Comment by FabHK
2 years ago
> In an effort to get the plane out quickly, Boeing, with the assent of the FAA, had even told the airlines that their pilots didn’t need to conduct flight simulator tests. That was a critical mistake, because the pilots would have discovered the issue that caused the planes to crash.
Is that so? The simulators would have been able so simulate the failure of one of the two AOA sensors, and the simulated MCAS would've kicked in, issuing stabiliser trim nose-down commands, and the pilots would've tried to fix it with the trim nose-up switch on the yoke, and this would've gone back and forth a while until they'd stopped trimming up for a bit, and it would've simulated a crash?
That's possible, but news to me. Here's a source [0] saying "the simulators have been shown to be incapable of replicating the conditions under which the two 737 MAX aircraft crashed" and "Boeing have discovered that their simulators cannot accurately recreate a fault with the anti-stall system."
Seems to me that (at least) one of the two articles is wrong.
My understanding of the situation is this: When there is a new plane released, the FAA determins what type of training the (existing) pilots need to undergo to be certified to fly on it. If the plane is new or very different from existing planes, then the pilots have to go through long and expensive training- this training includes flight simulators. If the plane is "mostly the same" as an existing plane, the pilots go through shorter and cheaper training.
Boeing wanted the pilots to take the cheaper training, because it ment that the buyers could save a lot of money. So they convinced the FAA that the cheaper training was appropriate. They convinced the FAA that the MCAS system wasn't a "big difference." This was a mistake
Sure, Boeing’s desperate attempts to “grandfather” in this plane under the original type certificate constituted the root cause for all this.
My question here though was specifically whether, as the article alleges, MAX-specific simulator training (whether required or not) would have exposed this problem in time to prevent the accidents. And I don’t think it would.
Ethiopian Airlines had a max 8 simulator and their pilots had trained on it prior to the crash.
Pretty sure it only had one AoA?
Saw somewhere that it physically had two, but the specific software module only used data from one.
That’s right, MCAS (originally) was fed by only one of the two AOA sensors (on the side of the pilot flying, if I’m not mistaken).