All training material is supplied and approved by BOEING, be it the hour's i-pad session to allow a pilot to know what's different between a 737classic/ng and a 737MAX, or the full blown type conversion. So that one lands firmly in BOEING's lap

As has been said MANY times MCAS is NOT the same as "runaway trim", and DOES NOT behave the same as runaway trim.

You criticise the training regime - yes it isn't up to other standards, but it obviously produces pilots who can and do fly daily without crashes in other types of aircraft - they only "failed disastrously" on the 737MAX - mostly due to the fact they were incorrectly trained using the BOEING supplied training material.

I ask yo a very simple question - why did the pilot form a US airline I referred to earlier say that the training he undertook was not adequate for him to fly a 737max? (This was a long service pilot, who had many types in his log, but he found the i-pad training to be inadequate, and has been supported by others.)

With the way MCAS was behaving there would have been far more crashes than the two plus one reported near miss (I dare say there have been others, but good luck has kicked in). The trouble is that MCAS didn't always present itself initially as runaway trim, so a flight crew might be sorting the first symptoms when the runaway trim kicked in. FAR, FAR BETTER - have a proper active cross checking and reporting of the sensor disagree so only the errant system (AoA sensors) is cut out, and not the whole electric trim - again a BOEING design decision. (And one that Boeing themselves have had on other types with large-fan engines).

Boeing are culpable - they put a system onto an aircraft which could force the aircraft into an unrecoverable situation, they didn't call that system a "safety" system, they didn't automatically supply the airlines with the correct information function, they didn't supply the correct pilot training - and they basically led the FAA and the whole of the rest of the airline business astray.

As you are so fond of saying, it all comes down to money - in this case I doubt that the saving was more than a few dollars on the whole project of billions - they had the logic required, they had the sensors required, but they went off an "invented" an inferior system.

I agree with you about the rapid transition from single engine tail dragger to large twin civil airliner - there should be adequate transition steps, and an adequate number of hours total stick time. I do know that while the US requires more hours than Europe, I don't know what transition steps are required, but given the heavy commercial accident rates are very similar between the two the results of the process are comparable.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The problem here is that non-US pilots are taught by rote.

Are you yankee dandies really that arrogant?
Quite a few of our airlines use L3 Airline Academy. Hmm...
...isn't that an American company?

As has been said MANY times MCAS is NOT the same as "runaway trim", and DOES NOT behave the same as runaway trim.

You are making an unwarranted assumption that all runaway trims are continuous and none are intermittent.

Yes, MCAS does an additional thing, it activates the stick shaker, but that doesn't move any control. Any pilot who is paying attention should know if his airplane is near a stall and a quick look at the airspeed indicator and the artificial horizon will tell him. Isn't he supposed to be scanning those instruments anyway? Or is the failure systematic, that the pilots are taught that the computers on the aircraft are correct all the time? So they think that stick shaker is real despite what the other instruments tell them?

Or is the problem that pilots aren't being taught how to prioritize? That's not a Boeing fault.

Seems to me that when something moves a control when you don't want it to, you put that up near the top of the list, while you put an idiot light failure near the bottom of the list.

I agree with you about the rapid transition from single engine tail dragger to large twin civil airliner - there should be adequate transition steps, and an adequate number of hours total stick time.

It is stick time. You have to have enough that you have been PIC once or twice when something has gone haywire and you have had to say emergency into the radio. No training can simulate that.

It is YOU who is making assumptions based on your inability to READ simple English. I said "MCAS is NOT the same as runaway trim" - and that's exactly what I meant, is you who is miss-reading what has been written.

MCAS does not only activate the stick shaker when working correctly, it just gently lowers the nose a little bit and, in the case o the B737MAX makes the aircraft "feel" like an older generation B737. And this has been explained on any number of occasions, and does so a LONG way before a stall.

You are a very deluded Yank, you refuse to accept that the ONLY additional training material given to pilots transferring to the flying the B737MAX was that PROVIDED BY AND APPROVED BY BOEING. And at least one US pilot has come out and said how inadequate that material was. I personally feel very sorry for any pilot transferring onto the B737MAX given the reported poor state of that transition training material developed and provided to the airlines by Boeing. As far as I'm aware, for a "new" pilot they would get their initial B737 training on the "generic" B737 (mostly simulator), then, if necessary, get the same "transition" training package as every other B737 pilot that was going to be flying a B737MAX - and as has already been explained was provided by Boeing to the airlines and took the form of a short i-pad session, This process had been deemed to be "adequate" by the FAA on the basis that the B737MAX was "the same as any other B737".
One thing I've seen from a European airline says that the majority of the transition training focused on the new engine start procedures (the big new engines take far longer to start than the older ones), the new (bigger?) displays and didn't mention the fact that MCAS was on the plane. But, in the case of that airline, there was mention of the "new AoA disagree indicator", and a short paragraph on how how to cope with an AoA disagree warning. The airline had paid to fit those indicators (despite being advised by Boeing that they weren't required for the safe operation of the aircraft). Further all the "paperwork", apart from the front page and the "course taken" sign-off, was on Boeing headed "paper".

If it ain't in the manual it is pure luck that there weren't more accidents of this nature - one thing we do not know (and may never know) is how many "near misses" there were, where the flight crew did the right thing despite the lack of information provided. There are numerous articles written in November 2018 about the lack of information about MCAS, I think one of the most relevant is Seattle Times on 12th November

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

There is a new (Sep. 26, 2019 at 7:00 am Updated Sep. 26, 2019 at 7:04 pm) article linked on that link you gave.
Boeing made erroneous assumptions on pilots’ response to alerts in 737 MAX, NTSB says

From your link:

one American Airlines pilot posted the APA message and then added a personal reaction:
“We had NO idea that this MCAS even existed. It was not mentioned in our manuals anywhere (until today). Everyone on the 737 had to go through differences training for the MAX and it was never mentioned there either,” the anonymous pilot posted. “I’ve been flying the MAX-8 a couple times per month for almost a year now, and I’m sitting here thinking, what the hell else don’t I know about this thing?”

That makes me wonder about those "near misses" - How many occurred to "trained" pilots in the US/Europe?
By trained, I don't mean those who learned by rote!

WHY?

Boeing omitted safeguards on 737 MAX that were used on military jet - WSJ

(Reuters) - Boeing Co (BA.N) engineers working on the 737 MAX passenger plane’s flight-control system omitted safeguards included in an earlier version of the system used on a military tanker jet, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The engineers who created the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight-control system more than a decade ago for the military refuelling plane designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with limited power to move aircraft’s nose, the Journal said.

6 737 MAX to fly tomorrow.
Nice parking fines

Boeing’s stock of planes could balloon by nearly $12bn by the end of September if regulators don’t act and 737 production continues at the current pace, Mr Ferguson said. “They can’t keep building and parking planes indefinitely,” he said. “We don’t think it will get to that, but it’s going to take a lot of cash to park those in the desert.”

Official complaint by Boeing engineer, Curtis Ewbank, calling out the chief executive for publicly misrepresenting the safety of the plane.

NYT - Boeing Engineer, in Official Complaint, Cites Focus on Profit Over Safety on 737 Max
The Seattle Times - Boeing whistleblower’s complaint says 737 MAX safety upgrades were rejected over cost

The Seattle Times - Boeing whistleblower’s complaint says 737 MAX safety upgrades were rejected over cost

Good article.

“The MAX was different from the very beginning,” he said. “We’re just going to put these new engines on and the minimum change to make that happen. That’s it. We’re not spending money.”
“That concept broke the company,” Ludtke concluded.

As this is post 600, requesting this thread be locked & starting a new one.