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A comment on In Lion Air Crash, Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggle to Regain Control. Parent comment

Re:In Lion Air Crash, Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggl... by aeternus on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @09:25PM (#18548766)
Documentation may have helped, but any pilot that has used an autopilot should know how to deal with runaway trim. Fighting any trim issue via yoke pressure is wrong, and flight instructors typically drill that into students.

Dealing with this is relatively simple:

1) Hold the trim wheel. Autopilots are designed so that humans can easily override just by holding the control.

2) Disable the autopilot / M.C.A.S. via switch.

3) Pull the circuit breaker. Even if they pull the wrong breaker(s), flying with a partial panel is safer than flying without controls.

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Re:In Lion Air Crash, Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggl... by thisrod on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @01:53AM (#18549741)
> Disable the autopilot / M.C.A.S. via switch.

The version of the article that I read says:

"The pilot of Flight 610 appears to have [pressed that switch] repeatedly to bring the nose up, but the MCAS reactivated each time, as it was designed to do, forcing the nose back down, and the pilot had to repeat the process again and again."

This is getting quite wierd. The captain had 6000 hours of experience, the pilots knew what the problem was, they had ten minutes to solve it, and they had started to do the right things. All good so far. Then, something went wrong. But what?

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Re:In Lion Air Crash, Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggl... by dx034 on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @03:42AM (#18550109)
That it was not the autopilot misbehaving but the MCAS. The pilot probably assumed it was the autopilot (and therefore deactivated it) but didn't know about MCAS in this situation.

I wonder if the system showed a warning that was active to give the pilots a hint of why the aircraft behaved the way it did. Even if they didn't know about MCAS, a warning that it is active would've at least triggered further responses (e.g. cut off power to the systems to return to manual control).

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