At least with the LionAir flight, the captain immediately disengaged the A/P. MCAS overrides manual control, unless you specifically switch it off, which isn’t in the QRH. The fact that MCAS activated at such a low altitude meant that the crew had very little time to recover.
If it is, it would be little. This also come from confirmation bias-all the trends that shame Boeing (y’know, like "If it’s Boeing, I’m not going) come from aviation based communities anyways. Travelers don’t have to-and the vast majority aren’t anyways-be fans of aviation and airplanes, many of which generally couldn’t care less. The name & brand “Boeing” has definitely made a bad name of itself with everyone, but way too many people are too uneducated to act on this in any way that impacts anything other than their selves.
The issue gets massively inflated in the media. A single incident stays in the news for weeks, all the while hundreds of thousands of flights go completely without issue.
Even if Boeing isn’t at fault, a lot of newsletters somehow drag Boeing into the story, and to make matters worse, if they say “a Boeing 777 wheel fell of mid-flight”, a lot of travelers are going to be like “oh no another Boeing incident” without reading that it was the airline’s fault (or whatever else happened). Boeing can be held accountable for a lot of things right now, but they are being blamed (by inexperienced people) for even more things than what Boeing is actually at fault for.
EDIT: Yeah I know I’m a Boeing fan but I’m more of a classic Boeing fan (when quality over quantity mattered and stock prices mattered less.) I’m not going to protect Boeing for what they were at fault for.
Boeing will be criminally charged by the United States Department of Justice (USDoJ), as reported by Bloomberg News. The charges are not yet known, but it is expected to be in relation to the MAX crashes. An unnamed DoJ source told Bloomberg that Boeing has until the end of the week to enter their guilty/not guilty plea.
I’m on a family vacation. On of the people here (my aunt) is a corporate/labor lawyer in New York. She said this is the best move Boeing could make. It looks much better from a PR standpoint than outright denying the allegations or delaying the inevitable.
The Lion Air pilots could not do anything about it because they didn’t know what MCAS was, and they certainly didn’t know it was on their plane. As Mort mentioned, it was simply impossible for the pilots to beat MCAS, especially without knowing it existed, because it was just far too powerful. And to say it is because of the poor safety culture at the airline, and poorly trained crews before looking at the facts is plain racism. In fact, Lion Air specifically asked for more information about the aircraft, and extra crew training for its pilots before the aircraft entered commercial service. As for the captain, he completed his pilot training in the USA, and was a well-trained and competent pilot, it’s just a shame that you are pointing fingers and playing the blame game for something he had no control over. If the crash happened in the US with an equally competent crew (who I am sure would be well-trained), nobody would have blamed the pilots or the airline, and everyone would have made a ruckus about it, but since it was in Indonesia, nah, let’s not think about why this could have happened, let’s just jump the gun and blame the pilots.
As for the Ethiopian crash, it was also due to MCAS. The pilots at this point knew that their plane had MCAS, and even though they did everything they were instructed to do by Boeing, and did it as fast as they could, the nose of the plane was pushed down so forcefully that it was unrecoverable. Also, because there were so many alarms going off in the cockpit, and so much distraction due to an issue that Boeing themselves caused, the pilots didn’t realise that they had to manually trim the aircraft instead of using the yoke once MCAS was disabled.
There are various other reasons for the crash, so please don’t say things like this without any facts or sources to back it up. I would highly recommend watching “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”. It is on Netflix if you have it, it’s a good watch.
Quit buying the bs. Nothing wrong with the design of the Max just those who run the company, this is what happens when you let beancounters run a company like Boeing quality goes down.
That’s just objectively untrue. The MAX was designed originally to use only one pitot tube to control MCAS. That’s a fatal flaw in the core design, no question about it. That’s just one example, there are definitely others.
Given how much Boeing has lost over the Max, they would have saved money just starting fresh but it currently isn’t possible to turn back time so the world is stuck with the decisions Boeing has made. Still, even with the 737 Max having its flaws, it’s not an unsuccessful program. The average passenger doesn’t really care about the aircraft they’re flying on. I’ve flown on the Max 8 4 times and every flight was full. I also didn’t see anyone try and rebook their flight on a different aircraft. While I say this from a passenger perspective, as a pilot, I’m going to wait until I don’t see Boeing in the headlines monthly for the wrong reasons. Until Boeing can promise a better and safer production of their aircraft, I ain’t piloting one anytime soon.
The fatal flaw in any design is the human element. In the case of aviation that would be the pilots and the engineers (maintainers I consider as engineers). A fatal design flaw is more about structural issues a la the dehaviland commet with the square windows. That is a fatal design flaw, one like the max is not as serious. Reason being as pilots and engineers we need to have enough common sense to know when to not do something at that time. To do the right thing. . Boeing quality problems are on the current people in charge as ,odt are not engineers at all, they are worse than lawyers they’re accountant aka beancounters.
“The system’s redesign will correct the MCAS’s reliance on only one source of information about the plane’s angle-of-attack (AOA) sensors in flight, Boeing said, making it possible for pilots to manually override the MCAS.”
“Going forward, MCAS will compare information from both AOA sensors before activating, adding a new layer of protection,” the company said. “In addition, MCAS will now only turn on if both AOA sensors agree, will only activate once in response to erroneous AOA, and will always be subject to a maximum limit that can be overridden with the control column.”
