Read up on the extensive reporting on both accidents. They never reached that conclusion because it was absolutely unexpected, as a result of Boeing’s stealth changes to the aircraft.
There was an article recently where they put very experienced pilots in a simulator under the same conditions and they all failed.
> Read up on the extensive reporting on both accidents. They never reached that conclusion because it was absolutely unexpected
Apparently you haven’t read it either, otherwise you wouldn’t have said what you did. I’m not defending Boeing in the slightest, they should be tarred and feathered over this, but it’s getting really old seeing folks on HN acting like experts and not even knowing the basic facts, especially when the article they are commenting on refutes their own statements.
True, but this seems to sound like, "if we just hire the right people none of these safety procedures would be necessary". If we only had ethical people we wouldn't need laws.
Its more important to focus on the processes rather than the individual people, especially because even great people can have off days.
My point was that we should figure out why one aircrew worked it out, and one did not. If we want to fix the process, we have to consider the humans. I get the impression from this whole debacle that one significant contributor to the accidents was that Boeing's idea of what the procedures should be and what pilots actually do is different enough to be catastrophic. Putting everything else aside for a moment, this has to be a lesson about how procedures are designed and documented. It does no good to decree how something should work if the operators won't, as a practical matter, ever follow those instructions.
Edit: This seems to be unpopular. I am curious how you guys would do it differently? Just document the controls and provide no procedural recommendations? Interesting.
It’s like seeing someone make a half court shot in basketball at the buzzer and wondering why other players don’t do the same. You could adjust the probability to it being a 3 pt shot, dunk, or free throw.
The failures in the Boeing 737 introduced a significant probability of unrecoverable failure. The fact that a few pilots managed to recover does not mean that the ones who didn’t recover did something wrong.
On the other hand, the fact that 2 crews with over decades of safely flying planes were unable to recover from the same plane indicates it had a lot to do with the issues in the plane.
Sorry to confuse, I am not really interested in assigning blame. I am more interested to see what can be learned from this so flying continues to get safer. That will include looking at how the pilots responded to the training material in practice, and figuring out how that plays into designing future procedures, documentation, and training. I get that nobody here seems to have much appreciation for human factors, but I fly a lot. I do care :)
The entire discussion does revolve around human factors; how decisions were made, how the changes were designed to avoid the need for retraining, and in this specific article, designed to hide a change under the guise of preserving standard procedures for the people flying the plane. I’m not sure what other angle you’re after.
Depends on your definition of “debugging”. That’s actually the entire job of a pilot in the plane during flight, to be ready to respond when something goes wrong.
There was an article recently where they put very experienced pilots in a simulator under the same conditions and they all failed.