They also only used data from a SINGLE sensor, which is a cardinal sin in aviation. The plane already has two angle attack sensors, and they even went so far as to make the alarm that warns when the sensors are mismatched a paid option. They wanted airlines to fucking pay extra for the privilege of knowing when something on their plane isn’t working properly.
Comment on Hang in there.
fastandcurious@lemmy.world 8 months agoThe thing is MCAS fucking used to overpower manual commands, unless you actually followed some specific procedure to disable it
HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
vox@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
wait but if there are two sensors installed even without that “safety” option isn’t it purely software then?
HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
IIRC their logic was “well we display the outputs of the two sensors independently don’t we? Why aren’t your pilots paying attention and crosschecking the sensor readouts on our 21st century glass cockpit airplane like this was a B-52 with needle gauges then?”
What we do know is that they argued that the errant MCAS activation from a faulty sensor was “designed to” look like a stabilizer trim runaway (when the “rear wings” you see on the tail of the airplane start moving without pilot command) and therefore claimed that a “properly trained” pilot should have been able to deal with that since they’re supposed to be trained for a trim runaway.
This is a garbage argument of course, because a trim runaway is in itself an emergency that threatens the safety of the aircraft, so why the hell should your supposed “safety” system be putting the pilots in that position to begin with? And if this wasn’t a big deal, why go out of your way to hide the fact that a new system on the aircraft can effectively cause a trim runaway? Not to mention that Boeing is essentially victim blaming the pilots that died from their profit oriented decisions by insinuating that they were poorly trained in order to take the heat off their shoddy design. Finally, it should me mentioned that when Boeing had its own test pilots use a flight simulator to demonstrate what a “properly trained” pilot should be doing when MCAS misbehaves, the pilots used unconventional maneuvers that are not apart of the standard operating procedures of the 737 (i.e. not apart of pilot training). What’s more, their own pilots lost more altitude in recovering from the failure than the pilots of the accident planes even had, so wouldn’t that mean that by their own admission the accident planes were in an impossible situation?
gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, it would have been a completely horrifying and infuriating way to die, especially for the pilots who probably had a pretty good idea of what was happening but just never got told how to deal with it
Also, it just blows me away, the corporation as a whole got charged with felony fraud, fraud which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, and they still just get to be a company after saying sorry and paying a little fine. Like, when Fuckup Beauregard III decides to rob his local gas station with an unloaded gun and the clerk dies of a heart attack (or when his accomplice Cletus gets shot and killed by a responding police officer), the felony murder rule will kick in for him and say “someone dying as a result of your felonious behavior is legally equivalent to you intentionally murdering them,” but that sort of thing just doesn’t ever happen to rich and powerful people.
Cold_Brew_Enema@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is why I refuse to fly. Just scandal and improper training and maintenance. It’s fucking dangerous.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s not yet more dangerous than most other modes of travel.
It’s just more dangerous than it needs to be thanks to capitalist “innovation”.
sxan@midwest.social 8 months ago
I know a (retired) guy who used to be an engineer designing commercial airliners. He, too, categorically refused to fly.
Makes ya think.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Part of it could just be the survivability. A lot of people get REALLY turned off of ideas if the result can be terrible death, even to the point of having something like a phobia of risk in general. Like some won’t ride a motorcycle even if it’s just down the street once.