It seems to me Sully is making a case for proper training, combined with improved design and integration of existing technology (purposefully left out by Boeing) to take into account excellent US airline performance and “puppy mill” training that seems more and more prevalent both in the US and overseas carriers. MAX was supposed to meet certain design certification criteria for aircraft stick loads and make the case for no additional transition training to MAX from 737 rated pilots at the same time. Boeing was so confident of MCAS, they didn’t even bother to tell the purchasing airlines it was aboard…until one crashed.
Sully has a boatload of safety/advocacy/training/CRM/NTSB investigator credentials in addition to being a glider pilot. He and Skiles validated excellent CRM skills, understanding and execution of procedures, proper evaluation of systems under great stress, and then performed…not in theory…a dead stick landing of that Airbus on the Hudson.
He is quite qualified to critique MCAS from design, engineering, training, and implementation. The airline industry would not be using the full potential of CRM they advocate in the cockpit ignoring his suggestions about MCAS, proper training, and best practices for safe integration as these airplanes return to the skies. C
He and Skiles cannot walk on water but has demonstrated they can land on it well enough for the airplane to float for evacuation and eventually be recovered. He walks his talk. And he has done that his entire flying career, just as many Avweb professional pilot commentators. Dismissing that experience would be a terrible thing to waste, considering Boeing’s penchant for cost cutting.
How come no one mentions an Airbus that has no override for engines that go to idle if a bird takes out the first PT probe? Sullly was happy with this engineering over sight. I read his book. In my Navy Squadron Sully might have even been almost average and did not think his units F4 were safe…and got out. Not a job for everyone, I guess. Of course I was unimpressed by his support for Bidden. Did he not learn anything in the Air Force about Democrats affect on a combat pilot’s survive-ability? Yep, the Max MCAS was not good, but I do not thing American Boeing pilots would ever be caught up in it. Maybe I am just too old.
A combat aviator with 727, 737,747,777 types from my airline.
Agree with you, watched that video, and was very disappointed. Not one person anywhere in the world got this right. Sully needs to go back to “can we get serious now?”.
I get people don’t like Trump, that’s fine; but don’t hold him to unrealistic expectations. All the data changed a thousand times, we can’t go back and pick and choose what fits our bias to castigate or reward the man.
Ah, the blessed arrogance of pilots. Such sweet liquor to quaff.
A low hanging fruit of course is, how many commentators have landed an Airbus on the Hudson river and are then such qualified to comment on his skills in that moment or any other. Most likely some have had emergencies less public and surely dealt well with them, but till you put your bonifieds next to his publicly, tread lightly thinking his is “average”. His political positions not withstanding, any pilot here, sitting in that plane on that day would not give a SHIT if he loved Kim Jung Un as long as he landed the plane without killing you.
As to MCAS, Boeing shoved a pile of Shit on to the airline industry. Oh, by the way, consider their Starliner, another POS they screwed up and could have killed astronauts, so let’s not defend a company that is quite happy to not give a shit about you ATPs for the bottom line. They fucked up. They should have required training on MCAS and they did not. They should have sold MCAS with redundancy, they did not yet many so casually toss fellow commercial pilots under the bus to sooth American ego’s, “Not one US pilot had this accident”…please, anyone consider that the same situation had not yet occurred in the US before grounding.
Whether Sully believes in Biden, Trump, God, or the devil does not matter when it comes to what he understands about aviation. Sully didn’t have a Boeing that day, he had an Airbus so please STFU unless someone here wants to recreate the Hudson Miracle with a 737 and see how it goes.
No human wants to die, no pilot wants to die, and while yes, there are not great pilots and great pilots, the next time y’all feel comfortable about saying “sha’ right man, those dudes were totally incompetent because…like…Africa”…pray you are not sitting front seat in a 767 coming into Houston and your FO knocks you into a dive and later folks say “what was the Captain thinking”…or your in the cabin of a L1011 with all US pilots that fly into the everglades staring at a light or you’re dead tired trying to do a ILS approach into Buffalo and stall out on final or … Pilots are pilots and they may make a mistake, but never for one moment think that a company like Boeing will not give a damn if you auger in because they gave you a broken plane. They will blame you first and always.
“How come no one mentions an Airbus that has no override for engines that go to idle if a bird takes out the first PT probe?”
I heard this one way back right after it happened, amidst all the other ragging on the automation in the Airbus. Believe me, I’m no fan of the Airbus design philosophy, but this argument is complete BS. I attended a talk given by Jeff Skiles on the accident, and I asked him, face to face, about the condition of the engines. He told me he had a look at the engines after the airplane was pulled from the river. Both engines were completely destroyed. In one, all the compressor blades were simply gone, and the other wasn’t far behind.
Maybe at another time, in another world, the presence of a sensor override would have allowed an engine to keep running, but not in this one.
The Indonesian NTSB blamed pilots, mechanics and Boeing equally. My opinion is that they were being overly-generous to Boeing.
I think the Indonesian accident root cause was an AoA sensor that was damaged and not noticed by the mechanics. Boeing’s vague documentation on MCAS was the next link in the accident chain.
Indonesia is literally at the end of the earth from the USA geographically, so also at the end of the earth for training and parts. Boeing needs to ship working planes to buyers who are already at an operational disadvantage compared to the West.
Justin, it’s not necessary to use corrosive language to get your point across. It’s easily done without it and actually more effective. We have to much of it in our society today. It’s not useful anywhere much less here.
Fixing the Max is like sprucing up a turd.
I too fly the NG’s for a major. After having read only a small portion of Congress’ investigative report here on Avweb so far, I hope I never have to see the thing. With so much shady crap going on at Boeing to push it to market, who knows what else is wrong with the airplane??!! And how will the public react flying on it to go somewhere? Will the airlines just paint over the word MAX and just pretend no one will know the difference, or do we need to make a PA:
" Err, folks, em’, by the way we are flying the Max to Orlando today…thanks for flying with us." Those passengers would deplane that thing in record time.
Don’t like it. Don’t want to fly it. I’ll take a 321 Neo any day. Just wish my airline would see the light, cancel the Max orders, sue Boeing for delivering a shit product, a grounded one at that costing the airline millions in schedule cancellations, and order the Airbus Neos, a far superior product. Dang, too bad I cannot take the early out! Any one remember the cargo door that blew off of a 747 out of Honolulu? Another faulty design. They knew it. The FAA knew it. The airlines knew it. Ah well, it only killed nine people. Could have been hundreds more. So what…it’s the cost of doing business. Old Mr. Boeing is surely turning over in his grave. The greed is disgusting.
Apart, very apart from Who said that, what he said was 100% correct: Redundancy requires to be solid. The best way it to have something called “TMR” or Triple Modular Redundancy. Your ignorant posture based on stoopid politically based opinion about candidates has nothing to do here. Learn some technical education before emitting dumb comments please.
You are completely ignoring his credentials as an Aviation Safety Consultant with a deep knowledge about many well researched accidents. Learn before posting wrong assumptions.
OWEN K. : The fact that there were no accidents on other B737MAX airplanes was ONLY because no Angle of Attack sensors failed on them. But the DESIGN was indeed FAILED. It was just a matter of time, and that failed design would fail again in ANY country. Possibly, SOME highly trained and quick reacting crew COULD react on time and save those planes, but either it could not. One thing is for sure and is today 100% clear: the design was failed and required a complete fix, that we are still waiting for. Not only did Boeing perform badly, they were quick to try to conceal it, and there are clear indications of their corporate culture went south together with unacceptable FAA lack of supervision.
EDWARD MC DONALD: You are conveniently forgetting one critical thing: the stupid design team at Boeing implemented a wrong design practice: the active SINGLE Angle of Attack Sensor IS ALTERNATED from one side to the other at every following flight!. Now, the stupid thing with that design is that it is only advantageous in those cases where a more distributed wear is desired to extend the time between required maintenance or replacement of a component, like for example, alternating the use of an Spare Pump with the normally used pump to distribute wear… That makes the wear to be distributed among the two pieces of equipment. BUT, that engineering practice is NOT PROPER on critical systems, where there is the RISK OF HIDING an INCIPIENT FAULT being developed, as it tends to occult the failure by using the other side, still good component.
What is more, that WRONGLY APPLIED practice accumulates the components wear, so that it increases the probability of having a SIMULTANEOUS Failure At BOTH SIDES, at the same time.
Thus, the engineering team that designed that critical system at Boeing should be sent to both Engineering School (to UNDERSTAND WHY THEY DID A WRONG DESIGN), and to Jail, because you don’t play with others lives in an unprofessional way. Why and How it was so badly designed tell a lot about the state of matters at Boeing nowadays.
Bill B. : And you sorely need to learn a little more about DESIGN and PROPER ENGINEERING before commenting on this matters. The thing is: The MAX design had a terribly wrong lack of redundancy ( Single Point of Failure), complicated by wrongl use of side to side alternation of that single AoA sensor, a compromised Aerodynamic Stability (caused by incomplete assessment of aerodynamic behaviour), and a completely wrong computer conducted flight assisting stability system (MCAS) with too aggresive response, done by “engineers” and dumb software programmers with an amazing lack of undestanding, that was occulted from pilots to reduce expenses and certification completeness. No amount of critique to Sullenberger (imagined) lack of undestanding about the 737 can cover the MULTIPLE design errors from Boeing, never.
Forgot to say your evident lack of what is a proper understanding of which is good versus which is bad design, sir. With due respect, you said nothing that contributes anything useful to the discussion
Tom Cooke : The way Boeing conducted the design and did the many mistakes they did, deserve much more punishment that a few hard words. They deserve jail, at least!