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.
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.
Yes, and Boeing also changed the functionality of the Stab Trim cutout switches such that the Flight Computer with MCAS running on it was never able to be isolated from the electronic actuator switches on the yoke, and the use of said trim switches reset the undocumented MCAS system activation to 5s after release, which also ramped itself up far beyond the documented limits sent to the regulators, upward to a max of 2.5 degrees per activation triggered by a fubar'd, non-redundant, misclassified, intentionally non-cross checked, ultimately safety-critical sensor!
>In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off.
Airspeed unreliable checklist on takeoff/climbout: increase throttle. Maybe they went through a different CL?
>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.
Because of aforementioned screwing with the cutout switches which was not clearly communicated to pilots and only came out in retrospect.
>At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed.
...using a maneuver removed from documentation for several versions of 737 that only military trained pilots clued into cold on a simulator, and a civil aviation captain failed to arrive at, again, due to it's undocumented nature since about dino-737.
>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.
Aerospace Engineers who design airplanes and don't take into account human info processing limitations, human factors research, basic ethics, and an appreciation for the fact that "management can wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first, because I. Am. Not. Going. To. Kill. People." should likewise, also wash out. But lo and behold, we live in an inperfect world with fallible people. Which has generally meant we should be on our toes to be up front about what we're building instead of hiding implementation details from regulators for fear of all the money we might lose if we actually do our jobs to the professional standard we should.
>My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies,>>
>BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.
Walter, if it'd have been built the way it should have, and been documented as it should have been, and had the simulator training it damn well should have requirex it never would have happened.
Stop trying to justify it. This wasn't a bunch of "get 'er done" skunkworks engineers, working on mindbending, cutting edge, ill-understood designs.
This was a civil transport project, co-opted by a bunch of fiscal min-maxer's who pressured everyone, and continue to pressure everyone to cut every corner imaginable.
I genuinely feel bad for you. It'd rip at my soul to see something I worked so hard for to fall so damn hard. I'm going through a crisis of faith on that front at the moment. It ain't fun at all.
We cannot afford to be kind to these institutions once we've left them though. People like you were, and I certainly am are counterweights to people who think that all those corners we fastidiously upkeep and check are just so much waste, when they damn well aren't.
