journey by car. A 'plane with a bunch of faults' could range from a non-issue to an imminent crash, a typical journey by car tends to do what it is supposed to do, it is the 'exceptional journeys by car' that are the problematic ones. Air travel is safer statistically because most planes do not have 'a bunch of faults', when you start out with faulty planes the stats will rapidly turn against you.
      - notfromhere 8y ago
        Cars have a lot of issues, but those issues are more forgiving than a similar issue in a plane. If my cars engine has issues, I can pull over. If a plane's engine has issues, there's a good chance its going to kill everyone on board
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    The FAA did put out a notice to pilots last year, I don't know if that kind of information reached Ethiopia Air though > Following the [lion air] crash, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency directive warning that faulty AOA data could trigger a dive, and requiring pilots be made aware of a "runaway stabiliser" checklist.
- dingaling 8y ago
  > wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? Perhaps so, but with alarms blaring and potentially misleading data on the flight displays and the aircraft bucking around near the terrain at 400 knots... Things might be difficult to put into context.
- acqq 8y ago
  > If I was aware of this issue from the Lion Air crash, wouldn't every pilot in the world know about it? Knowing that some new mechanism exists that can mess your flight doesn’t necessarily help much: The truth is that the plane even with that new device turned off behaves differently than the plane for which you trained! The cause is Boeing’s lie that it’s “just more efficient old plane” when in fact it is a new plane with different and worse flying behavior. The device was implement to hide that fact. So even if you as a pilot know about it, until you diagnose it and turn it off the plane can already be in the almost unrecoverable state. But once you turn the device off you‘re supposed to save the plane for which you weren‘t trained and in the alteady hard-to-save state!
avs733 8y ago
Tons of reasons this can happen. Best analogue I have is to patched security vulnerabilities in software still existing in some systems because a sysadmin isn't aware.