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You're not the first person I've head of this idea from; it's from the NTSB charter The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather

You're not the first person I've head of this idea from; it's from the NTSB charter The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties … and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person” But there was plenty of blaming / faulting going around outside of the NTSB. Hence the fraud we're currently talking about where Boeing tried to blame the pilots who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves. I'm glad you feel personally assured though your enthusiastic personal connections but that does not work for me. That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying.

WalterBright 2y ago
> That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying. Feel free to ask the flight crew next time you're on a 757. The service record of the 757 speaks for itself. I fly Iceland Air because their fleet consists of 757s. I literally bet my life on my work. > Boeing tried to blame the pilots The pilots were partially responsible. 1. First incident - the LA crew followed emergency procedures and continued the flight safely. 2. Second incident - the LA crew restored normal trim 25 times, but never turned off the stab trim system, which is supposed to be a memory item. 3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder. > who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves. The flight voice and data recorders spoke for them. We know what they did. If you want to know the truth, read the official government reports on the crashes. Ignore what the mass media says.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Weird to see such a strongly held belief of not blaming people abandoned so quickly. It's pretty standard to blame the pilots, as we know there is a Swiss cheese model for statistical analysis of risk and from my vantage point opening such large holes in the MCAS layer with the expectation that events are caught at the pilot layer is inadequate. That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected. Edit: I should add that the pilots already got a death sentence for their involvement.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Finding the source of the error is not the same thing as meting out punishment. I am not aware of any pilot being criminally charged for making a terrible mistake. Though their careers are usually ended by it. That seems fair to me. An engineer at Boeing who could not be relied on will also find his career shunted to working on non-critical stuff. That's fair as well. > That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected. Of course. But consider that piloting can all be automated today. Why isn't it done? Because pilots are the backup system for unexpected failures. A great deal (most?) of pilot training is training on what to do in an emergency. One aspect of that training is turning off the stab trim system if the system runs away. It's a switch on the console in easy reach, and it's there for a reason. Remember that Boeing also sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots after the LA crash. The EA pilots did not follow it. Do you want to fly with pilots who don't read/understand/remember emergency procedures? I don't. I wouldn't put them in prison, though, I'd just revoke their license to fly. Pilots undergo regular checks for their competency. No pass => no fly.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      Dying in plane crashes and having their license revoked are pretty severe punishments, perhaps if management could similarly have their license to practice management revoked we could consider that somehow equivalent. I'm sure many people would prefer prison time to dying in a plane crash or having their career destroyed. I don't trust Boeing and haven't for several decades so while I agree in theory an automated system could fly aircraft with a great deal of reliability I do not trust Boeing to be able to deliver that reliability. I like the idea that someone educated in the safety of the aircraft is up in the airplane with me sharing in the risk of flying even if all they are doing is babysitting a computerized system. Most of my knowledge of Boeing is from engineers that used to work there and complained bitterly about the degradation of engineering safety culture. And sure, perhaps flying is safer than it has ever been, I think that's more down to improvements in technology than the culture of safety. Unfortunately while technology generally improves it's hard to say the same thing about culture. In general I'm upset that flying is less safe than it could have been.
- bumby 2y ago
  You can also read the Boeing documents. The hazard analysis listed MCAS as hazardous. By Boeing process controls, that should have mandated redundant sensors. Why were they optional? Because that could increase profits. (Seattle Times has done good reporting on this).
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Boeing indeed has a failure here, and is responsible for it. But as the first LA incident confirms, the pilots, by following their training, were able to deal with it. It was the subsequent flight on the same airplane that crashed. This remains omitted by the mass media, which contraindicates any of the reporting on it as "good". There is also responsibility in the production of a faulty AOA sensor, and the failure of LA to fix the known faulty sensor, or inform the crew, before authorizing the next, fatal, flight.
    - bumby 2y ago
      I disagree. The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. It seems like you want to point to a singular cause. As with most mishaps with complex systems, it’s the result of a cascade of failures. Training is only one part of the problem. Fixing that is still only an administrative mitigation which is the least desirable form of mitigation when designing a safety system. Even if the pilots had additional training, it wouldn’t fix the root cause of the issue and is just asking for trouble because administrative fixes “only” require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        > The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. I've never seen it in the media. Not knowing what the stab trim cutoff switch does is a massive failure either on the part of the pilot or the training. Not reading the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is a failure of the pilot. > It seems like you want to point to a singular cause Au contraire. It seems that everyone but me wants to blame a singular cause - Boeing. There was a cascade of failure here: 1. A defective AOA sensor was manufactured and installed 2. After the first LA incident landed safely, LA failed to correct the problem before sending the airplane aloft again 3. Single path MCAS inputs could not detect failure 4. Pilots failed to apply known emergency procedures > require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time. Of course we try to design airplanes so they do not cause emergencies. But we still need pilots to train to react to emergencies. You don't put a person in the pilot seat who is not well-trained in emergency procedures. Making airplane travel safe means identify and correct ALL causes in the cascade of failures. Most accidents are a combination of airplane failure and pilot failure. Sometimes pilots make deadly mistakes. That's why we have copilots, they check each other. But in the MAX crashes, both pilot and copilot failed to follow known emergency procedures. Why they didn't, I have no idea.
- bumby 2y ago
  This comment seems to ignore all kinds of good practices in human factors engineering that are prevalent in aerospace.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Not sure what you mean, but pilots are trained to deal with runaway stabilizer trim. The EA pilots were also sent an Emergency Airworthiness Bulletin reiterating instructions on dealing with runaway stabilizer trim. They're also trained to reduce thrust when they hear the overspeed horn, rather than continue at full throttle. Overspeeding the aircraft is extremely dangerous, and also makes it almost impossible to manually turn the trim wheel.
    - bumby 2y ago
      As an example, you said they “ignored” the over-speed warning. I would bet it’s much more likely that there was too much going on in the cockpit, likely with confusing or conflicting information, that prevented them from making the correct assessment in a time critical environment. Expecting the humans to act perfectly when the system is working against them is as bad of a design assumption as assuming your airspeed sensor will always act perfectly.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        In the LA crash, the pilots restored normal trim something like 25 times over 11 minutes (or maybe it was 11 times in 25 minutes, I forgot). That's plenty of time to realize that the stab trim system should be turned off. They never turned it off. In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off. I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but they turned off the stab trim with the airplane sharply nose down, and tried to restore normal trim by turning the manual wheel. At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed. The overspeed warning should never be ignored, as it means parts of the airplane can be torn off. Especially in a dive. Even so, if they had followed the directions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive to use the electric trim thumb switches (which override MCAS) they could have restored normal trim. It's not hard: 1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches 2. turn off the stab trim That's it. > Expecting the humans to act perfectly Reading the EAD and do steps 1 and 2 is not some super complicated thing. Besides, pilots who get flustered in emergency situations should be washed out of flight school. My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies, but kept a cool head and properly resolved each of them. In one, the engine on his F-86 conked out. The tower told him to bail out. But he knew exactly what the rate of descent of the F-86 was, his altitude, his speed, how far he was from the landing strip, the effect of the wind, etc., and calculated he could make the field. Which he did, saving the very expensive airplane. (However, he was reprimanded for not bailing out, as the pilots were more valuable than the jet.) But he was unrepentant, confident in his calculations. BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.
- salawat 2y ago
  >3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder. Walter, ffs, they were taking off hot & high from Adis Ababa with airspeed unreliable because of the screwed AoA sensor; a sensor unjustifiably classified too low in terms of consequence for failure, and deliberately wired non-redundantly and kept from being cross-checked in most configurations in order to avoid training burden to avoid cert work to compete with the NEO. Without that AoA sensor, overspeed had no basis; garbage in, garbage out. Let it go. Boeing f*cked up. Period. Their (the pilot's) instruments and alarms were completely untrustworthy. You (Boeing) don't get to blame pilots for not doing memory items when your (again, Boeing's) technical design is screwed from the first. Your 757 work was fine. The MAX as it was was not. Nothing will ever make it so.

WalterBright 2y ago

> That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying. Feel free to ask the flight crew next time you're on a 757. The service record of the 757 speaks for itself. I fly Iceland Air because their fleet consists of 757s. I literally bet my life on my work. > Boeing tried to blame the pilots The pilots were partially responsible. 1. First incident - the LA crew followed emergency procedures and continued the flight safely. 2. Second incident - the LA crew restored normal trim 25 times, but never turned off the stab trim system, which is supposed to be a memory item. 3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder. > who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves. The flight voice and data recorders spoke for them. We know what they did. If you want to know the truth, read the official government reports on the crashes. Ignore what the mass media says.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Weird to see such a strongly held belief of not blaming people abandoned so quickly. It's pretty standard to blame the pilots, as we know there is a Swiss cheese model for statistical analysis of risk and from my vantage point opening such large holes in the MCAS layer with the expectation that events are caught at the pilot layer is inadequate. That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected. Edit: I should add that the pilots already got a death sentence for their involvement.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Finding the source of the error is not the same thing as meting out punishment. I am not aware of any pilot being criminally charged for making a terrible mistake. Though their careers are usually ended by it. That seems fair to me. An engineer at Boeing who could not be relied on will also find his career shunted to working on non-critical stuff. That's fair as well. > That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected. Of course. But consider that piloting can all be automated today. Why isn't it done? Because pilots are the backup system for unexpected failures. A great deal (most?) of pilot training is training on what to do in an emergency. One aspect of that training is turning off the stab trim system if the system runs away. It's a switch on the console in easy reach, and it's there for a reason. Remember that Boeing also sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots after the LA crash. The EA pilots did not follow it. Do you want to fly with pilots who don't read/understand/remember emergency procedures? I don't. I wouldn't put them in prison, though, I'd just revoke their license to fly. Pilots undergo regular checks for their competency. No pass => no fly.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    Dying in plane crashes and having their license revoked are pretty severe punishments, perhaps if management could similarly have their license to practice management revoked we could consider that somehow equivalent. I'm sure many people would prefer prison time to dying in a plane crash or having their career destroyed. I don't trust Boeing and haven't for several decades so while I agree in theory an automated system could fly aircraft with a great deal of reliability I do not trust Boeing to be able to deliver that reliability. I like the idea that someone educated in the safety of the aircraft is up in the airplane with me sharing in the risk of flying even if all they are doing is babysitting a computerized system. Most of my knowledge of Boeing is from engineers that used to work there and complained bitterly about the degradation of engineering safety culture. And sure, perhaps flying is safer than it has ever been, I think that's more down to improvements in technology than the culture of safety. Unfortunately while technology generally improves it's hard to say the same thing about culture. In general I'm upset that flying is less safe than it could have been.
bumby 2y ago
You can also read the Boeing documents. The hazard analysis listed MCAS as hazardous. By Boeing process controls, that should have mandated redundant sensors. Why were they optional? Because that could increase profits. (Seattle Times has done good reporting on this).
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Boeing indeed has a failure here, and is responsible for it. But as the first LA incident confirms, the pilots, by following their training, were able to deal with it. It was the subsequent flight on the same airplane that crashed. This remains omitted by the mass media, which contraindicates any of the reporting on it as "good". There is also responsibility in the production of a faulty AOA sensor, and the failure of LA to fix the known faulty sensor, or inform the crew, before authorizing the next, fatal, flight.
  - bumby 2y ago
    I disagree. The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. It seems like you want to point to a singular cause. As with most mishaps with complex systems, it’s the result of a cascade of failures. Training is only one part of the problem. Fixing that is still only an administrative mitigation which is the least desirable form of mitigation when designing a safety system. Even if the pilots had additional training, it wouldn’t fix the root cause of the issue and is just asking for trouble because administrative fixes “only” require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      > The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. I've never seen it in the media. Not knowing what the stab trim cutoff switch does is a massive failure either on the part of the pilot or the training. Not reading the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is a failure of the pilot. > It seems like you want to point to a singular cause Au contraire. It seems that everyone but me wants to blame a singular cause - Boeing. There was a cascade of failure here: 1. A defective AOA sensor was manufactured and installed 2. After the first LA incident landed safely, LA failed to correct the problem before sending the airplane aloft again 3. Single path MCAS inputs could not detect failure 4. Pilots failed to apply known emergency procedures > require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time. Of course we try to design airplanes so they do not cause emergencies. But we still need pilots to train to react to emergencies. You don't put a person in the pilot seat who is not well-trained in emergency procedures. Making airplane travel safe means identify and correct ALL causes in the cascade of failures. Most accidents are a combination of airplane failure and pilot failure. Sometimes pilots make deadly mistakes. That's why we have copilots, they check each other. But in the MAX crashes, both pilot and copilot failed to follow known emergency procedures. Why they didn't, I have no idea.
bumby 2y ago
This comment seems to ignore all kinds of good practices in human factors engineering that are prevalent in aerospace.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean, but pilots are trained to deal with runaway stabilizer trim. The EA pilots were also sent an Emergency Airworthiness Bulletin reiterating instructions on dealing with runaway stabilizer trim. They're also trained to reduce thrust when they hear the overspeed horn, rather than continue at full throttle. Overspeeding the aircraft is extremely dangerous, and also makes it almost impossible to manually turn the trim wheel.
  - bumby 2y ago
    As an example, you said they “ignored” the over-speed warning. I would bet it’s much more likely that there was too much going on in the cockpit, likely with confusing or conflicting information, that prevented them from making the correct assessment in a time critical environment. Expecting the humans to act perfectly when the system is working against them is as bad of a design assumption as assuming your airspeed sensor will always act perfectly.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      In the LA crash, the pilots restored normal trim something like 25 times over 11 minutes (or maybe it was 11 times in 25 minutes, I forgot). That's plenty of time to realize that the stab trim system should be turned off. They never turned it off. In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off. I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but they turned off the stab trim with the airplane sharply nose down, and tried to restore normal trim by turning the manual wheel. At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed. The overspeed warning should never be ignored, as it means parts of the airplane can be torn off. Especially in a dive. Even so, if they had followed the directions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive to use the electric trim thumb switches (which override MCAS) they could have restored normal trim. It's not hard: 1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches 2. turn off the stab trim That's it. > Expecting the humans to act perfectly Reading the EAD and do steps 1 and 2 is not some super complicated thing. Besides, pilots who get flustered in emergency situations should be washed out of flight school. My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies, but kept a cool head and properly resolved each of them. In one, the engine on his F-86 conked out. The tower told him to bail out. But he knew exactly what the rate of descent of the F-86 was, his altitude, his speed, how far he was from the landing strip, the effect of the wind, etc., and calculated he could make the field. Which he did, saving the very expensive airplane. (However, he was reprimanded for not bailing out, as the pilots were more valuable than the jet.) But he was unrepentant, confident in his calculations. BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.
salawat 2y ago
>3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder. Walter, ffs, they were taking off hot & high from Adis Ababa with airspeed unreliable because of the screwed AoA sensor; a sensor unjustifiably classified too low in terms of consequence for failure, and deliberately wired non-redundantly and kept from being cross-checked in most configurations in order to avoid training burden to avoid cert work to compete with the NEO. Without that AoA sensor, overspeed had no basis; garbage in, garbage out. Let it go. Boeing f*cked up. Period. Their (the pilot's) instruments and alarms were completely untrustworthy. You (Boeing) don't get to blame pilots for not doing memory items when your (again, Boeing's) technical design is screwed from the first. Your 757 work was fine. The MAX as it was was not. Nothing will ever make it so.