Re:Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data
by crooked-v on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @03:43PM
(#19628092)
The third factor to add to your list is that the design of MCAS makes the plane unrecoverable in some situations.
On the Ethiopia Air flight, it looks increasingly like the pilots knew what to do, but even after MCAS was disabled it was impossible to recover control because once trim was maxed out, adjusting the physical control trim wheels may have literally taken more brute strength than the pilots had, there was no way to reactivate electric trim control without also reactivating MCAS, and going nose-down to reduce load on the control surfaces to allow manual trim adjustment was infeasible because this all happened at 1000 ft. altitude.
On the Ethiopia Air flight, it looks increasingly like the pilots knew what to do, but even after MCAS was disabled it was impossible to recover control because once trim was maxed out, adjusting the physical control trim wheels may have literally taken more brute strength than the pilots had, there was no way to reactivate electric trim control without also reactivating MCAS, and going nose-down to reduce load on the control surfaces to allow manual trim adjustment was infeasible because this all happened at 1000 ft. altitude.