Quote:
Originally Posted by FlameOn
Boeing test pilots and engineers have determined in simulations of the Lion Air crash an unrecoverable dive leading to a crash would have occurred if the MCAS was not shut down within 40s of an AoA data error.
Basically an undisclosed system, which was put in place to save airlines the cost of retraining pilots, had a single point of failure which can kill an untrained flight crew in under a minute. A trained flight crew would have no problems disabling the system. Saving training costs for the airlines cost 300+ people their lives.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...vent-disaster/ |
40 seconds...in the hands of Boeing test pilots knowing to expect an error who would be able to react within those 40 seconds.
In other words, a well trained crew knowing about the MCAS and testing for the scenario would have had 40 seconds or less to disable the problem after noticing it, versus a crew that had no idea the system even existed because it was not disclosed or trained on. Boeing built a system that
actively was trying to crash a fricking plane if not countered within 40 seconds, and decided not to tell anyone about it to save on cost.
A pilot taking a sip of coffee and a few seconds of inattention on a 6 hour flight could be enough to cause a plane to crash. And you have to remember to turn off 3 specific switches, after identifying the problem, within the seconds you have left or you die.
And this is the Lion Air situation, we still don't know all the details of the Ethopian Air crash, where the pilots did know about MCAS at that point. That 40 seconds for Lion Air may have been 15 seconds for Ethiopian Air due to different conditions. It crashed much sooner than Lion Air.
Lion Air pilots hit the switch over 24 times while scrambling through the manual until they eventually lost control (and they would have no idea of a 40 second counter of course).
This is like pressing the button from Lost, Boeing edition