As one of the few pilots who have lived to tell about being in the left seat of an airliner when things went horribly wrong, with seconds to react, I know a thing or two about overcoming an unimagined crisis. I am also one of the few who have flown a Boeing 737 MAX Level D full motion simulator, replicating both accident flights multiple times. I know firsthand the challenges the pilots on the doomed accident flights faced, and how wrong it is to blame them for not being able to compensate for such a pernicious and deadly design. These emergencies did not present as a classic runaway stabilizer problem, but initially as ambiguous unreliable airspeed and altitude situations, masking MCAS.
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Like sully himself when his aircraft lost both engines, it took himself a bit of time to realise what had actually happened and then to act on it. For him it was a dual engine failure but for the 737 max pilots, it was something they had never heard was a thing before. And even after being taught how to switch it off, which the Ethiopian pilots did, it still failed to respond to manual controls.
This is why I will always say it is wrong to blame the pilot in these types of situations when it is clearly the manufacturer for designing an aircraft made to nose dive.
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Proof that you should never listen to the media, folks…
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