4 ms·
As someone who's done a bunch of human factors design training for critical situations in a previous career as a UI/UX designer and now works as a systems engin
by karlkatzke 8y ago
As someone who's done a bunch of human factors design training for critical situations in a previous career as a UI/UX designer and now works as a systems engineer doing a bunch of alerting, 40 seconds is too short of a time to troubleshoot the issue.
When this situation happens, five things happen at once. MASTER CAUTION (whoop, whoop noises and a big red light!), ALT DISAGREE alert on the MFD, Incorrect Airspeed on the MFD, the stick shaker goes off, and by the way, if you take the time to look down at the throttle section of the dashboard with all those other alerts going off, you'd see that there is suddenly a lot of trim on the APL trim indicator but the trim wheel doesn't actually move (which would provide an audible 'click click click' that would probably trigger that there was a problem with trim.
Each of those things has a separate memory checklist that you have to run down, and subtract ten seconds to register them, prioritize, communicate with the other pilot, and start executing them.
The worst part here is that they've added another alert and then changed how the airplane will fly in the middle of an emergency. While the extra alert narrows down the number of branches from the "prioritization" part of the checklist, I'm not sure that's "fixing" the problem.
- ams6110 8y agoThe trim wheel always moves on the 737. It's physically connected to the stabilizer. If the stabilizer is moving, the trim wheel is moving. Otherwise, yes I agree. A lot of stuff probably went crazy in a short time for them.
- VBprogrammer 8y agoThe fix for the problem is that it can no longer repeatedly drive the trim to it's extremes. There should be plenty of elevator authority counter a single trim movement of 2.5 units. I appreciate your point about all of the alerts going off however the pilot is manually flying the aircraft at this point, they should feel that something is going on through the controls and react to that firstly. Imagine having a blow-out in a fancy car with pressure sensors, sure lots of alerts are going off but you have probably not registered that because keeping the car going in a straight line is taking 100% of your attention.
- ams6110 8y agoGood point, and that's why there are two pilots. When stuff goes crazy, one flies the plane, the other one runs the checklists.