Comment on Hang in there.
HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 3 months agoThey also only used data from a SINGLE sensor, which is a cardinal sin in aviation. The plane already has two angle attack sensors, and they even went so far as to make the alarm that warns when the sensors are mismatched a paid option. They wanted airlines to fucking pay extra for the privilege of knowing when something on their plane isn’t working properly.
vox@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
wait but if there are two sensors installed even without that “safety” option isn’t it purely software then?
HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
IIRC their logic was “well we display the outputs of the two sensors independently don’t we? Why aren’t your pilots paying attention and crosschecking the sensor readouts on our 21st century glass cockpit airplane like this was a B-52 with needle gauges then?”
What we do know is that they argued that the errant MCAS activation from a faulty sensor was “designed to” look like a stabilizer trim runaway (when the “rear wings” you see on the tail of the airplane start moving without pilot command) and therefore claimed that a “properly trained” pilot should have been able to deal with that since they’re supposed to be trained for a trim runaway.
This is a garbage argument of course, because a trim runaway is in itself an emergency that threatens the safety of the aircraft, so why the hell should your supposed “safety” system be putting the pilots in that position to begin with? And if this wasn’t a big deal, why go out of your way to hide the fact that a new system on the aircraft can effectively cause a trim runaway? Not to mention that Boeing is essentially victim blaming the pilots that died from their profit oriented decisions by insinuating that they were poorly trained in order to take the heat off their shoddy design. Finally, it should me mentioned that when Boeing had its own test pilots use a flight simulator to demonstrate what a “properly trained” pilot should be doing when MCAS misbehaves, the pilots used unconventional maneuvers that are not apart of the standard operating procedures of the 737 (i.e. not apart of pilot training). What’s more, their own pilots lost more altitude in recovering from the failure than the pilots of the accident planes even had, so wouldn’t that mean that by their own admission the accident planes were in an impossible situation?