They probably ditched the transceiver because it weighed 40-60lbs, which is a lot of extra weight for something that you don't need, based upon "success oriented" planning.
(The linked article says Earhart didn't know enough about radio, either to convert from wavelength to frequency, or to match an antenna to the transmitter. Such knowledge was probably rare in 1937.)
lucas_membrane · 16h ago
Earhart had a practice run at navigating over the ocean to a radio source on land prior to the start of her trip. She flew from somewhere around San Francisco out over the ocean, then turned around and tried to fly toward the source of a radio signal using the technique that would guide her to Howland Island. She got lost, and that exercise was never repeated by her.
jahewson · 1d ago
Radio had been around for the best part of 40 years by that point.
lucas_membrane · 16h ago
One of the things that may have caused Earhart to underestimate the risk was the high reliability of AM medium wave radio broadcasting in the US over long distances, with over a dozen 50,000 watts and higher clear-channel stations, each serving about half the country reliably just about every night. But short waves (around 7 MHz) in the tropics during daylight with a 50-watt transmitter, and a receiving antenna that you lost on takeoff, is a far different situation. For the trip from Hawaii to the US, their plan was to home in on a powerful AM broadcasting station in Los Angeles, which would rewire its antenna to send most of its power to the west. That might have worked, depending on the time of day.
laverya · 5h ago
Not to mention "just fly east" will get you to land just fine from Hawaii. It might not be the land you were looking for, but it will be land - so even if the direction finding failed the error would be survivable.
laverya · 1d ago
Compare that to computers, which had been around for the best part of 40 years... in 1980.
IAmBroom · 7h ago
What's your point?
They didn't, and still don't, teach radio theory for a pilot's license. Can you calculate the ideal quarter-wave length of a single-line antenna for a given frequency?
bigbuppo · 1d ago
Sounds like she would have been friends with Stockton Rush if she were alive today.
eterm · 1d ago
And indeed if he were alive.
meinersbur · 9h ago
The retractable antenna could only be used for Morse code. Only Harry Manning was well-versed in Morse, so after he quit, neither Earhard nor Fred Noonan effectively couldn't use it anyway [1].
That retractable antenna was for low frequencies. If you are referring to the underside "V" antenna (which was not retractable), that one was likely just damanged, not intentionally removed. [1, 2]
In short: there's plenty of evidence Amelia Earhart was reckless. I'm sad that she paid with her life, but that is sometimes what happens when you're reckless while using dangerous machines.
sokoloff · 1d ago
Captain A. G. Lamplugh, a British pilot from the early days of aviation once famously said “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”
spankibalt · 1d ago
> Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous.
Yes, it is. Otherwise, "any carelessness, incapacity or neglect" wouldn't be so "terribly unforgiving".
unethical_ban · 1d ago
Agreed. It is like saying a tightrope isn't trying to harm you, just don't fall off.
marcosdumay · 1d ago
In car transit (like most things in life), you can do everything right and still die. In aviation, if you do everything right, you'll land safely.
krisoft · 1d ago
> In car transit (like most things in life), you can do everything right and still die.
Same with aviation. The DHL Flight 611 over Überlingen, Iran Air Flight 655,
Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, American Airlines Flight 5342, Pan Am Flight 1736 are just the few easy ones which comes to mind immediately.
> if you do everything right, you'll land safely.
You. And the people who designed your aircraft. The people who maintain your aircraft. And the ATC. And other pilots. And the people on the ground operating anti-aircraft missiles.
ephou7 · 1d ago
The two pilots in the Tenerife aircrash would beg to differ.
gambiting · 1d ago
>> In aviation, if you do everything right, you'll land safely.
The pilots who died in the 787 MAX crashes would disagree. They did everything exactly as they were trained to do and still crashed.
david-gpu · 1d ago
> 787 MAX
You are thinking of the 737 MAX [0]. There is no such thing as a 787 MAX yet [1].
Yep, and how my instructor said, what's worse is that the sky can let you enjoy being careless 100 times and then punish.
HeyLaughingBoy · 1d ago
Same thing with farmers: it's usually the old, experienced farmers who die in dumb ways. They've been doing the same dangerous thing their whole lives and become complacent until it catches up with them.
deepsun · 44m ago
Interesting, didn't know about farmers. Skydivers are the same, most accidents happen to experienced ones. But it's understandable, as adrenaline wears out with experience.
Pilots typically are trained against that complacency, plus, as they say, everyone can be stupid for 15 minutes a day, plan for that. I found piloting pretty boring, if done right. Talk about soul-crushing.
libraryatnight · 1d ago
That's just life.
fossuser · 1d ago
Yeah this was a great video, so many errors.
The experienced navigator refusing to fly with her was correct, but I do wonder if he had been there if he would have been smart enough to save them.
goodcanadian · 1d ago
Probably . . . from what I have read in the past, a better understanding of radio direction finding probably would have been enough to get them to Howland Island.
WalterBright · 1d ago
My dad was a B-17 navigator and later a career pilot. He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot, and had little respect for her. Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.
WalterBright · 1d ago
An unmentioned aspect is airplanes of that era did not have hydraulically boosted controls. They were designed according to the strength of men. This means under emergency conditions, women were simply not strong enough.
My dad flew B-17s, and with 3 engines out and just an outboard engine running, it took all of a man's strength to keep it straight. Usually, the pilot and copilot would trade off each 10 minutes.
When planes got larger, like the B-29, boost had to be added.
To accommodate female pilots, Boeing reduced the flight control forces in the 757.
Waterluvian · 1d ago
Is there a ceiling to the amount of force exerted on a plane’s control surfaces or does every human have a limited range of what situations they could wrestle a plane out of?
I’ve got to imagine that put into a fast enough dive, nobody’s pulling up?
unsnap_biceps · 1d ago
Mentour Pilot did a video on the second MCAS crash where they basically crashed due to being unable to pull up. MCAS changed the trim to a level where the pilots were pulling with a recorded 180 lbs pull weight but still couldn't hold the nose up
The thumb switches would have pulled the nose up. But the pilots didn't read the instructions, and turned off the stab trim system with the airplane nose down. They also had the engines at full throttle, and the increased speed made it impossible to hand crank the stabilizer.
The instructions were:
1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches
2. turn off the trim system
cornholio · 1d ago
This is an insane take. The plane was fitted with an undocumented automatic system that would erroneously change the pitch about ten times faster than what the pilot switches allowed, and that would automatically re-engage repeteadly as soon as the pilot released their switch, negating all progress made by the pilot. It would continue this adjustment blindly despite copious information available to the flight computers that a crash with terrain is imminent and that the pilot is having trouble leveling the plane.
So the electronic control route was fried, any normal person in that situation and physical and mental overload would conclude that trim controls are not functional.
The manual route, which they tried, involved at that speed an undocumented "roller coaster maneuver", pitching forward (!!) to release pressure on the trim mechanism and allow manual adjustment. It goes without question it's impossible the pilots could have come up with that solution in the mere seconds they had at their disposal, let alone the high risk it entailed.
Reducing the throttle early would have saved the plane, but it would have also resulted in immediate pitch down due to the torque the engines create against the body of the plane, as they are mounted off axis. The autothrottle was left to near 95% for the entire ~250s duration of the flight (the setting necessary for take off at the particular altitude of the airport) and once the cascading failures consumed all their situational awareness it stands to reason why they failed to adjust it and then hesitated to perform an action that would have (in the short run) worsened the problem in a near crash situation.
The MCAS as designed was a ticking timebomb that killed two plane loads of people in mere months, and Boeing accepted full responsibility for that, even if they are still denying criminal charges.
coredog64 · 1d ago
The 737 has had the issue of runaway trim forever. The giant "wagon wheels" used for trimming early models were very loud when activated, and part of that was to give the pilots a heads up that something unexpected was happening.
WalterBright · 1d ago
> about ten times faster than what the pilot switches allowed
This is utterly false. The trim rate has two speeds - on and off.
> would automatically re-engage repeteadly
This is called "runaway trim". The procedure to counter it is to turn it off. The same procedure for every airplane.
> any normal person
Pilots are required to read and understand and remember Emergency Airworthiness Directives.
Don't forget the first MCAS incident, where normal trim was restored with the column trim switches and then the trim was turned off and the airplane landed safely.
Or the second where normal trim was restored 25 times, but never turned off.
I would expect a MAX pilot to have paid attention to that crash, and the followup EAD which instructs them to restore normal trim with the column switches and then turn it off.
cornholio · 1d ago
> This is utterly false. The trim rate has two speeds - on and off.
This is wrong and easy to disprove. The trim rate for a pilot issued trim command starts at 0.4 degrees/second at low air speeds and tappers off to zero as the speed increased towards Mach 0.68. The MCAS had a fixed rate of 0.27 degree/second that did not depend on airspeed. Here is the relevant quote from the FAA report on the 737MAX:
> “If activated by a high AOA, MCAS moves the horizontal stabilizer at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second, which is the same trim rate as Speed Trim with flaps down. The magnitude of the MCAS command is a function of Mach and angle of attack. At higher airspeeds, flight‐control surfaces are more effective than at lower airspeeds. Therefore, a smaller MCAS command at higher airspeeds has the same effect as a larger MCAS command at lower speeds."
So the trim rate is fixed but the magnitude (duration) of the original MCAS is variable to account for airspeed. Because the MCAS reengaged repeatedly due to erroneous AOA sensor data and faulty design logic, the duration became irrelevant. However, as the plane speed exceeded 0.6 Mach, the rate of pilot trim substantially decreased, meaning that a full 10s second activation of the MCAS could no longer be negated by a 10s trim command from the pilot. The flight recorder shows trim commands of up to 4 seconds, which in fact allowed the MCAS to re-engage and issue a fresh 10s opposite command, at a higher rate. This is a disastrous succession of events that can't be blamed on the pilot.
I won't go down the rabbit hole with the rest of your comment, enough to say you need to better vet your sources and reevaluate your claims. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots fought for their lives for a few desperate minutes and lost, quite possibly made some mistakes but overall many other qualified pilots would have failed too in the same scenario.
filleduchaos · 1d ago
> But the pilots didn't read the instructions
Actually watching the linked video (or barring that, actually reading the final report) would dispense with this widely spread inaccuracy in fairly short order and make it quite obvious why they turned ON the stab trim system, which is what ultimately killed them.
But of course, "the pilots were simply stupid" is a psychologically easier conclusion to walk away with.
WalterBright · 1d ago
As I wrote, the column switches override MCAS. It's also how the crew in the first MCAS incident recovered and continued the flight and landed safely.
kashunstva · 1d ago
> the column switches override MCAS.
Temporarily, right? Using the pitch trim switches on the yoke suppresses MCAS, but in order to remain at even net zero stabilizer position change, the duration of trim input would have to be of equivalent duration to the reciprocal MCAS-driven change. This is part of what made the problem so insidious - running trim for that long is rarely needed and rarely done. I haven’t flown the MAX but I can’t think of any type I have flown in which continual pitch trim input of 5+ seconds at a time would be required in flight.
jajko · 1d ago
Didn't investigation confirmed they followed official Boeing training?
consumer451 · 1d ago
One of the airlines that suffered an MCAS crash had asked Boeing for specific training on MAX and was denied, as it would have set a bad precedent for sales.
arunabha · 23h ago
If what you are saying is true, and it was the pilots fault, I'm wondering why did a corporation with the clout and resources of Boeing lose in court?
rtkwe · 22h ago
The wrinkle is that yes they could have saved the plane if they had information they didn't have because of Boeing's self serving negligence.
cameldrv · 1d ago
This is not true. In the condition of a failed AoA vane like on the two accident flights, there is no way to enable the trim thumb switches and disable MCAS. You either get no electric trim and no MCAS or you get both. If you happened to have known that MCAS pushes the trim down for 9.3 seconds and then pauses for 5 seconds, you might have been able to time it and turn on the electric stab trim at just the right time when MCAS wasn’t trying to kill you, but unfortunately the very existence of MCAS was hidden from pilots.
If you flip the stab trim cutout switches, you can turn the wheel manually, but if there have already been a couple of cycles of MCAS, the plane may be so out of trim that you need too much force to move the trim wheel manually.
In that case there is one thing that could save you which would be to do the so called rollercoaster procedure, where you push the yoke forward to unload the trim and then crank the trim up while you hurtle towards the ground. This was a documented procedure in the 737-300 manual, but was later deleted.
The real crime was that Boeing deliberately removed all mention of MCAS from the flight manual. The problem was that if there were procedures that pilots needed to know in order to recover from an MCAS failure, they would have been required to practice these procedures in a simulator, and Boeing’s contract with Southwest had financial incentives if the MAX didn’t require any additional sim time for pilots to transition from the NG to the MAX.
We know that the information about MCAS was deleted from the manual because the only occurrence of the term MCAS in the MAX flight manual is in the glossary where it is a defined term. The tech writers obviously put it in there because it was described in an earlier version of the manual, but later deleted, but the glossary entry wasn’t deleted when the description was.
sokoloff · 1d ago
The electric trim switches override MCAS (and indeed the crew of ET302 almost saved the aircraft by turning it back on and commanding aircraft-nose-down (AND) with the electric trim).
What is inexplicable is that they stopped doing that while leaving the trim system enabled after correctly disabling it via the memory item checklist.
Boeing’s not blameless here, nor should the crew of ET302 bear the primary fault, but they seem to have understood the issue (and it’s not possible they didn’t know about MCAS) and were frustratingly close to saving the flight.
WalterBright · 1d ago
> there is no way to enable the trim thumb switches and disable MCAS
This is simply wrong.
The electric trim switches override MCAS regardless of whether MCAS is trying to drive the trim or not. Timing it for when the MCAS was not engaged is completely unnecessary.
rtkwe · 22h ago
The problem is they don't know MCAS exists so it looks like the trim system has failed and is running away so the normal and natural solution is to disable electronic trim.
Had they known about MCAS they could have potentially known they could override it then disbale the trim system but that information was hidden by Boeing so they didn't do it..
glitchc · 1d ago
Not being trained on distinct and aberrant behaviour of a specific aircraft is not the same as ignorant or stupid.
IAmBroom · 7h ago
If the training is available, it really is.
This isn't your friend's car you're borrowing to pick your kid up from school. A tad more care should be involved before loading it with human beings and flying over cities.
WalterBright · 1d ago
All MAX pilots received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive with the instructions on how to recover.
throwaway5752 · 1d ago
Surely you know this, but MCAS was a badly designed system that failed in a fatal manner in the event of malfunctioning non-redundant sensor (10s of failure events per year). Boeing knew this, but allowed it kill everyone aboard two flights. Documentation in the instructions or not it had no business being on a commercial aircraft, ever.
WalterBright · 1d ago
I know this. I also know that there were 3 MCAS incidents. On the first one, the crew restored normal trim with the thumb switches, then turned off the stab trim system. They had no idea that MCAS existed, they simply followed standard procedure for runaway trim.
After the first crash, Boeing sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots with the two steps I showed.
There's no excuse for MAX pilots not reading, understanding, and remembering Emergency Airworthiness Directives.
It's not just me. I've talked to two 737 pilots who said the same thing.
throwaway5752 · 1d ago
I see in a sibling comment that you do not think the MCAS system on the MAX was well designed, and the reliance on a single AoA sensor was not a good decision. I agree.
The aircraft should have never been declared airworthy. There should have been no need for an EAD in the first place. There is no excuse for putting a control system that flies the craft into the ground when there is a failure in a nonredundant sensor on a commercial aircraft.
The high standards required for pilots, like Amelia Earhart, do not obviate the even higher standards for quality and safety from manufacturers.
WalterBright · 1d ago
I suspect that Boeing didn't think it would be a problem because the runaway stab trim procedure is enough to stop it and recover. Who would have thought that trained pilots would not remember this procedure? It's supposed to be a "memory item", meaning consulting the checklist was not required.
The stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent position on the central console (not overhead or behind the crew).
In the first Lion Air crash, the airplane dipped and recovered (via the thumb switches) 25 times over a period of 11 minutes. They never thought to turn off the stab trim system. It boggles the mind. Would you want to fly with a crew that didn't know what the switches on the console were for? Not me.
Both Boeing and the crew are at fault. Some percentage also for whoever made the faulty sensor and the failure to see that it worked correctly after it was installed.
genewitch · 1d ago
Do we also blame the drivers of the Toyotas that got stuck accelerators, because any driver should know to take the car out of gear or turn the key to the off position. Right? While the car is accelerating at or near WOT?
I've been in a car when the throttle got stuck open, we crashed, I hit the windshield. It happened in about 5 seconds, and the driver spent most of those giving steering inputs to avoid hitting people and furiously working the break and kicking the gas pedal. It happened because enough engine mounts were broken or broke because of a hard throttle push.
Also my dad died in a single seat plane crash because the engine died several times in flight, according to a witness interviewed by a local paper; there was no investigation at all so I'll never know what really happened. At least the company that made the plane changed their name!
quesera · 21h ago
I do not work in aero or auto, but I have a much higher expectation of training and retention of a commercial airline pilot than I do of a random Toyota driver.
I had a stuck accelerator on an old Ford F-150. The throttle inside the carb got stuck. I was lucky to have the Toyota case in my memory, so I just shifted into neutral.
It was an automatic, which I think is another factor -- the more direct control you remove from the driver, the less intuitive it becomes to compensate for a single system failure. Obviously a standard transmission driver would just hit the clutch.
(And I've had a similar failure on an unfamiliar motorcycle that just came out of storage. Pulling the clutch bail was the instinctive response, after manually untwisting the throttle did not work. I learned my lesson about old vehicles eventually. Trust nothing, verify everything.)
Very sorry to hear about your dad!
WalterBright · 1d ago
I had the throttle stick on my car once. I immediately turned the ignition off. I was a teenager at the time (and my car was a POS).
The brakes are much stronger than the engine (proof: you can brake in a much shorter distance than you can accelerate).
On my current car, I have inadvertently hit the edge of the gas pedal while I stepped on the brake a couple times, as those pedals are too close together and I have wide feet. My reaction was to instantly move my foot.
A number of those "surging" incidents are suspected of being the driver had their foot on the gas rather than the brake.
Glad to hear you're all right after the crash. I nearly died in a car crash.
Sorry to hear about your dad. It must be very frustrating to not know the cause. I thought all GA accidents were officially investigated.
genewitch · 23h ago
My car has a pushbutton "ignition switch" and i have not tried pushing it while travelling; however, my lexus also has floormat retention to stop the floormat from going onto the gas pedal. It wasn't "accidental" - there was a recall. The toyotas and lexus affected don't have a floating accelerator pedal, where it hangs from above and there's space underneath. The gas pedal is hinged on the floor, and swings free at the top. So you could shove something forward and it will push the gas pedal down.
If memory serves there was an instance in southern california where the driver called 911 or some other recorded line (they died); but it may have just been a witness statement i remember.
throwaway5752 · 1d ago
1. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System
(MCAS) system existed because the plane was unstable at high angles of attack.
2. The 737 MAX was unstable because Boeing wanted to milk the 737 airframe further than it should have been for financial reasons and oversized engines were mounted forward on the wings.
3. Since the plane was unstable in this way, it would pitch up when climbing. MCAS would detect this through the angle of attack (AoA sensors) and automatically engage, forcing the nose down.
4. When the single, nonredundant AoA sensor failed, MCAS would misinterpret this and try to continuously force the nose down in normal operations. Or more plainly, it would fly the plane into the ground for no reason.
5. This happened at least 3 times. In two cases, it caused crashes, killing everyone - almost 350 men, women, and children - aboard.
6. Boeing strenuously blamed the crew in the first crash, and did not ground the planes.
7. Boeing did not ground the 737 MAXes after the second crash, either. The FAA only grounded the aircraft after much of the rest of the world already had.
As you noted previously, MCAS existed to make the 737 MAX fly like prior versions of the plane. Boeing, in fact, lobbied for this outcome so it would not affect certification or require separate pilot training, which would have cost time and money. So while MCAS was documented, pilots were not required to be trained on the system, because of Boeings efforts.
One cannot put a "don't crash the plane button" on a plane, even if it is well documented. It is particularly disgraceful if the "don't crash the plane" button only exists because the plane's manufacturer added the button to increase their own profits.
I have to admit, you have made me lose my composure here a bit. I thought anyone this knowledgable about flying would not blame pilot error in the 737 MAX crashes. The plane was grounded for almost 2 years, this was arguably the greatest scandal in the production and regulation of commercial aircraft in history. Boeing paid $20 billion in fines and restitution, and pled guilty to criminal charges.
For the benefit of anyone else curious about this, good starting points are
"hours after the approval for MCAS's redesign was granted, Boeing sought, and the FAA approved, the removal of references to MCAS from Boeing's flight crew operations manual (FCOM)"
"Boeing wanted the FAA to certify the airplane as another version of the long-established 737; this would limit the need for additional training of pilots, a major cost saving for airline customers. During flight tests, however, Boeing discovered that the position and larger size of the engines tended to push up the airplane nose during certain maneuvers. To counter that tendency and ensure fleet commonality with the 737 family, Boeing added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to earlier 737 versions."
"The MAX was exempted from certain newer safety requirements, saving Boeing billions of dollars in development costs."
All the media reports about the MAX cannot be trusted. All the ones I've seen contained false information.
The first error was the claim that the MAX was "unstable". It just behaved differently due to the engine placement. I see this error all the time. And so on.
The errors in the MCAS design were not to save money. They were just sloppy engineering. There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The proof is MCAS is still there, it just had its flaws corrected.
As for knowledgeable, I've talked with two 737 pilots. One told me it was pilot error and never would have happened to him. The other told me that his pilot buddies agreed with me but were afraid to speak up against the tidal wave of bad press. I also spent 3 years working on the 757 stab trim system, at one point I knew more about it than about anyone else. The 737 system is more primitive, but is easily understandable. (The 757 uses dual hydraulic motors driving a differential gearbox, the 737 has a single electric motor with manual drive for the backup. Both have a console mounted cutoff switch. Both have column thumb switches.)
> Boeing added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to earlier 737 versions.
Which improves safety. This is never mentioned. (The 757 and 767, very different airplanes, were designed to fly similarly and have the same cockpits. It did save money on training because of that, saved money on production, and improved safety.)
throwaway5752 · 15h ago
I appreciate the civil and informed discussion. I appreciate your expertise and connections, but I think we will end up disagreeing.
With respect to "unstable", I will quote the findings
"Observation O3.4-B: Extension of MCAS to the low-speed and 1g environment
during the flight program was due to unacceptable stall characteristics with STS
only. The possibility of a pitch-up tendency during approach to stall was
identified for the flaps-up configuration prior to the implementation of MCAS"
Regarding flight crew expectations, this is dry, but I will quote it in its entirety, anyway,
"Recommendation R6.1: The FAA should ensure applicants improve adherence to failsafe design concept principles when designing or modifying systems. The FAA should encourage applicants not to design only for compliance, but also to follow basic principles to design for safety when developing or changing system functions. This should include elimination of hazards and use of design features, warnings, and procedures.
- Observation O6.1-A: Proper flight crew action was considered an adequate
mitigation to risks such as erroneous activation of MCAS.
- Finding F6.1-A: The JATR team identified that the design process was not
sufficient to identify all the potential MCAS hazards. As part of the single-channel speed trim system, the MCAS function did not include fault tolerant features, such as sensors voting or limits of authority, to limit failure effects
consistent with the hazard classification.
- Finding F6.1-B: The use of pilot action as a primary mitigation means for MCAS
hazards, before considering eliminating such hazards or providing design features
or warnings to mitigate them, is not in accordance with Boeing’s process
instructions for safe design in the conception of MCAS for the B737 MAX.
- Finding F6.1-C: The JATR team found that there was a missed opportunity to
further improve the system design through the use of available fail-safe design
principles and techniques presented in AC 25.1309-1A and in EASA AMC
25.1309 in the MCAS design"
and further, on flight crew expectations
"Finding F6.4-A: When all flight deck effects are considered, the introduction of
the MCAS function invalidated aircraft-level assumptions for flight crew
responses related to erroneous AOA failures under certain conditions. A complete
workload assessment was not performed for validation of the erroneous AOA
effects with the added MCAS functionality. The same assumptions for flight crew
responses to erroneous AOA were carried over from previous programs without
formal validation."
The discussion around AOA DISAGREE conditions is educational regarding MCAS for others who might not be familar with the technical root cause. But I would specifically encourage you to read the Flight Controls and Flight Deck Interface Assessment and Training Evaluations. They don't avoid the issue of flight crew training and trim system awareness, but I they illustrate how workload created by the erroneous MCAS activation was contributing.
As for your pilot conversations, I will make two short points. First, pilots don't always suffer for a lack of self-confidence. Maybe it would have never happened to them, maybe not, and thankfully we will not get to find out. Second, passengers are owed a safe aircraft based on the full range of quality flight crews, with a wide margin for error. I do care if a highly skilled qualified crew would have avoided the accident, I care if the least-skilled qualified crew would have. And 610's captain had 5,176 hours on the 737 and 302's captain had 4,120 hours.
signatoremo · 1d ago
It still exists today after modification that requires input from both AOA sensors.
Why do you think it’s badly designed? The implementation was badly done for sure.
filleduchaos · 1d ago
Design and implementation are not completely distinct things, though. If e.g. a software company's backups were implemented solely as daily dumps to the same SSD the database was running on, and then they implemented a more sane backup solution after the practically-inevitable data loss, would we just go "well the implementation was badly done" or would people not call it out as bad systems design?
Some designs are so poorly thought through (and/or conceived for the wrong reasons to begin with, like MCAS was) that they cannot help but yield poor implementations.
(Also, input from one or two sensors was far from the only problem with MCAS' implementation. The fact that it could activate multiple times and that it could trim far harder and faster than human pilots could manually trim were equally contributors to making the saga a tragedy).
WalterBright · 1d ago
> conceived for the wrong reasons
The reasons were correct. Making the MAX behave, as far as the pilots were concerned, like other models of the 737 makes the airplane safer. Many crashes have resulted from pilots getting confused about which airplane they are flying.
The design particulars, however, were incorrect. That is Boeing's fault.
> trim far harder and faster
The 737 has only one electric trim rate - on and off. It does not trim harder or faster than the autopilot trim or the thumb switch trim. The signal all boils down to a wire that has signals "trim on / trim off". The thumb switches sit on the path of that wire, so when they activate they override the autopilot and MCAS. The cutoff switch is downstream of that.
Part of the reason the manual trim wheel could not be moved is the airplane was overspeeding due to being (incorrectly) at full throttle. Overspeeding greatly increases the force on the stabilizer, making it much harder to move. In the EA flight, the overspeed warning horn could be heard on the voice recorder.
anonymars · 1d ago
Isn't the fact that it was redesigned (to not rely on a single AoA sensor, to only activate once per AoA-event, to limit the magnitude of intervention) a strong indication that it was badly designed?
wat10000 · 1d ago
It was implemented exactly as designed.
snozolli · 1d ago
For others reading through these interesting comments, here's a Wikipedia excerpt:
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is a flight control law built into the Boeing 737 MAX's flight control computer, designed to help the aircraft emulate the handling characteristics of the earlier Boeing 737 Next Generation.
dlcarrier · 16h ago
A 737 can be flown by hand, without hydraulics or electricity, despite weighing over 50x more than a Cessna 172, or other small manually controlled airplanes.
Airplanes' control surfaces have have smaller control surfaces inside them called tabs. Just as a small movement in a control surface is amplified into the larger movement of the entire airplane, a control tab's even smaller movement is amplified into the movement of the rest of the control surface, which in turn is amplified into the movement of the entire airplane.
Many small airplanes, and pretty much every large airplane, effectively use tabs as a gross adjustment and the yoke/rudder as a fine adjustment, so under normal operation there shouldn't be large forces on the yoke or rudder. The only time it takes a lot of force to control an airplane is when the tab can't be easily controlled. Flying even a small Cessna 152 out of trim can take tens of pounds of force and be impossible to sustain for long periods of time. I once tried flying a 152 from one airport to another, only a few minutes away, without adjusting the elevator trim, and my arms were sore the next day.
Going into too fast of a dive has two much larger dangers, one is that the aircraft can break up from the aerodynamic forces, and the other is that the air becomes turbulent near the trailing of of a control surface, making it no longer able to control the aircraft. When the later happens, the controls don't take much force to move, but they also don't do much.
Merad · 18h ago
Generally speaking these days I think that small planes with manual controls (i.e. your private pilot's Cessna) just aren't capable of going that fast. Most of the planes that will be able to go that fast in a dive will have hydraulically boosted controls if not full fly by wire systems.
However this was a real problem during WW2, and high speed dives killed more than a few pilots. By 1942-43 most fighter planes were able to dive fast enough to get into trouble (500+ mph/800 kph) but weren't designed for it at all. The aerodynamics of supersonic flight just weren't understood at the time. In some cases the design of the plane made it essentially impossible to pull out once you went beyond a certain speed, all you could do was attempt to slow down enough to regain control. The P-38 Lightning was notorious for this. I don't have any specific sources handy but I recall reading accounts of things like pilots bracing their feet against the control panel trying to pull the control stick with all their strength, taking extreme measures like lowering the landing gear to slow down (risking it being ripped off and maybe tearing the whole plane apart), or only surviving due to sheer luck - sometimes the thicker air at lower altitudes would slow them down enough before it was too late.
WalterBright · 1d ago
The "feel forces" exerted by the pilot are taken into account for the maximum ability to control the airplane.
A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed. Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to literally tear the structure apart.
There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical stabilizer off.
There are also situations where no amount of control input is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.
In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all to get right.
For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates. This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.
This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You always gotta watch your airspeed.
This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved everyone.
It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before it hit the ocean.
Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the F-86 jet fighter.
For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up, tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80 pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway, let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was scrapped.
Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target, one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.
PNewling · 1d ago
These are all incredible stories. I appreciate you sharing them with us.
Could you link-to/tell-us more about the 727 affair? I've always had a fascination with autopilot (and autoland) systems, so I would love to read/hear more about this incident.
WalterBright · 1d ago
That's all I know about it. I was told the tale by my lead engineer at Boeing, Erwin Schweitzer. One of the great things about working with such engineers is all the amazing stories. You won't find much information on this incident or the "mach tuck" one because they didn't crash.
But you might try googling "727 autopilot landing gear dive".
WalterBright · 1d ago
> These are all incredible stories.
Thank you. I enjoy relating them. There are other airplane junkies who come to our monthly D Coffee Haus meeting, and we often wind up talking shop about airplane engineering.
nayuki · 1d ago
> This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on
Comparable physics, different route to the same effect. It has to do with air compression, speed of sound, etc, shielding the control surfaces and the shape of that effect around the plane as you increase speed. IDK if it has a name. Any youtube explanation of supersonic flight should cover it.
Most higher speed subsonic aircraft recycle the design principals from supersonic aircraft to alleviate the problem. You could on paper dive a Learjet or 747 or other "designed for the higher end of subsonic" aircraft to Mach 2 and retain control authority if you wanted and if the airframe could take it.
WalterBright · 1d ago
Great question! I don't know the answer.
The separation affects the ailerons as well, so you lose roll control.
StanislavPetrov · 1d ago
Reminds me of driving a car with manual steering. If you have never tried it, it is a whole different experience and a massive workout.
vunderba · 1d ago
Totally agree. My first car as a teenager lacked power steering (and coincidentally the AC did not work). No power steering isn't so bad when you're in transit but the slower you go, the worse it gets.
Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring sweat.
alnwlsn · 1d ago
One time, I was driving across New Mexico, and we heard something break under the hood. No point in stopping to see what it was; we might as well drive it as far as we can until it stops. All was fine, going along the same perfectly straight section of highway for around 2 hours, until we made it to the next city and went to turn down a street - oof! It was then very apparent the power steering pump went out.
HeyLaughingBoy · 23h ago
The serpentine belt in my wife's F250 Super Duty snapped one day. How she made it home and parked that beast without power steering I'll never know. At least it happened close to home!
crossroadsguy · 1d ago
After harbouring the idea for quite some time (mostly out of fear/FOMO of never learning to drive a manual) I finally gave it up and I will be buying an AMT car (even though the lessons I took were in manuals which are still very mainstream in my country and AMTs are catching up). I realised life is too small to put your wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and shoulders (did I miss anything?) through this torture esp. in a traffic hell like my city.
selimthegrim · 1d ago
Manual steering (no hydraulic boost)
WalterBright · 1d ago
Power steering and power brakes were added to accommodate female drivers. Disk brakes also need more pedal pressure than drum brakes.
Steering wheels for manual steering tend to be larger, giving more leverage, and the steering gearbox is geared differently.
RankingMember · 1d ago
> Power steering and power brakes were added to accommodate female drivers.
This is a myth. Power steering and power brakes were developed to make driving easier and safer for all drivers as vehicles became larger and heavier. Some of the advertising from the era framed the features as helpful to female drivers, but this was just that- advertising.
WalterBright · 1d ago
I'm not so sure that was a myth. My dad drove long before power brakes. Women often had trouble executing a hard stop due to the pedal force required, along with the primitive brakes. He said the term "women drivers" came about because of the difficulty they had muscling the controls in emergency conditions. (Power steering, too.)
They also wanted to sell cars to little old ladies.
RankingMember · 5h ago
That power steering/brakes made the experience easier for women doesn't mean they were implemented for women, though, and there's no evidence that this was the reasoning behind their invention (e.g. power steering was first used en masse in large trucks in 1938, which few women would've been driving). These features made the driving experience easier for everyone, and so were originally luxury features when first implemented for cars (the Chrysler Imperial being the first mass-produced car to have power steering, known as "Hydraguide").
StanislavPetrov · 1d ago
>Disk brakes also need more pedal pressure than drum brakes.
I had disk brakes on my '67 Firebird. Not only was the pedal pressure much higher, but you better have your crash helmet on when it snowed!
gonzobonzo · 1d ago
> He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot
I was surprised to learn the same once I started diving into her history. She definitely was a media phenomenon, with her public image largely manufactured by her publicist husband.
Her story actually feels very similar to the fake YouTube personalities of today. What's funny is that, for all the complaints about people today being too gullible about modern influencers, the ones from history often succeed in fooling far more people.
> Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.
It's understandable why this needs to be said - unfortunately, these accusations accusations are the default reaction many people have to this criticism (I've seen them before in discussions about Earhart and others). Once someone is given a status of an icon for a particularly identity, people have an unpleasant habit of believing criticism of the icon is criticism of the identity. It would be nice if we were able to judge people as individuals.
genewitch · 1d ago
To your last point, I really enjoy trapped in the closet, both the video and the audio; but mentioning that got me a lot of grief, "don't you have kids? Don't you know about him?"
Yeah a large portion of humans have flaws, do bad things (3 felonies a day!), etc. But I think art (as it were) transcends the artist, especially in audiovisual stuff where it's much more likely there are other people involved that actually make the art memorable; however even a self-published asshole can produce something great.
I guess I could just suffer the weird al trapped in the drive-through, to placate such people, or can ignore them. R Kelly got no money from me, anyhow, I bought it all secondhand. My conscience is clear enough, I think.
southernplaces7 · 1d ago
It's dumb that a man should be automatically assumed as sexist because he happened to elaborate a criticism of something a woman did in some context. I've even seen some women use this implicit assumption as a weapon, labeling as sexist a completely valid complaint.
fennecfoxy · 7h ago
Happens a lot across a variety of protected classes. For example Israel calls anyone who criticises them "antisemitic". Whereas I like to call the IDF, who indiscriminately kill Gazans, state sponsored terrorists; just as Hamas killing Israeli civilians are also terrorists.
Perhaps if someone calls me antisemitic for that, I'll call them homophobic for disagreeing with the opinion of a gay man.
ergsef · 1d ago
You're making it very black-and-white when there's a lot of nuance to these kinds of discussions. A woman in a leadership role making difficult choices or shutting people down may be abrasive, but a man doing it might be admired for their vision. A woman taking risks might be careless, or a dilettante, while a man taking the same risks is bold and courageous. Even if the outcome is the same, men can fail while women have to be successful (and even then they're still criticized for _how_ they succeeded).
fennecfoxy · 7h ago
I think a lot of women in positions of power try to emulate the intra-male hierarchy system with aggression/dominant behaviour without understanding the nuance behind it. I think women see the figurative (and sometimes literal) chest-beating & posturing as simple actions but not the deeper communication behind it.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly dislike said behaviour in men.
aaronbaugher · 1d ago
It's very dumb. It's also the default assumption today in government, media, academia, and most of the corporate world, especially HR. If you like your job, or just like being able to post your thoughts on social media, you ignore it at your peril.
fennecfoxy · 7h ago
I do notice that people all across the comments are treating this as a touchy topic, what, because she was a woman? She had as much capacity for skill, responsibility and agency as anybody else and her missteps led to her death in the same way that those of Stockton Rush led to his (and others') death.
WalterBright · 1d ago
When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.
He didn't hesitate: "Spacial disorientation"
Aka pilot incompetence. Airplanes don't care if you're a celebrity or not.
beedeebeedee · 1d ago
That's a little too dismissive. Flying in those conditions is deeply disorienting, and you have to have instrument training (and discipline) to safely accomplish it. My dad (also air force pilot, F-104, and later, bush pilot) was flying near Block Island at the same time, and despite his training and experience said it was difficult and disorienting. You need to be rated for instruments and have developed trust in them, despite your senses.
WalterBright · 1d ago
JFK jr knowingly flew into haze without proper training. He had incidental instrument flying instruction, but was not rated for it. He was late and suffered from get-there-itis, a common killer of pilots.
My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.
Your dad is exactly correct.
He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the base and head to the flight line. Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start down the runway, and halfway down would light the afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the most delightful thunder.
I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.
I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/
bombcar · 1d ago
Anyone who's interested can go down to the local small airfield and ask an instructor to show you "unusual attitudes" - he'll have you sit in the seat with your head looking down, do things and then ask you what the plane is doing - then you look up and realize it's doing the exact opposite.
At night with no visible horizon - you do it to yourself.
WalterBright · 1d ago
That's exactly how instrument training is done. The student wears a hood so he can only see the instruments. The instructor puts the airplane in various situations where your senses lie, and the student has to recover.
My dad, against orders, carried a piece of pipe with him, to ensure the student would not panic and kill them both. He said he never had to use it.
wombatpm · 1d ago
I assume the pipe was to club the student pilot unconscious in order to recover control of the aircraft.
WalterBright · 1d ago
yup, thereby saving both of their lives.
genewitch · 1d ago
I really was hoping to make a lead pipe cryptanalysis rhyming reference but neither I nor Gemini can make it work, and I don't want to go get my thesaurus and rhyming dictionary to work something out.
Lead pipe crash avoidance closest I could get.
wat10000 · 1d ago
Lead pipe for student paralysis.
genewitch · 23h ago
I had paralysis as an option but, imo, a good rhyme would have the same cadence, and adding the "for" or "with" messes up the cadence. "no place like home for the holidays" -> "no plate like chrome for the hollandaise".
WalterBright · 1d ago
It wasn't lead. Steel.
dctoedt · 22h ago
> He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.
In about 1967, my dad (career USAF, fighter jock) was flying in clear, sunny weather. He started to get bad vertigo, so he did an emergency, instruments-only landing at a nearby AF base. He said that on final approach, he "knew" he was upside down, and that it was all he could do to refrain from rolling the airplane "right side up" for touchdown on the runway.
wat10000 · 1d ago
A superior pilot uses their superior judgment to avoid needing their superior skills.
Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected. Knowingly flying into those conditions without an instrument rating is very bad judgment.
dlcarrier · 16h ago
His flight instructor offered, or really pleaded, to make the flight with him. It was clearly beyond his skills, but the Kennedeys had a long history of surviving reckless actions.
technothrasher · 1d ago
> When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.
Um, what?!? .... ohhhh, you phoned your dad.
WalterBright · 1d ago
My dad flew in two wars, bombers and fighters and transports, propeller and jet, for 23 years. He also was an instructor for instrument training, and was given the job of accident investigation for a while. He ran base operations at Galena AFB in the Vietnam war. He owned thousands of books on aviation, wrote two books about it, and wrote articles for aviation magazines and books.
Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?
IAmBroom · 7h ago
More to the point here: why wouldn't you make that clear to the reader, who wondered how you called the afterlife?
HeyLaughingBoy · 23h ago
He, like me, was confused for a second and thought that you called JFK Jr after the crash.
rpmisms · 1d ago
Cochran was simply insane. I credit her success to a pathological lack of fear, and an amazing teacher in Chuck Yeager.
WalterBright · 1d ago
Was Neil Armstrong insane, too? He later remarked that he figured his odds of surviving were 50-50. I think he was being optimistic.
caycep · 1d ago
These people basically have no amygdala
WalterBright · 1d ago
During the moon landing, when Neil took over the descent from the failed computer, Aldrin's heart rate went through the roof. Armstrong's remained steady.
NASA picked exactly the right man for the job.
ivanech · 1d ago
Amrstrong’s heart rate spiked to >150bpm during the moon landing, more than double his resting heart rate
WalterBright · 1d ago
I read otherwise. So I'm conflicted.
richwater · 1d ago
It's not really fair comparison. Being the actor is very different than being an observer.
WalterBright · 1d ago
Landing the LEM required the full active cooperation of both.
rpmisms · 1d ago
Many Great people are batshit. Chuck Yeager certainly was.
WalterBright · 1d ago
Yup. I read Yeager's autobiography. A life very well lived.
Yeul · 8h ago
History books are written by reckless people- especially in aviation.
caycep · 1d ago
also, I imaging operational and safety planning/operations research basically didn't exist back then, or maybe was at a fledgeling state?
cameldrv · 1d ago
The publicity machine is pretty amazing. There are hundreds of books about Amelia Erhart and probably hundreds of thousands of girls and women named Amelia, but who even knows the name of the first woman to fly around the world?
sevg · 1d ago
Your question was rhetorical, but for anyone that doesn’t know: it was Jerrie Mock
It was actually Richarda Morrow-Tait, according to the Amelia Erhart criteria, i.e. a male navigator is allowed. Similarly no one had ever heard of Albert Cushing Read, Walter Hinton, or Elmer Fowler Stone, the first men to fly the Atlantic, or John Alcock and Arthur Brown, the first men to fly the Atlantic nonstop, but everyone has heard of Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic nonstop solo.
joarv0249nw · 1d ago
Magellan is know for first circumnavigating the earth, but he died in the Philippines, about half way around.
wat10000 · 1d ago
He had been to the Philippines before, coming from the other way.
drewbug · 19h ago
Wow, I never realized he had sailed to the same longitude before heading West!
Apparently he made it as far Ambon Island in Indonesia, so he indeed circled the globe in nine years starting and ending in the East Indies.
6031769 · 1d ago
In the UK at least Alcock and Brown are quite well known. I would estimate public knowledge of them here is on a par with Lindbergh.
Yeul · 8h ago
I think every country has their own aviation heroes. The Netherlands has Fokker for example.
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
The Wikipedia account of Morrow-Tait's “circumnavigation” is passing strange, particularly the way it was interrupted for 5 months but “resumed” with a completely different aircraft and navigator?
I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.
And concerns/mockery of “the flying housewife” alone in close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that child... bonkers!
And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they “reached Japan [having flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the Soviet Union]” — so what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948?
cameldrv · 15h ago
It’s easier and safer to make that flight if you can stop somewhere in the Russian far far east. Most people these days take the southern route through Hawaii, but the problem is that Hawaii-California is about 2300 miles, and not that many planes of the day could do that.
The other option is through the Aeutians, but they famously have some of the worst weather in the world and there aren’t that many places to land.
Especially back then when weather reports were terrible and radionavigation wasn’t that accurate, it was extremely chancy to fly somewhere like that without a big fuel reserve, ideally enough to get back to your origin if the weather at the destination turned out to be unlandable. Stopping in the Russian far east gives you a shorter leg to the Aelutians.
lucozade · 1d ago
> what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948
As it says she flew from Japan to the Aleutian islands, it would have probably been safer to fly via the Kamchatka peninsular instead of direct.
lucas_membrane · 16h ago
That's kind of like the story of Annie Londonderry, who made a bizarre round-the-world bicycle trip.
thaumasiotes · 1d ago
> I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.
Wikipedia isn't concerned with that kind of thing.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration , where the article states "R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively", despite the facts that (1) it's not like the Latin word for right is obscure; (2) the claim was highlighted as false (in a different section of the article, where it still also appears) on the talk page in 2018.
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
But this is truly the correct usage, despite your original research; you (and the nobodies on Talk page) should have referred to the reliable secondary sources instead. Chemists are better at Latin than you gave them credit for.
Almost all flight during this stage of development was reckless. It took a long time for us to collectively learn the lessons as pilots, mechanics, engineers, logistics, etc, to make it safe. A great source of reckless piloting stories are from the Alaska bush in the 1920's. People like Eielson and Wilkins managed to land on drift ice and fly from Alaska across the Arctic Ocean to Europe in 1928. A great book to read about this is The Flying North by Jean Potter (1946), which chronicles the Alaska bush pilots from the 1900s to 1940s, when she was stationed in Alaska during WWII.
bombcar · 1d ago
There's reckless and there's reckless.
One is doing something that nobody knows if it's going to work, and probably won't - Lindberg, perhaps.
Another is doing something you should KNOW isn't going to work, but you don't bother or care.
0xbadcafebee · 1d ago
I like stories like this. They remind me of two things: 1) you have to be a little crazy to make history (and become an inspiration), 2) there's no need to whitewash, ignore, or silence the tellings of imperfections of "heroes"; their [often inaccurate] legend will live on anyway.
johnyzee · 1d ago
WTF is with the "coördinated" umlaut... Seriously the New Yorker works hard to earn their monocled caricature.
Indicates that the two o's are separate syllables.
globular-toast · 1d ago
In French. It's long since disappeared from English, even in words like "naive".
It's pointless in English because we have nothing remotely close to phonetic spelling.
If we want to bring back cool things from French can we start with reverting to spellings like "connexion", "reflexion" etc.?
JimDabell · 1d ago
It hasn’t disappeared. You’re literally commenting on an example of it being used in English.
thaumasiotes · 1d ago
It isn't used in English in any context other than writing published in the New Yorker... except for the word "naive" (and "naif"), where it is still sometimes used. The criticism of the New Yorker is well founded.
JimDabell · 1d ago
I’ve never been published in the New Yorker, and I use it. People with the names Chloë, Zoë, etc. might be surprised to hear they have been imagining their names too.
It’s in use. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s not the norm, but it is definitely still in use.
globular-toast · 1d ago
Girls' names can hardly be considered "English". I've seen all of Chloé, Aimée, Zoé etc. There are no rules.
It was hard for me to type those on my English keyboard. That's reason enough for me to say they are not really part of English any more and haven't been for decades. I do like writing connexion sometimes, and I note that this isn't even considered a spelling error in my installed dictionary, unlike coördinate, but I'm not going to claim that it's "still in use" because I read a dictionary one time.
JimDabell · 1d ago
> I'm not going to claim that it's "still in use" because I read a dictionary one time.
It’s not “still in use” because it’s in the dictionary.
It’s “still in use” because it’s still in use.
enmyj · 1d ago
They have used an umlaut on the second repeated vowel in a word for as long as I've been reading. I can't find a link but I believe that's part of their style guide
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
It is not, in fact, an umlaut, but a diaeresis, which has the same shape but a different linguistic purpose.
Well, no, they've always used diaereses, but they've never had a policy of marking them on "the second repeated vowel in a word". You don't see them writing about boöks.
nkurz · 1d ago
Based on your other comments, you probably already understand this correctly, but for others who might be confused, the actual policy is not that it goes on repeated vowels, but that it goes on the second vowel in a pair to make clear that it starts another syllable. Under this policy, coöperate and naïve get diaereses, but books never would (unless you were somehow trying to indicate a special case where it was pronounced with two syllables). Here's more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
slater · 1d ago
Yes, because that's not what they're doing.
thaumasiotes · 14h ago
I said that. I responded to a comment that said they have always "used an umlaut on the second repeated vowel in a word". Is this somehow a problem with my comment?
peterfirefly · 8h ago
You were unclear. nkurz explained it well.
db48x · 1d ago
You’re supposed to do that for any word where two consecutive vowels have a syllable break between them instead of forming a dipthong. Of course, most of the time it’s redundant because there’s only one cromulent word anyway and the reader can figure it out quickly enough without the umlaut.
howenterprisey · 1d ago
I think "supposed to" is overstating it given that I've only ever seen it used by this one publication. To boot, I wouldn't pronounce the word they use it for, coordination, (in context, "piloting it demanded constant coordination") with a syllable break, either.
db48x · 23h ago
It’s true that most Americans are lazy and do not pay sufficient attention in school. Thus the observation of nuances such as this are becoming rarer every day.
Do you pronounce the “oo” in “coordination” the same way as you do in “bookkeeper”? Because that is a very weird mispronunciation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination
fluxist · 1d ago
The Economist and MIT Technology Review, off the top of my head, use the diaresis as well.
> The compact is far from perfect. It is vague about how countries should cooperate on many issues, such as border management and access to public services.
The New Yorker is famous for its commitment to unreality on this issue. It's only the New Yorker.
dragonwriter · 23h ago
Rather than "You're supposed to...", it would be more accurate to say, "It was once a common convention—that has since mostly been abandoned and is retained as a general rule only in a small minority of publications, of which the New Yorker is the most notable—to..."
nayuki · 1d ago
For this rule, the word I see most often is "naïve". I used to write it that way but now I use the simple spelling of "naive". The diaeresis emphasizes that "naive" does not rhyme with "dive", "five", "hive", "jive", etc.
thaumasiotes · 1d ago
> The diaeresis emphasizes that "naive" does not rhyme with "dive", "five", "hive", "jive", etc.
It can't emphasize that; there's nothing to suggest that "naive" would rhyme with those words. It emphasizes that it doesn't rhyme with "glaive" and "waive"...
caycep · 1d ago
the monocle gives them permission
atombender · 1d ago
The New Yorker does it because it needs to project an air of sophistication, even though it's basically The Atlantic with cartoons and a NYC-local bias. It's no New York Review of Books.
It's a similar kind of conservative affectation as The New York Times referring to people as "Mr. Putin" or "Mrs. Clinton". I find it hilarious that the NYT will never refer to someone by their first name, even when it's contextually more apt to do so, and will often use a stiffly formal version of their full name ("Vladimir V. Putin") that nobody else in the world bothers with outside encyclopedias.
genewitch · 1d ago
What meaning of conservative? Because the deep south has that affectation too. Everyone is mister or Mrs or Mz (my favorite by far). When talking to a child about someone it's Mr. Given Name. In polite company when discussing a non-mutual acquaintance of some regard, it might revert to Mrs. Surname.
I am also constantly called sir and I cannot say "ma'am" like the people out here so I don't bother with that frivolity. They also say "no" with extra vowels that are somewhat silent, like noueh, it ends more in the nose than a normal "no"
So that's the link I drew.
toast0 · 1d ago
Conservative in the meaning of not changing lightly. Conserving the current state (which for English style in the New Yorker is now rather old style, but why change?)
atombender · 1d ago
The examples you give are not written media. If you look at newspapers in the deep south, I'm willing to bet that they're not referring to people as "Mr" and "Mrs" (and a quick check seems to confirm this).
Secondly, the NYT is not in the deep south and doesn't abide by local conventions, so it stands out relative to its peers (e.g. LA Times, etc.).
bauble · 1d ago
"Earhart planned to have human navigators on board with her, but she’d be the first female pilot to accomplish the feat." - What an odd statement. Could "male" have been replaced by "human"?
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
The strangest TIL for me this year is that Fred Noonan was indeed on board for the doomed flight, and he was just as lost/dead as Earhart was.
I've surely conflated Earhart with Lindbergh, who was known for his solo marathon flights, and somehow absorbed decades' worth of pop-culture "Amelia Earhart" legends that left Captain Noonan as a remarkably obscure footnote in history.
And even more interesting still were the accounts that a disastrous landing in Hawaii carried a crew of four, and her penultimate attempt had a crew of three, with an aborted takeoff that severely damaged her Electra, and the third man had refused/declined to continue as the odds were increasingly not in their favor.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1993/d...
An example: she or somebody had a retractable antenna optimized for long-range high-frequency/shortwave radio removed prior to the flight—crazy!
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39239964
(The linked article says Earhart didn't know enough about radio, either to convert from wavelength to frequency, or to match an antenna to the transmitter. Such knowledge was probably rare in 1937.)
They didn't, and still don't, teach radio theory for a pilot's license. Can you calculate the ideal quarter-wave length of a single-line antenna for a given frequency?
That retractable antenna was for low frequencies. If you are referring to the underside "V" antenna (which was not retractable), that one was likely just damanged, not intentionally removed. [1, 2]
[1] https://youtu.be/zTDFhWWPZ4Q?t=1629 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262061
In short: there's plenty of evidence Amelia Earhart was reckless. I'm sad that she paid with her life, but that is sometimes what happens when you're reckless while using dangerous machines.
Yes, it is. Otherwise, "any carelessness, incapacity or neglect" wouldn't be so "terribly unforgiving".
Same with aviation. The DHL Flight 611 over Überlingen, Iran Air Flight 655, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, American Airlines Flight 5342, Pan Am Flight 1736 are just the few easy ones which comes to mind immediately.
> if you do everything right, you'll land safely.
You. And the people who designed your aircraft. The people who maintain your aircraft. And the ATC. And other pilots. And the people on the ground operating anti-aircraft missiles.
The pilots who died in the 787 MAX crashes would disagree. They did everything exactly as they were trained to do and still crashed.
You are thinking of the 737 MAX [0]. There is no such thing as a 787 MAX yet [1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner
Pilots typically are trained against that complacency, plus, as they say, everyone can be stupid for 15 minutes a day, plan for that. I found piloting pretty boring, if done right. Talk about soul-crushing.
The experienced navigator refusing to fly with her was correct, but I do wonder if he had been there if he would have been smart enough to save them.
My dad flew B-17s, and with 3 engines out and just an outboard engine running, it took all of a man's strength to keep it straight. Usually, the pilot and copilot would trade off each 10 minutes.
When planes got larger, like the B-29, boost had to be added.
To accommodate female pilots, Boeing reduced the flight control forces in the 757.
I’ve got to imagine that put into a fast enough dive, nobody’s pulling up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcB31RgeL50 is the full video, well worth watching IMHO, but the talk about the fatal trim is at 51:00 to 53:00
The instructions were:
1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches
2. turn off the trim system
So the electronic control route was fried, any normal person in that situation and physical and mental overload would conclude that trim controls are not functional.
The manual route, which they tried, involved at that speed an undocumented "roller coaster maneuver", pitching forward (!!) to release pressure on the trim mechanism and allow manual adjustment. It goes without question it's impossible the pilots could have come up with that solution in the mere seconds they had at their disposal, let alone the high risk it entailed.
Reducing the throttle early would have saved the plane, but it would have also resulted in immediate pitch down due to the torque the engines create against the body of the plane, as they are mounted off axis. The autothrottle was left to near 95% for the entire ~250s duration of the flight (the setting necessary for take off at the particular altitude of the airport) and once the cascading failures consumed all their situational awareness it stands to reason why they failed to adjust it and then hesitated to perform an action that would have (in the short run) worsened the problem in a near crash situation.
The MCAS as designed was a ticking timebomb that killed two plane loads of people in mere months, and Boeing accepted full responsibility for that, even if they are still denying criminal charges.
This is utterly false. The trim rate has two speeds - on and off.
> would automatically re-engage repeteadly
This is called "runaway trim". The procedure to counter it is to turn it off. The same procedure for every airplane.
> any normal person
Pilots are required to read and understand and remember Emergency Airworthiness Directives.
Don't forget the first MCAS incident, where normal trim was restored with the column trim switches and then the trim was turned off and the airplane landed safely.
Or the second where normal trim was restored 25 times, but never turned off.
I would expect a MAX pilot to have paid attention to that crash, and the followup EAD which instructs them to restore normal trim with the column switches and then turn it off.
This is wrong and easy to disprove. The trim rate for a pilot issued trim command starts at 0.4 degrees/second at low air speeds and tappers off to zero as the speed increased towards Mach 0.68. The MCAS had a fixed rate of 0.27 degree/second that did not depend on airspeed. Here is the relevant quote from the FAA report on the 737MAX:
> “If activated by a high AOA, MCAS moves the horizontal stabilizer at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second, which is the same trim rate as Speed Trim with flaps down. The magnitude of the MCAS command is a function of Mach and angle of attack. At higher airspeeds, flight‐control surfaces are more effective than at lower airspeeds. Therefore, a smaller MCAS command at higher airspeeds has the same effect as a larger MCAS command at lower speeds."
So the trim rate is fixed but the magnitude (duration) of the original MCAS is variable to account for airspeed. Because the MCAS reengaged repeatedly due to erroneous AOA sensor data and faulty design logic, the duration became irrelevant. However, as the plane speed exceeded 0.6 Mach, the rate of pilot trim substantially decreased, meaning that a full 10s second activation of the MCAS could no longer be negated by a 10s trim command from the pilot. The flight recorder shows trim commands of up to 4 seconds, which in fact allowed the MCAS to re-engage and issue a fresh 10s opposite command, at a higher rate. This is a disastrous succession of events that can't be blamed on the pilot.
I won't go down the rabbit hole with the rest of your comment, enough to say you need to better vet your sources and reevaluate your claims. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots fought for their lives for a few desperate minutes and lost, quite possibly made some mistakes but overall many other qualified pilots would have failed too in the same scenario.
Actually watching the linked video (or barring that, actually reading the final report) would dispense with this widely spread inaccuracy in fairly short order and make it quite obvious why they turned ON the stab trim system, which is what ultimately killed them.
But of course, "the pilots were simply stupid" is a psychologically easier conclusion to walk away with.
Temporarily, right? Using the pitch trim switches on the yoke suppresses MCAS, but in order to remain at even net zero stabilizer position change, the duration of trim input would have to be of equivalent duration to the reciprocal MCAS-driven change. This is part of what made the problem so insidious - running trim for that long is rarely needed and rarely done. I haven’t flown the MAX but I can’t think of any type I have flown in which continual pitch trim input of 5+ seconds at a time would be required in flight.
If you flip the stab trim cutout switches, you can turn the wheel manually, but if there have already been a couple of cycles of MCAS, the plane may be so out of trim that you need too much force to move the trim wheel manually.
In that case there is one thing that could save you which would be to do the so called rollercoaster procedure, where you push the yoke forward to unload the trim and then crank the trim up while you hurtle towards the ground. This was a documented procedure in the 737-300 manual, but was later deleted.
The real crime was that Boeing deliberately removed all mention of MCAS from the flight manual. The problem was that if there were procedures that pilots needed to know in order to recover from an MCAS failure, they would have been required to practice these procedures in a simulator, and Boeing’s contract with Southwest had financial incentives if the MAX didn’t require any additional sim time for pilots to transition from the NG to the MAX.
We know that the information about MCAS was deleted from the manual because the only occurrence of the term MCAS in the MAX flight manual is in the glossary where it is a defined term. The tech writers obviously put it in there because it was described in an earlier version of the manual, but later deleted, but the glossary entry wasn’t deleted when the description was.
What is inexplicable is that they stopped doing that while leaving the trim system enabled after correctly disabling it via the memory item checklist.
Boeing’s not blameless here, nor should the crew of ET302 bear the primary fault, but they seem to have understood the issue (and it’s not possible they didn’t know about MCAS) and were frustratingly close to saving the flight.
This is simply wrong.
The electric trim switches override MCAS regardless of whether MCAS is trying to drive the trim or not. Timing it for when the MCAS was not engaged is completely unnecessary.
Had they known about MCAS they could have potentially known they could override it then disbale the trim system but that information was hidden by Boeing so they didn't do it..
This isn't your friend's car you're borrowing to pick your kid up from school. A tad more care should be involved before loading it with human beings and flying over cities.
After the first crash, Boeing sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots with the two steps I showed.
There's no excuse for MAX pilots not reading, understanding, and remembering Emergency Airworthiness Directives.
It's not just me. I've talked to two 737 pilots who said the same thing.
The aircraft should have never been declared airworthy. There should have been no need for an EAD in the first place. There is no excuse for putting a control system that flies the craft into the ground when there is a failure in a nonredundant sensor on a commercial aircraft.
The high standards required for pilots, like Amelia Earhart, do not obviate the even higher standards for quality and safety from manufacturers.
The stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent position on the central console (not overhead or behind the crew).
In the first Lion Air crash, the airplane dipped and recovered (via the thumb switches) 25 times over a period of 11 minutes. They never thought to turn off the stab trim system. It boggles the mind. Would you want to fly with a crew that didn't know what the switches on the console were for? Not me.
Both Boeing and the crew are at fault. Some percentage also for whoever made the faulty sensor and the failure to see that it worked correctly after it was installed.
I've been in a car when the throttle got stuck open, we crashed, I hit the windshield. It happened in about 5 seconds, and the driver spent most of those giving steering inputs to avoid hitting people and furiously working the break and kicking the gas pedal. It happened because enough engine mounts were broken or broke because of a hard throttle push.
Also my dad died in a single seat plane crash because the engine died several times in flight, according to a witness interviewed by a local paper; there was no investigation at all so I'll never know what really happened. At least the company that made the plane changed their name!
I had a stuck accelerator on an old Ford F-150. The throttle inside the carb got stuck. I was lucky to have the Toyota case in my memory, so I just shifted into neutral.
It was an automatic, which I think is another factor -- the more direct control you remove from the driver, the less intuitive it becomes to compensate for a single system failure. Obviously a standard transmission driver would just hit the clutch.
(And I've had a similar failure on an unfamiliar motorcycle that just came out of storage. Pulling the clutch bail was the instinctive response, after manually untwisting the throttle did not work. I learned my lesson about old vehicles eventually. Trust nothing, verify everything.)
Very sorry to hear about your dad!
The brakes are much stronger than the engine (proof: you can brake in a much shorter distance than you can accelerate).
On my current car, I have inadvertently hit the edge of the gas pedal while I stepped on the brake a couple times, as those pedals are too close together and I have wide feet. My reaction was to instantly move my foot.
A number of those "surging" incidents are suspected of being the driver had their foot on the gas rather than the brake.
Glad to hear you're all right after the crash. I nearly died in a car crash.
Sorry to hear about your dad. It must be very frustrating to not know the cause. I thought all GA accidents were officially investigated.
If memory serves there was an instance in southern california where the driver called 911 or some other recorded line (they died); but it may have just been a witness statement i remember.
2. The 737 MAX was unstable because Boeing wanted to milk the 737 airframe further than it should have been for financial reasons and oversized engines were mounted forward on the wings.
3. Since the plane was unstable in this way, it would pitch up when climbing. MCAS would detect this through the angle of attack (AoA sensors) and automatically engage, forcing the nose down.
4. When the single, nonredundant AoA sensor failed, MCAS would misinterpret this and try to continuously force the nose down in normal operations. Or more plainly, it would fly the plane into the ground for no reason.
5. This happened at least 3 times. In two cases, it caused crashes, killing everyone - almost 350 men, women, and children - aboard.
6. Boeing strenuously blamed the crew in the first crash, and did not ground the planes.
7. Boeing did not ground the 737 MAXes after the second crash, either. The FAA only grounded the aircraft after much of the rest of the world already had.
As you noted previously, MCAS existed to make the 737 MAX fly like prior versions of the plane. Boeing, in fact, lobbied for this outcome so it would not affect certification or require separate pilot training, which would have cost time and money. So while MCAS was documented, pilots were not required to be trained on the system, because of Boeings efforts.
One cannot put a "don't crash the plane button" on a plane, even if it is well documented. It is particularly disgraceful if the "don't crash the plane" button only exists because the plane's manufacturer added the button to increase their own profits.
I have to admit, you have made me lose my composure here a bit. I thought anyone this knowledgable about flying would not blame pilot error in the 737 MAX crashes. The plane was grounded for almost 2 years, this was arguably the greatest scandal in the production and regulation of commercial aircraft in history. Boeing paid $20 billion in fines and restitution, and pled guilty to criminal charges.
For the benefit of anyone else curious about this, good starting points are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
"hours after the approval for MCAS's redesign was granted, Boeing sought, and the FAA approved, the removal of references to MCAS from Boeing's flight crew operations manual (FCOM)"
"Boeing wanted the FAA to certify the airplane as another version of the long-established 737; this would limit the need for additional training of pilots, a major cost saving for airline customers. During flight tests, however, Boeing discovered that the position and larger size of the engines tended to push up the airplane nose during certain maneuvers. To counter that tendency and ensure fleet commonality with the 737 family, Boeing added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to earlier 737 versions."
"The MAX was exempted from certain newer safety requirements, saving Boeing billions of dollars in development costs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_groundi...
https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing/dp/0...
The first error was the claim that the MAX was "unstable". It just behaved differently due to the engine placement. I see this error all the time. And so on.
The errors in the MCAS design were not to save money. They were just sloppy engineering. There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The proof is MCAS is still there, it just had its flaws corrected.
As for knowledgeable, I've talked with two 737 pilots. One told me it was pilot error and never would have happened to him. The other told me that his pilot buddies agreed with me but were afraid to speak up against the tidal wave of bad press. I also spent 3 years working on the 757 stab trim system, at one point I knew more about it than about anyone else. The 737 system is more primitive, but is easily understandable. (The 757 uses dual hydraulic motors driving a differential gearbox, the 737 has a single electric motor with manual drive for the backup. Both have a console mounted cutoff switch. Both have column thumb switches.)
> Boeing added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to earlier 737 versions.
Which improves safety. This is never mentioned. (The 757 and 767, very different airplanes, were designed to fly similarly and have the same cockpits. It did save money on training because of that, saved money on production, and improved safety.)
I think interested parties should look at the JATR report (Joint Authorities Technical Review Observations, Findings, and Recommendations) -https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-08/Final_JATR_S...
With respect to "unstable", I will quote the findings
"Observation O3.4-B: Extension of MCAS to the low-speed and 1g environment during the flight program was due to unacceptable stall characteristics with STS only. The possibility of a pitch-up tendency during approach to stall was identified for the flaps-up configuration prior to the implementation of MCAS"
Regarding flight crew expectations, this is dry, but I will quote it in its entirety, anyway,
"Recommendation R6.1: The FAA should ensure applicants improve adherence to failsafe design concept principles when designing or modifying systems. The FAA should encourage applicants not to design only for compliance, but also to follow basic principles to design for safety when developing or changing system functions. This should include elimination of hazards and use of design features, warnings, and procedures.
- Observation O6.1-A: Proper flight crew action was considered an adequate mitigation to risks such as erroneous activation of MCAS.
- Finding F6.1-A: The JATR team identified that the design process was not sufficient to identify all the potential MCAS hazards. As part of the single-channel speed trim system, the MCAS function did not include fault tolerant features, such as sensors voting or limits of authority, to limit failure effects consistent with the hazard classification.
- Finding F6.1-B: The use of pilot action as a primary mitigation means for MCAS hazards, before considering eliminating such hazards or providing design features or warnings to mitigate them, is not in accordance with Boeing’s process instructions for safe design in the conception of MCAS for the B737 MAX.
- Finding F6.1-C: The JATR team found that there was a missed opportunity to further improve the system design through the use of available fail-safe design principles and techniques presented in AC 25.1309-1A and in EASA AMC 25.1309 in the MCAS design"
and further, on flight crew expectations
"Finding F6.4-A: When all flight deck effects are considered, the introduction of the MCAS function invalidated aircraft-level assumptions for flight crew responses related to erroneous AOA failures under certain conditions. A complete workload assessment was not performed for validation of the erroneous AOA effects with the added MCAS functionality. The same assumptions for flight crew responses to erroneous AOA were carried over from previous programs without formal validation."
The Technical Advisory Board's report is also interesting - https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-08/737_Technica...
The discussion around AOA DISAGREE conditions is educational regarding MCAS for others who might not be familar with the technical root cause. But I would specifically encourage you to read the Flight Controls and Flight Deck Interface Assessment and Training Evaluations. They don't avoid the issue of flight crew training and trim system awareness, but I they illustrate how workload created by the erroneous MCAS activation was contributing.
As for your pilot conversations, I will make two short points. First, pilots don't always suffer for a lack of self-confidence. Maybe it would have never happened to them, maybe not, and thankfully we will not get to find out. Second, passengers are owed a safe aircraft based on the full range of quality flight crews, with a wide margin for error. I do care if a highly skilled qualified crew would have avoided the accident, I care if the least-skilled qualified crew would have. And 610's captain had 5,176 hours on the 737 and 302's captain had 4,120 hours.
Why do you think it’s badly designed? The implementation was badly done for sure.
Some designs are so poorly thought through (and/or conceived for the wrong reasons to begin with, like MCAS was) that they cannot help but yield poor implementations.
(Also, input from one or two sensors was far from the only problem with MCAS' implementation. The fact that it could activate multiple times and that it could trim far harder and faster than human pilots could manually trim were equally contributors to making the saga a tragedy).
The reasons were correct. Making the MAX behave, as far as the pilots were concerned, like other models of the 737 makes the airplane safer. Many crashes have resulted from pilots getting confused about which airplane they are flying.
The design particulars, however, were incorrect. That is Boeing's fault.
> trim far harder and faster
The 737 has only one electric trim rate - on and off. It does not trim harder or faster than the autopilot trim or the thumb switch trim. The signal all boils down to a wire that has signals "trim on / trim off". The thumb switches sit on the path of that wire, so when they activate they override the autopilot and MCAS. The cutoff switch is downstream of that.
Part of the reason the manual trim wheel could not be moved is the airplane was overspeeding due to being (incorrectly) at full throttle. Overspeeding greatly increases the force on the stabilizer, making it much harder to move. In the EA flight, the overspeed warning horn could be heard on the voice recorder.
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is a flight control law built into the Boeing 737 MAX's flight control computer, designed to help the aircraft emulate the handling characteristics of the earlier Boeing 737 Next Generation.
Airplanes' control surfaces have have smaller control surfaces inside them called tabs. Just as a small movement in a control surface is amplified into the larger movement of the entire airplane, a control tab's even smaller movement is amplified into the movement of the rest of the control surface, which in turn is amplified into the movement of the entire airplane.
Here's a good descriptions of different types of control tabs: https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/systems/4-types-of-t...
Many small airplanes, and pretty much every large airplane, effectively use tabs as a gross adjustment and the yoke/rudder as a fine adjustment, so under normal operation there shouldn't be large forces on the yoke or rudder. The only time it takes a lot of force to control an airplane is when the tab can't be easily controlled. Flying even a small Cessna 152 out of trim can take tens of pounds of force and be impossible to sustain for long periods of time. I once tried flying a 152 from one airport to another, only a few minutes away, without adjusting the elevator trim, and my arms were sore the next day.
Going into too fast of a dive has two much larger dangers, one is that the aircraft can break up from the aerodynamic forces, and the other is that the air becomes turbulent near the trailing of of a control surface, making it no longer able to control the aircraft. When the later happens, the controls don't take much force to move, but they also don't do much.
However this was a real problem during WW2, and high speed dives killed more than a few pilots. By 1942-43 most fighter planes were able to dive fast enough to get into trouble (500+ mph/800 kph) but weren't designed for it at all. The aerodynamics of supersonic flight just weren't understood at the time. In some cases the design of the plane made it essentially impossible to pull out once you went beyond a certain speed, all you could do was attempt to slow down enough to regain control. The P-38 Lightning was notorious for this. I don't have any specific sources handy but I recall reading accounts of things like pilots bracing their feet against the control panel trying to pull the control stick with all their strength, taking extreme measures like lowering the landing gear to slow down (risking it being ripped off and maybe tearing the whole plane apart), or only surviving due to sheer luck - sometimes the thicker air at lower altitudes would slow them down enough before it was too late.
A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed. Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to literally tear the structure apart.
There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical stabilizer off.
There are also situations where no amount of control input is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.
In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all to get right.
For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates. This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.
This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You always gotta watch your airspeed.
This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved everyone.
It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before it hit the ocean.
Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the F-86 jet fighter.
For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up, tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80 pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway, let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was scrapped.
Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target, one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.
Could you link-to/tell-us more about the 727 affair? I've always had a fascination with autopilot (and autoland) systems, so I would love to read/hear more about this incident.
But you might try googling "727 autopilot landing gear dive".
Thank you. I enjoy relating them. There are other airplane junkies who come to our monthly D Coffee Haus meeting, and we often wind up talking shop about airplane engineering.
Does this refer to the deep stall that affects T-tail aircraft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_(fluid_dynamics)#Deep_st... ), or is it a phenomenon that applies to nearly all fixed-wing subsonic aircraft?
Most higher speed subsonic aircraft recycle the design principals from supersonic aircraft to alleviate the problem. You could on paper dive a Learjet or 747 or other "designed for the higher end of subsonic" aircraft to Mach 2 and retain control authority if you wanted and if the airframe could take it.
The separation affects the ailerons as well, so you lose roll control.
Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring sweat.
Steering wheels for manual steering tend to be larger, giving more leverage, and the steering gearbox is geared differently.
This is a myth. Power steering and power brakes were developed to make driving easier and safer for all drivers as vehicles became larger and heavier. Some of the advertising from the era framed the features as helpful to female drivers, but this was just that- advertising.
They also wanted to sell cars to little old ladies.
I had disk brakes on my '67 Firebird. Not only was the pedal pressure much higher, but you better have your crash helmet on when it snowed!
I was surprised to learn the same once I started diving into her history. She definitely was a media phenomenon, with her public image largely manufactured by her publicist husband.
Her story actually feels very similar to the fake YouTube personalities of today. What's funny is that, for all the complaints about people today being too gullible about modern influencers, the ones from history often succeed in fooling far more people.
> Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.
It's understandable why this needs to be said - unfortunately, these accusations accusations are the default reaction many people have to this criticism (I've seen them before in discussions about Earhart and others). Once someone is given a status of an icon for a particularly identity, people have an unpleasant habit of believing criticism of the icon is criticism of the identity. It would be nice if we were able to judge people as individuals.
Yeah a large portion of humans have flaws, do bad things (3 felonies a day!), etc. But I think art (as it were) transcends the artist, especially in audiovisual stuff where it's much more likely there are other people involved that actually make the art memorable; however even a self-published asshole can produce something great.
I guess I could just suffer the weird al trapped in the drive-through, to placate such people, or can ignore them. R Kelly got no money from me, anyhow, I bought it all secondhand. My conscience is clear enough, I think.
Perhaps if someone calls me antisemitic for that, I'll call them homophobic for disagreeing with the opinion of a gay man.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly dislike said behaviour in men.
He didn't hesitate: "Spacial disorientation"
Aka pilot incompetence. Airplanes don't care if you're a celebrity or not.
My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.
Your dad is exactly correct.
He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the base and head to the flight line. Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start down the runway, and halfway down would light the afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the most delightful thunder.
I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.
I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/
At night with no visible horizon - you do it to yourself.
My dad, against orders, carried a piece of pipe with him, to ensure the student would not panic and kill them both. He said he never had to use it.
Lead pipe crash avoidance closest I could get.
In about 1967, my dad (career USAF, fighter jock) was flying in clear, sunny weather. He started to get bad vertigo, so he did an emergency, instruments-only landing at a nearby AF base. He said that on final approach, he "knew" he was upside down, and that it was all he could do to refrain from rolling the airplane "right side up" for touchdown on the runway.
Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected. Knowingly flying into those conditions without an instrument rating is very bad judgment.
Um, what?!? .... ohhhh, you phoned your dad.
Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?
NASA picked exactly the right man for the job.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrie_Mock
Apparently he made it as far Ambon Island in Indonesia, so he indeed circled the globe in nine years starting and ending in the East Indies.
I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.
And concerns/mockery of “the flying housewife” alone in close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that child... bonkers!
And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they “reached Japan [having flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the Soviet Union]” — so what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948?
The other option is through the Aeutians, but they famously have some of the worst weather in the world and there aren’t that many places to land.
Especially back then when weather reports were terrible and radionavigation wasn’t that accurate, it was extremely chancy to fly somewhere like that without a big fuel reserve, ideally enough to get back to your origin if the weather at the destination turned out to be unlandable. Stopping in the Russian far east gives you a shorter leg to the Aelutians.
As it says she flew from Japan to the Aleutian islands, it would have probably been safer to fly via the Kamchatka peninsular instead of direct.
Wikipedia isn't concerned with that kind of thing.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration , where the article states "R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively", despite the facts that (1) it's not like the Latin word for right is obscure; (2) the claim was highlighted as false (in a different section of the article, where it still also appears) on the talk page in 2018.
https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/z1ms9-63w28
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recto_and_verso#Etymology
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One is doing something that nobody knows if it's going to work, and probably won't - Lindberg, perhaps.
Another is doing something you should KNOW isn't going to work, but you don't bother or care.
Indicates that the two o's are separate syllables.
It's pointless in English because we have nothing remotely close to phonetic spelling.
If we want to bring back cool things from French can we start with reverting to spellings like "connexion", "reflexion" etc.?
It’s in use. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s not the norm, but it is definitely still in use.
It was hard for me to type those on my English keyboard. That's reason enough for me to say they are not really part of English any more and haven't been for decades. I do like writing connexion sometimes, and I note that this isn't even considered a spelling error in my installed dictionary, unlike coördinate, but I'm not going to claim that it's "still in use" because I read a dictionary one time.
It’s not “still in use” because it’s in the dictionary.
It’s “still in use” because it’s still in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
In fact, the lede paragraph of the Wikipedia article notes its retention by The New Yorker manual of style, despite being considered archaic.
Direct cited source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Do you pronounce the “oo” in “coordination” the same way as you do in “bookkeeper”? Because that is a very weird mispronunciation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/22/1117294/a-new-at...
> It’s the third-dimensional counterpart to latitude and longitude, says Sanchez, who helps coordinate the standardization effort.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/09/1108076/satellit...
> Now, the scientists were poised to catch this reentry as it happened.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/12/11/america-...
> The compact is far from perfect. It is vague about how countries should cooperate on many issues, such as border management and access to public services.
The New Yorker is famous for its commitment to unreality on this issue. It's only the New Yorker.
It can't emphasize that; there's nothing to suggest that "naive" would rhyme with those words. It emphasizes that it doesn't rhyme with "glaive" and "waive"...
It's a similar kind of conservative affectation as The New York Times referring to people as "Mr. Putin" or "Mrs. Clinton". I find it hilarious that the NYT will never refer to someone by their first name, even when it's contextually more apt to do so, and will often use a stiffly formal version of their full name ("Vladimir V. Putin") that nobody else in the world bothers with outside encyclopedias.
I am also constantly called sir and I cannot say "ma'am" like the people out here so I don't bother with that frivolity. They also say "no" with extra vowels that are somewhat silent, like noueh, it ends more in the nose than a normal "no"
So that's the link I drew.
Secondly, the NYT is not in the deep south and doesn't abide by local conventions, so it stands out relative to its peers (e.g. LA Times, etc.).
I've surely conflated Earhart with Lindbergh, who was known for his solo marathon flights, and somehow absorbed decades' worth of pop-culture "Amelia Earhart" legends that left Captain Noonan as a remarkably obscure footnote in history.
And even more interesting still were the accounts that a disastrous landing in Hawaii carried a crew of four, and her penultimate attempt had a crew of three, with an aborted takeoff that severely damaged her Electra, and the third man had refused/declined to continue as the odds were increasingly not in their favor.