Re:Boeing delays 737 MAX software fix delivery
by salawat on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @10:53AM
(#19563813)
That is nominally the purpose of a pilot. To safely operate the machine within the envelope for which it is engineered.
There is always a trade-off with these types of decisions, and like it or not, every airframe certified airworthy has the potential to kill everyone on board without proper piloting.
I'm not saying that I'm letting Boeing off the hook personally, but as someone who has an avid interest in engineering things, I do understand the optimization points they were going for with the MAX, they found a physical design that could accommodate those optimizations, but they skimped or didn't put enough emphasis on communicating changes to pilots.
The pilots are the single most versatile safety system on the plane. Hiding or keeping from them the information they would need to form a checklist to handle this type of failure is the major failing here (given we assume there were no other physical configurations that could have been grandfathered in that wouldn't have involved an MCAS like system for certification). The root cause of that omission though may be traced to the minimal retraining requirement, which was absurd in the first place.
There is always a trade-off with these types of decisions, and like it or not, every airframe certified airworthy has the potential to kill everyone on board without proper piloting.
I'm not saying that I'm letting Boeing off the hook personally, but as someone who has an avid interest in engineering things, I do understand the optimization points they were going for with the MAX, they found a physical design that could accommodate those optimizations, but they skimped or didn't put enough emphasis on communicating changes to pilots.
The pilots are the single most versatile safety system on the plane. Hiding or keeping from them the information they would need to form a checklist to handle this type of failure is the major failing here (given we assume there were no other physical configurations that could have been grandfathered in that wouldn't have involved an MCAS like system for certification). The root cause of that omission though may be traced to the minimal retraining requirement, which was absurd in the first place.