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I understand your point, but I have a little different perspective. Pilots are not engineers. Airline pilots are not test pilots. They drill the procedures,
by cameldrv 3y ago
I understand your point, but I have a little different perspective.
Pilots are not engineers. Airline pilots are not test pilots. They drill the procedures, and they follow them. We'd all like to have Neil Armstrong flying our plane, instinctually solving unexpected problems in seconds, but there aren't enough Neil Armstrongs out there to meet the demand for air travel. The solution that we've come up with is standardized procedures, and to have a procedure for every critical failure mode.
Boeing, for commercial reasons, did not want there to be a procedure for this failure mode. 737 pilots run the trim runaway scenario in the simulator, and they could easily have added a scenario for MCAS failure, but that would have cost Boeing considerable cash and they decided not to do it.
The simple fact is that you had two crews that were trained to Boeing standards crash, and as far as we know, only one survive.
If it had been just one crash and many successful recoveries, you'd be on a much stronger footing to argue that "oh, it's just those developing world airlines with their substandard pilots." When it's a 67% fatality rate though, you can't just blame the crew.